Late-night experiments with Bifrost

PHIL RADFORD: Hi, guys. My name is Phil Radford, and today, I'm going to be doing a presentation on Bifrost. And how I use it as a creative and as an artist inside of Maya. What I'd really like to do today is to try and get across my workflow and my experiences with Bifrost. And because I'm not a deeply technical person with any kind of coding knowledge, how I learn it and how I attack day-m-to day using Bifrost.

So I'm also known as Maya Guy on YouTube. You can find me on Twitter as well @Strangebox_ltd where I post a bunch of experiments, and links, and stuff. On YouTube, I teach Bifrost and Maya, but these days, it's just mostly Bifrost. You could head over to MayaGuy.com where you can find a bunch of my work and potentially some courses coming soon.

So all of this just reach out to me because we've done some marketing videos, and I'm working with them here and there doing bits and bobs. But yeah, let's have some fun. Let's just do something creative, and I'll show you how my brain works. And yeah. Let's go for it.

So the first thing I want to do is bring your attention to the Bifrost browser, which you can get through using this button here in Bifrost or just by going up to the windows Bifrost browser there. Now, the Bifrost browser is growing, and it's becoming packed with really highly detailed example scenes and graphs, which you should have no shame in using.

These have been made by the devs mostly. However, there's also a bunch of other technical artists that are creating their own bespoke compounds, and graphs, and subsequent browsing experiences here in the browser. So for example, this is a guy called Maxime, and he creates a tool-set called MJCG tools.

And he's been doing this for quite a while now, pretty much since the inception of Bifrost, and he's just released his new tool-set. We'll stick some links in somewhere as to where you can download that and maybe just give a small amount to his cause.

These are fantastic. There's a whole bunch of real technical stuff in there, and this is what I find really interesting because I can't build this stuff or wouldn't know where to start to be honest. But I can build upon this stuff, and that's the most important thing that I'm trying to get across here, is that when someone that's very, very technically minded creates a tool-- Excuse me. We can build upon it. We can pull it apart. We can hack it.

Also, Bruce. Bruce Lee known in the community, very well known as well as Maxime. Bruce has created his curve influence tool. This allows us to create some really awesome particle effects. So what I'm going to show you today firstly is how I look at these tools, and how I work out well, maybe I can combine different things to create something completely new. So let's just get started.

So I'm just going to jump into Maxime's tool-set here, and I'm going to scroll down until I find strands wrap deformer, and I'm going to click import. So what this deformer does is basically you could add geometry in here, and it will deform along the curve multiplied by however many strands are here. Maxime's built a cool little script. This has actually been around for a while.

But I'm going to hack it apart and just show you how I work. So first thing's first, I don't want the curves that are available there. So I'm just going to pull them apart, and I'm going to create my own curve. So I'm just going to go create CV Curve Tool. I'm just going to start clicking some curves around here. Cool.

So with that in there, I'm just going to drag that into the browser. I was going to give us some more real estate here. So I know that this curve needs to plug into here now, but I also know that there's a set strand shaped node here, which I'm not going to need because that's just going to allow us to render the curve. And I don't want to render the curve, so I'm just going to drag that across there. And I'm going to just get rid of that, and I'm just going to plug-in my curve to here.

So we can see that we've got another curve turn up here, but we just need to go to our original curve shape and add in some more segments. I'm just going to stick in eight. It closely resembles it, and that's good enough for us at the moment. So we've got a curve.

So next up, I want to put some geometry in there because I basically want to deform along curve, along an animated curve. So I'm going to create a cube, and with our cube, I am going to put some divisions in. So I'm just going to stick eight in there for now. We can come back and put more in later, and that's going to drag that cube into here.

And with the first cube, I'm just going to switch off the visuals on that. So I'm going to undo Maxime's geometry there, and I'm going to plug-in our geometry. Now, if I play this, at the moment, it's going to be really fast, which is no good for us. So just with this time node here just delete that.

I'm going to stick in a different node because, quite simply, we want to divide some time, so we've got some more. I'm just going to undo this, so we know that goes into the offset. So I'm just going to pull that out there, and I'm going to push this into the offset.

But divide's going to need a value, so I'm just going to right click and get a value coming out here. And I'm going to just turn it up to about eight. Now for rewind and play, it's a lot slower, so I might put in 12 maybe because I want it to be even more slow.

And then I would like to increase the length of that. So the next go is down here, and I might try four. Rewind and play that. And we can mess around with all of the other settings, the squishing and all that kind of thing. But that's not what I'm bothered about at the moment.

So I'm going to create an output node here, and I'm going to drag an output into here. I don't necessarily need one because we are terminal, but we are going to need that in a moment. So we've got curve, and we've got geometry going around it. And I know you can do this in Maya anyway, but we're going to need it done in Bifrost because we're going to use it again in Bifrost as well.

So back to the Bifrost browser. So let's get the browser open. So what I'm going to do today is I'm going to combine one of Maxime's tools with one of Bruce's tools. We can use something here, but the main staple of Bruce's tool is the curve influence nodes. So I know that I need a curve influence node, so I'm just going to create a new graph.

Let's move some things out of the way, and I'm just going to lay down a curve influence node from Bruce. It's all good. And I'm going to create a basic particle, basic particle graph, and I'm going to explode that. So we've got some particles.

Let's just give ourselves some more screen space. Move that. Bring it over here. So this curve influence is obviously an influence, so we're going to drag that into simulate particles. And then we've got an output, and we can take the particles into the output.

But we're not going to emit anything at the moment because we haven't got anything plugged into the source particles. So we'll get rid of this collider because we don't need it. So there's the source particles, and so here's the cool bit.

We're going to bring that strand wrap into this curve influence graph, and I'm just going to pause graph for a minute. And I'm going to emit particles from this strand wrap shape, and it's just going to emit it from the geometry that's in there. So that's all good.

So we're emitting particles from there, and let's just unpause. See what we've got for a minute. So if I press play now, not a lot going on. So--

First of all, let's just go into our influence, and we need to plug-in the curve into the influence. Of course, it doesn't understand what's going on, so we'll just get our original curve dragged down here. And so we are telling that curve influence node to use this curve for the influence.

And with this curve influence here, I'm just going to switch off a couple of things that give me a little bit of trouble, which are in the-- Where are they? --in the shape. I'm just going here, and I switch this off. I'll hit zero. I'm going to hit zero on this. I just seem to have a little UI issue on my machine at the moment.

So now if I hit play, we've got particles coming off our geometry and going along a curve. So let's just increase the timeline for a minute. It's not particularly exciting at the moment. So we're going to this curve influence node, and I'm just going to drag this out and give us some more space.

And we got a whole bunch of stuff we can do. We can make this move along a curve, but it's going along a curve anyway because it's part of-- It's using the emission from the geometry there. But we can still move it along a curve, and I guess it will work much like an inherent.

So let's just stick another one in there. Let's rewind and play, and we see it start to move with it now, which is good. And then it would be nice to see it going around that curve. That's the cool part. So if I hit six there and rewind and play, it's going to start to see that twisting around as it goes, which is very cool.

I might be a little bit on the far side, so I'm just going to maybe give this a four in there. And