Interactive simulation workflows

JOSE ELIZARDO: Time-- even though it's after lunch, I do have an hour and a half of stuff to show you guys. So-- and out of respect for your early arrivals, we'll start on time.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Sorry?

AUDIENCE: Do you have any preference as far as graphics [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, I mean, it depends what your output is. Like, this is-- what you're looking at right here is real time. It's a game engine.

So that requires a pretty beefy graphics card. And depending what you're doing too-- if you're doing VR, right, there's a whole other requirement to do virtual reality too. But just a display of these kinds of graphics requires pretty good graphics card, nothing too crazy.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: I just don't know if it's better for that type [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: So for real time, gaming the Geforces are always better. But in terms of content creation with our tools like Max, Maya, Revit, stuff like that, you need-- it's better to have a a QDRO. More memory, more-- I'm running a QDRO.

Like, I'm not running a Geforce at all, yeah. Yeah. Mike, I'm honored. You're in my class. How are you?

[SIDE CONVERSATION]

All right, let me see where we are with time. Three more minutes. Yeah, sure.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: I'm not a CFD expert. I'm the guy who takes the CFD content and visualizes it. But from the demos that I've seen, yeah, I could do AutoCAD simulation. I couldn't provide more context than that but, I have received water simulation.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] somebody who can hopefully give me a yes or a no on a--

JOSE ELIZARDO: Well, I have received water simulations from CFD to visualize. So it's doable.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: The water that I've seen has been not so big. But you know, you'd have to-- I could probably find out and see to what extent it's doable. I'm sure it is but, I couldn't provide any more context.

We have other tools like-- I don't know if you've ever seen Maya's Bifrost system. It's an ocean simulator basically. So if you want to do oceans and stuff, that's really-- like, it's like, large scale. They use it in movies and stuff to do ocean simulations, an ocean vis.

But it's not a parameter driven tool like CFD. It's not condition based. It's probably not physically accurate, it's just beautiful to look at.

AUDIENCE: That's more than we're looking for [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AUDIENCE: --make it look

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah. Yeah, well, you could probably look into Bifrost. That would be an interesting-- at least look at the videos and see if it satisfies what you guys are after.

But yeah. But simulation two-- simulation [INAUDIBLE], fairly certain it can do larger stuff than what I got as a file. But you you'd have to find out.

AUDIENCE: OK.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Cool.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Sure. How are we doing on time? Hello. I think I'm going to get started--no, two more minutes.

I started going on. What do you guys want to do? Give it some time? [INAUDIBLE] cool?

Oh, you're not certain. Hesitation. Tall tale.

So what do you guys want to get out of this class? That's what I want to find out first. What do you guys do?

Can you give me a kind of synopsis here and there what you guys do and what you want to get out of this class? What's your goal here? What do you think this class is about? What was that?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: OK. Speak up?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Cool. That's one thing we're going to look at.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Same? Any more? Mike, what do you want to get out of this class?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] I guess visualization possibilities.

JOSE ELIZARDO: Sure.

AUDIENCE: You know, [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, telling a story.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Yeah, cool. I think we should be able to cover that stuff. I was hoping you guys were going to tell me, I want to learn all about simulation. Because I'm not the sim guy. I'm the vis guy.

We are going to do a little bit of sim, though, just to keep it in check. So I'm going to jump right in and start because it's 1 o'clock and you guys are here. So what do you guys think we're looking at on screen?

That's the first thing I want to talk about. And forget this here. Pretend this is not here.

What does this look like? Unfortunately, I can't block that. So-- I mean, I know it's arrows and they're colored and it looks like an acid trip.

But it's not. It's the stadium. What's that?

AUDIENCE: Wind simulation?

JOSE ELIZARDO: Wind simulation-- you got it. So this is-- and that was not a trick question. We often ask ourselves, how can we visualize things like wind. We don't see wind.

And how can you interpret wind in a visual way that actually resonates with people and makes sense? So that was actually just for my own etiquette. Does this look like wind to you? Do you think that this is wind?

We're going to talk about basically this project for the next hour and a half. I'm going to show you guys the nuts and bolts of how to put this together, where this started from, and what the outcome is. The other thing I want to talk about real quick is this is a looping video, sure.

But this is actually outputted from Stingray, the game engine that some of you guys talked about. For those of you not familiar, we own a game engine-- Autodesk. So just like Unreal and Unity, Stingray is a game engine just like those.

And so this is actually a fully interactive environment, a fully interactive project. Right now, we just see wind simulating from the west at nine miles per hour. But we have a whole bunch of other simulations in here that I'll show you guys at the end of the session.

So jumping right in, here's my beautiful title. My name is Jose. I've been at this for about 10 years now.

I've done a few different roles since I've been at the company and I've been on this team for about three years, my third years teaching at AU. And I'm basically a tech specialist. I work with primarily 3ds Max, also Stingray as of recently, other products I dabble in. But those are really my bread and butter, if you will.

So class summary-- I won't ask you to read this and I won't read it to you. They make us put this in here. I'm assuming you read this or else you wouldn't be here. Of course, also our learning objectives-- I think for the most part, we're going to get through this.

They make us write this like eight months ago. So things are in flux and change a lot. But I think for the most part, we're going to get through most of these learning objectives.

And one giant disclaimer-- I've been practicing my session in the last few weeks and I realized I have way too much. And that's probably every speaker's-- every speaker falls victim of that. So I'm going to touch base on some concepts, deep dive into others that I think are more important.

That said, the handout-- did you guys download the handout? Did some of you get it? So the handout covers every single thing that-- it was part of this project, all the details.

And the hand out actually has also embedded little videos. So you need to install the flash plug-in in order to get it to work. But every so often, there's these little embedded videos that highlight some of the workflows.

Other disclaimer-- this room is 90 people and there is like maybe 40-some odd people here. So-- and thank you for making it. That said, let's keep this interactive.

I know everyone says that, but ask me questions. If something's not clear, you want me to deep dive, double click onto something, let's do that. This is really about you guys.

It's not about me. I want you guys to walk away with something here. And so just make it interactive. Ask questions and let's keep it flowing. Cool?

I have a skeleton to follow, a sort of high level overview of things to follow. But for the most part, we can go in any direction you guys want. Before I jump in to the actual workflows, I want to tell you guys a little story about Fox, the sports broadcast channel.

So Fox, back in 2014, they were interested in potentially leveraging wind simulation effects and having those being overlaid on top of their broadcast of Super Bowl 2014. So they worked on a project called Fox Weather Trax.

This Is public information. You can go on Google and YouTube and research this. And at the time, they were using a combination of Autodesk tools, non-Autodesk tools to achieve this. But they had a lot of problems, right?

I mean, these tools are not necessarily connected in any meaningful way, required very advanced expertise to be able to connect all this. It wasn't very flexible. You couldn't really change things interactively or fast.

And so it was a bit of a challenge but they still managed to put something together. This is an early prototype image of what they were able to generate. But this effort got the attention of the 3DS Max development team and they spent the last couple of years building out a bunch of tool sets inside of Max that allow for a much more streamlined approach to visualizing simulation data.

So this is what we're going to look at basically today. This is the proposed ecosystem of products that make this happen today. So we have Max at the center of it all. And I'm going to come back to that in a second. It's an important point.

So I'm going to leverage that Max's SketchUp importer to bring in a model of a stadium. One of the great things about SketchUp-- and this could have been a Revit model. This could have been [INAUDIBLE] model.

This could be any model that you guys have. Great thing about SketchUp models is there's like a whole bunch online, free [INAUDIBLE]. The warehouse is huge.

I don't model stadiums for a living, so I was about to model a stadium. And Max has a very elegant importer for the SketchUp files. So I'm going to show you guys that real quick.

Then we're going to leverage Autodesk CFD. Who uses this tool, by the way? Does anybody use this tool? Does anybody do simulations all together? What tools are you using?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: Why aren't you using Autodesk CFD?

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE]

JOSE ELIZARDO: I'm just kidding. Hopefully, you're going to want it by the end of the class. So Autodesk CFD, I'm not a sim guy.

I know how to go into it, do the couple of things that I want-- in my case, wind sim-- bring it back into Max and do some stuff with it. So I will give you guys a quick little overview and we're going to do some stuff in it-- in our case, like I said, wind sim. Then we're also going to leverage another tool called InfraWorks 360.

Do you guys know that tool? A couple of nods, a couple more faces-- cool. So [INAUDIBLE] 360-- again, I'm not a civil engineer. I don't use it for civil engineering tasks.

But just as a tool to generate GIS based cities, real world contact cities, it's effortless. It's all done on a cloud.

It's super easy to come in [INAUDIBLE] files into Max. It's awesome. So we're going to leverage that tool to create the contextual surrounding.

We're going to massage the whole thing in Max and we're going to push it into Stingray. Cool-- that's the workflow we proposed to Fox and they were pretty excited about it. And I want to make a big important point here that 3DS Max really is at the heart of all of this workflow and it's at the heart of a lot of workflows inside of Autodesk all together.

Max is the bridge that connects all these tools together. It's not necessarily just about input and output. It's about bridging all these tools together in ways that no other product can really do. So Max is-- and it's really important, if walk away with one thing from this class, is that Max is your tool of choice for bridging all these technologies together. Right, so I split up the presentation in four segments, if you will.

The first is-- Ben, tardy arrival. How are you? Sorry to single you out.

First we're going to talk about is wind simulation. So for wind simulation, we're going to bring in a model of a stadium. In my case, I'm using SketchUp because that's what I like to use.

Then we're going to look at some very basic modeling tools inside of Max to create a proxy version of the stadium. So the stadium in its current form is way too complex for a simulation in CFD and there's also problems with the model holes that you need to solve. So instead of doing all that, we're going to create, a proxy version or a low res version of that stadium. I'm not going spend too much time on this because the point of this class is not to learn how to model, but it is an important step in the process.

And then of course we're going to do some wind simulations. Let me put this in my pocket and keep going. Some wind simulations with CFD-- so let's start off with the SketchUp importer.

Here we go. So from Max, the application button, you can go to Import and you can locate your SketchUp file and import it. You get the SketchUp importer dialog.

It's still called Google which it probably shouldn't be because it's no longer owned by Google. But you've got a couple of parameters in here. The two that I'm concerned with are split object by layer to keep things tidy in the Max project and the daylight system.

I don't care about the light itself but the daylight system comes with a compass. And the compass is really, really important for this workflow because we want to know what true north is and what true south is, west and east, so that when we create our wind simulations, we know where we're simulating wind from.

So the V model imports this way. We get the SketchUp file there. And when we select our compass, we see that we've got the north, south, east, west telling us what's going on here.

And the model, because it's a SketchUp file, they are geo referenced. And when they come into Max, they are correctly aligned. So I can trust that. And if I Google that particular stadium, which is the Keenan Memorial Stadium in North Carolina, in Google Maps, you see that they are represented the exact same way.

I didn't rotate this model. This is exactly how it was brought into Max. Right, so this is a really good starting point and I can trust that when I do my sim, wind will be accurately coming from the direction that I specify, if you will.

All right, so now we got that. Let's go back into Max and take it from there. So we got the model in.

The next thing we need to do is create a proxy version of this model. Really what we want to do is create volumes that represent the major parts of the stadium. It doesn't have to be super precise, at least not in the case that that I'm working with.

We just want to go ahead and remove all these sort of, you know, really complex pieces of geometry. So for example, this bleacher model here, this area here, it's a curved surface. To recreate that, what I'm going to do is use the spline object inside of Max.

So grab my line object here. I'm going to turn on snapping on the main toolbar. If I right click, I get options. I can snap to vertex. Make sure that's enabled.

Turn on my edges. And I approach a vertex. I get my little snapping cursor.

So now I can start drawing my line out. And I can still pan and zoom in the viewport to facilitate this process. So I'm just going to go ahead and create my line object following the contour of this shape here. And I'm not going to do it super precisely.

The point right now is just to show that this is very easily done and you don't have to be a modeling whiz to be able to achieve-- whoops, that was the wrong one. Let me get closer and keep going. Right, so let's just go ahead and close the loop here.

I've closed my spline object. Oops, I just lost my mouse. There you go.

Close the line, there you go. And when I isolate my spline object, you see we have this nice curved surface that we can start working with. I want to give this guy some volume. So I'm going to go ahead and add an extrude modifier from the modifier list.

Let's look at the extrude modifier, give it a little bit of depth. And now we have this volume that we can work with. All right, so let's go back and look at another way of creating other parts of this object.

The stadium-- that's of course the main component. And if you look at the stadium, really what you have are this exterior shell that you can guide yourself with this part of the model here and then an interior shell that's carved into it to create the bleacher area and the field. So let's go ahead and see how we can create that kind of easily.

So I'm going to create a cylinder, start off with that, put it into my scene like that. I'm going-- whoops. And I'm going to line it up using the align tool to the field so that it's oriented the exact same way.

Let's try and find the field. There we go. We're going to set our orientation x, y, and z to be the same. And we're going to set our reference coordinate system to local. So now when I move the sphere or the-- sorry, the cylinder and take off snaps, I'm moving it within the same alignment as the stadium there.

So let's go ahead and modify this guy. We're going to remove the height segments. We're going to scale it out a little bit so that it fills in roughly that space right there.

If I go into top view and turn on X ray mode, Alt-X, I can scale this guy in a little bit so that he better represents that shape right there. And when I come back in here, I have already the outer shell has been created.

I'm going to adjust my height a little bit so that it's better positioned right there. Now I'm ready to keep going. Next thing I need to do is create the inner volume that I'm going to carve out of the outer volume using Booleans. So to do that, I'm going to scale a copy of this guy inwards and make a copy, not an instance. And then I'm going to adjust the height there so it pops out a little bit so we see it. And I'm just going to push it up a little bit more.

So the next thing we need to do is scale this guy out so that he's representing the inner volume of the stadium. So to do that, I'm going to convert to editable poly. Right click, grab my upper face here, and I can start scaling this guy out.

I can scale in all directions, something like this. And this is kind of rough right now. We're going we're going to fix this as we keep going. Just gives you a rough idea of what we're trying to achieve here.

And then the last thing we're going to do is just take these two guys and isolate them and carve this guy out of this guy. To do that, grab my base model, go into compound objects, grab a Boolean.

This is a brand new Boolean system in Max 2017. I'm going to add an operand, which is this guy right here. I'm going to set it to subtract. And now I've carved out that part of the stadium.

What's really cool is I still have access to that operand itself. So if I double click on the operand, I can still go back and select a face. I can still scale it out to adjust that crave action that I've just done there to really precisely create the effect that I want to create. So Boolean's a really easy way to model the surfaces and these volumes without having to get into edit polys, vertices, edges, and all that complicated stuff.

All right, so the last thing around modeling that we need to do before we send these two guys over-- you know, we would, of course, complete the entire model with different volumes. I want to send this now into simulation CFD to create my wind simulation. But to do that-- so to do that, I'm going to use the IGES file format, which is one of the file formats that Autodesk CFD supports and Max can export.

But before I do that, I need to convert these guys into body objects. Right now, there editable polys and the IGES file format doesn't know what to do with that. So to do that, I'm going to select these volumes right here. I can come down into this list and expand it.

I have body objects as a sub item. And I can just click the body object button right there. And now I turned this guy into a body object. So I would do this to all these volumes that I've created, turn them all into body objects to get further tessellated. And now they're ready to be exported out as an IGES file.

So let me fast forward to a portion that-- to a part that is all modeled. So this is basically my proxy version of the stadium. You see it's kind of crude.

It's a crude representation. It doesn't have to be super precise. The idea is just to recreate those main volumes.

So once I've done all this, I can select all these objects I can go to Export, Export Selected. And then we're going to make sure we select IGES as our file format. Give a name.

Stadium is fine. Override that guy. We're good to go.

So now we can take that IGES file and bring it into CFD to create a design study. Let's go back into PowerPoint and see how that's done.

So if I click this here from within CFD, we can create a new design study, browse to that stadium IGES file on disk, give it a name. It's pretty straightforward. Hit the create.

And you're pretty much good to go. What's really cool about this tool-- and again, I'm not a sim guy, so thank God it's like this or else I wouldn't have been able to do this. It kind of guides you through the general process of creating at least a when simulation.

It's pretty straightforward stuff. So you get this geometry tool dialogue that appears and it's asking you to fix things. It's asking you to merge certain edges that are too close together.

It's asking you to remove small objects are not necessary in the simulation. And then it's asking you to create an exterior volume for the wind tunnel. Now there's rules that you generally want to follow when creating a wind tunnel. I actually documented them in my hand out. So there's some images that you can refer to.

But here, you just drag out your handles, position it how you want, scale it out how you want, hit Create, and your wind tunnel has been generated. The next step-- and what's really cool is if you follow essentially the ribbon, it kind of tells you. You know, you've got geometry tools.

Then we're on to materials and then boundary conditions, et cetera, et cetera. So right now, we're in materials. And basically, what we need to do is define the different materials that are inside of our projects.

Example-- the wind tunnel is going to be defined as a fluid air. And then we can hide it, get it out of the way. The stadium is going to be all steel in my case. Again, this is my project.

If you are using different kinds of surfaces, you would define those as they are-- humans, gypsum board, plastics. The next step is to define some boundary conditions. And this is basically telling the system, hey, where is air coming in from and where is air exiting the tunnel?

So we're going to grab the right hand side of the tunnel because we want air coming in from the east. We're going to define it as velocity set to miles per hour and we're going to give it 20 MPH. So wind is going to be coming into this tunnel at 20 miles per hour.

The next thing is define the exit. So we're going to set this to pressure and pascal. And that is basically telling the system air is exiting this way.

At this point now, we've got to mesh it out. This is all automatic. You hit the Auto Size there and you get-- you mesh out your volume. Your volume is the way the Auto Size does that.

At this point now, you basically just solve. So hit the Solve tool, the Solve button. Set your iterations to whatever you want.

A recommended iteration amount is anywhere between 200 and 300 iterations to get a physically correct simulation. I used 100 just to keep things going. And this actually takes a lot longer than what you see there. That was a sped up video.

But once you have simulated-- this is where things start to get fun-- you come to the Results tab up here and you have different ways of visualizing the simulation, even directly in the tool, in this tool, without even going into any other product. So what we can do is create-- I like to create traces-- so paths that are going to follow through and traverse the stadium. So I set myself up here as traces.

And then there's different ways of creating these traces. I'm going to create a rectangular grid of traces and I'm going to set my seed density to something a little bit lower to create a denser grid of traces, if you will. So once I set these guys up-- and if you expand these, you have different ways of creating your traces. You can create circular patterns.

You can create rings, et cetera. There's a few different ways that you can draw these out. I'm going to hit the Add button. And then I just need to basically click to create this series of red dots.

And basically, the density of these red dots is driven by your seed density up there that I set to 0.5. So let's just do something like this, hit that. And then boom, we have our traces inside of our stadium representing the wind simulation that we just did.

All right, now what you can do with this, a few cool things we can do to visualize this directly inside of CFD. We can animate these guys. I hit the Play button here.

We get them animated. It's going a little bit fast. We can slow that down a little bit.

We can also take our generating path here, our generating shape here, and maybe just drag it out a little bit to create a completely different wind simulation. But it's always following the settings of simulation that you defined a little bit earlier. Let's speed this up a little bit.

What we can also do is modify the look and feel of these traces. Right now, they're just tubes. So if we go to Edit, we have some settings in here that we can change.

For example, we're set the cylinders. Like I said, you can set them to lines. I'm not particularly a fan of the lines.

What I do like, though, are the comments. The comments are kind of cool because they're continuously generating. If I just get my mouse off of it, they turn-- they're colored.

And we can change the size of these guys-- for example, make them a little bit thinner. And one of my personal favorites is setting these guys to spheres. Let's make them smaller spheres and then play with our animation a little bit. No, it's a pretty good animation.

And then this starts to get really-- like, you can start to get some really crazy effects in here. For example, if I just go ahead and hide all my steel here and we can just visualize just the particles themselves-- I can set myself to a perspective view to get a nicer look. Now, I mean, you know, this is just playing around with the actual visualization tools in CFD, but there's not much you can do with this after the fact, right?

Like, you can create an AVI video and that's about it. But you can't comp this onto anything. You can't really visualize this in any meaningful way outside, you know-- I mean, within this product. So what you want to do now is take this and bring it outside of CFD into something else like Max, where you can actually do lots of crazy things with and a lot more flexible of a tool.

So to do that, you go to the application button. You export and you export your nodal results. This is going to save a CSV file on disk that you can then load into Max using the new tool sets that we added in the last couple of releases. So let's go ahead and see how that is done and let me just go back into PowerPoint just to make sure I'm on the right track. Yes I am.

All right, so we're going to-- we're following my skeleton here. So now we're going to take a look at how we can import that simulation data into 3DS Max. We're going to apply a visual style using something called shader effects.

Does anybody know what shader effects is? No, I don't think so. You know a little bit?

You know a little bit. You don't count. What are you here for?

So essentially, shader effects is the shading platform or the material definition platform that exists inside of Stingray. So when you create materials in Stingray, you're creating shader effects materials. A really great thing is that shader effects is also inside of Max. So you can create shader effects materials.

It's basically a node based material editor and you send your assets in. It's one to one. They come and they look the same and the same shading tree is also carried through into Stingray. So this is a really good-- a big advantage when working with Stingray the game engine.

And then we're going to use those shaders to animate that wind data. Cool? So what's next?

Here is a demo. So let's jump back into Max and see how-- whoops, it's not what I wanted. All right, there we go. So let's skip over into this portion here.

So we've got our stadium. We simulated-- we created a proxy version. We simulated the CFD. Now how do we bring this into Max?

So we have some new tools. The first one that I'm going to show you guys is under the create panel. We're going to expand the standard primitives and we're going to locate CFD.

From here, we have a couple of nodes. And there's a lot more that I'm not going to show you today that I just don't have time. The one that I want to show you is this import data node.

This is going to allow us to import that simulation data. So we click it, put it in our scene. And it's really important when using any of these CFD objects and nodes to center them to the world of. Max

You want to make sure that their x, y, and z is set to 0, 0, 0 down here. To do that, I'm going to right click on the spinners, resets them to 0, 0, 0. This is so that everything lines up properly inside of Max.

So once you've got this guy in, you can come to the Modify panel and he's looking for a CSV file. The CSV file is what I outputted it from CFD using that output nodal result. It created a CSV file on disk.

So let's go ahead and grab that in. I have it saved here as my east.csv, so the wind stimulation coming from the east. Hit Open. It takes a few seconds to load.

There's a lot of data. And it's basically going to come in as a point cloud of sorts or a-- the actual real term is a velocity field.

So now that it's in, we still don't see it, right? It's in but we're not looking at it. Why? The reason is because we need to turn on vertex ticks on that object.

To get to that, you can right click on the object in the Scene Explorer, display properties, vertex ticks. So now we get this lovely blue point cloud which is actually a velocity field. And basically, what you're looking at is every point in this point cloud contains simulated information-- in our case, wind direction and wind velocity.

So where is it going and how fast is it going? Right, so once it's in, we no longer need to see it in the viewport. It just needs to exist in the file.

So we can just hide it, get it out of the way. The next thing I want to do is I want to recreate those traces we saw in CFD. I want to create paths that are going to traverse that velocity field to accurately represent the wind as it's flowing through the stadium.

So to do that, I'm going to grab another new tool, under Shapes this time. Expand this guy here. We have a CFD category and we have CFD spline paths.

Again, I'm going to pop it in my scene. This one actually has a viewport representation of a circle. I'm going to zero it out to x, y, z, and come to its parameters.

This guy requires two things. It needs to read that point cloud, that velocity field, and it needs a geometric object to create splines from. So let's go ahead and connect those two together. We're going to click on this button here and locate our import data node in the point cloud.

And then the geometry-- I have this organic piece of plane that's floating off to the side of my screen here, of my model. We're going to use this guy. Basically, what's happening here is every vertex on the geometry that you assign will create a spline and that spline will traverse the point cloud, look at every point and then determine where to go next from each point to point. So it's an accurate representation of the wind.

And there's some settings in here to adjust the look and feel. They're actually documented in my handout as well what they all do and also in the help file, as a matter of fact. So I'm going to set up these values that I know work for my case-- 75 and 2. And now I have much smoother, cleaner curved lines representing the wind.

So the really great thing about this whole thing is that these are just splines like any other spline object inside of Max. You can turn on rendering, make them renderable, give them volume. You can increase the size and set this to 300, make them a little bit thicker.

And you can set them to a rectangular if you wanted to. You can add a modifier, a suite modifier, and completely change the shape itself. You have access to all of Max's tools when you're using these objects because they are just spline objects.

We want to make sure that mapping coordinates are enabled. This is because we will be applying textures to this guy and we don't want to do our own UV mapping. Just turn that on and don't even worry about it again.

And the great thing is that they are connected to this object here. So when I move this object, the splines are going to update to the new position within the velocity field. So they are splines, but they are procedurally connected to the objects that they are used to generate the splines from.

The really great thing is I can make modifications to this guy. For example, let's go ahead and add a tessellate modifier to add more vertices, right? That's what this is about. Add in, boom. You get more lines.

Modify vertices on this plane. Whoop, went a little too fast. And you can really creatively change the look and feel of these splines that you're going to be using to display and visualize wind data. Cool?

All right, so now that we have our wplines, we have our objects, we want to shape these guys. We want to give these guys a visual style or a visual interpretation. Right now, they're just pink tubes and clearly that's not very interesting.

So to do that, we're going to use shader effects. Now to create a shader effects material, you select any material in the material editor and you set it to a DirectX shader. And then you set it to Stingray here in the dropdown.

Now there's shader effects and Stingray. And that gets a little bit confusing. It confuses some people.

We're going to be using Stingray which is essentially a shader effects material. But it's a subset of a shader effects material. A shader effects material has access to a lot of nodes and a lot of tools that Stingray doesn't necessarily support the whole thing. So for other game engines or for other kinds of use cases, you'll want to use a shader effects material. But if you want to use it to go into a Stingray, you use a Stingray material.

So we set Stingray here and we get these options that appear. We have controls here for reflectivity or roughness, metallic, base color, normals, emissive, AO. This is a default Stingray material, default Stingray UI.

This UI is completely modifiable via the shader effects graph. So if I just double click on this guy to show you guys what this looks like, these nodes here and the connections between them are what make that UI in the material. So when I delete things from here or add things to here or modify things in here, the UI reflects those changes. So you basically build a material UI, if you will.

And this list of notes here on the left hand side is what you have access to in the side of a Stingray shader. If you add a shader effects material, there'd be a lot more nodes, but they woudln't be supported inside of Stingray. Makes sense? All right, so the other point I want to make on this is nothing. Let's just go ahead and assign this guy.

So we're going through-- oh yeah, the other point I want to make is this default material setup here that we see what, you know, your normal maps, your base color, your metallic, your roughness, your emissive-- this is the default setup to create a PBR shader or a physically based shader. So physically based trading requires your base color, your roughness, and your metallic. We're not creating a physically based shader.

We're just going to create some colored arrows flowing through splines. So I don't really care about any of these nodes. This is overkill right now for me.

Right, so what I'm going to do is go ahead and take all these notes right here and just simply delete them. I'm going to keep two nodes, two nodes that are important-- the output note, of course, right? This guy is a standard base. He's got all the inputs. Whatever gets connected into this gets reflected in the UI.

And we have our text coordinate node. This node is actually allowing us to read the UVs that are currently on the object-- so the mapping coordinates on the object. We need this guy-- really, really important.

So we're going to keep these two in and we're going to build out a shader to visualize CFD data. So the thing I want is color. I want to able to give this guy color.

So to do that, I'm going to use a material variable. Another heads up I want to just kind of lay on you guys-- shader effects materials can be a little bit daunting and intimidating and scary. And they were for me but give it time. Stick with it. Don't give up.

There's a lot of terms in here that are kind of strange-- vector threes and construct vectors and it gets a little bit wonky, especially if you're not from the gaming world, which I'm not. But give it time because if you give it time and you get the hang of it, you can create some really kick ass and cool shaders. So I'm going to walk you through the process of creating a basic shader for CFD vis.

So we want base, a base color-- so a diffuse color. We grab our material variable node. We're going to rename it here in the properties to Color-- very simple.

We're going to set type to vector three. Vector three is basically just a color swatch, right? And we're going to connect this guy to our base color. Notice what happens in the material. We get a new color entry that appeared set to black.

It's assigned to the splines array. I can adjust this and change the color of my spline objects. Let's just set it to white.

Because I want to have glowey arrows, I want to also drive the emissiveness or the self illumination of my shader by this color. So I'm going to connect that also to the emissive input. So next thing we need to do is I don't want to just have a white blobby spline or a white blobby shape to represent wind. I want to have arrows in my case or a texture map.

So to do that, we need to leverage the opacity channel of this node here. We need to give it the capability of loading a bitmap. So to do that, we're going to use a node called Texture-- Sample Texture. We're going to bring it in.

We're going to rename this guy to Opacity Map. And this guy requires UVs. What UVs? The UVs from the object. We're going to connect it in. And we're going to pipe this guy into our opacity map just like that.

So now here, we have a new slot called Opacity Map. We can load in our arrow texture or our opacity map. We can load in other maps, but that's the one we're going to load in for now.

Let me just put in an editable spline on top of the sky just to get that white line that's a little bit-- edits, poly. It's fine. No, it didn't do that. Hold on. Wrong one. All right, let me just add an edit spline just to get rid of that white line.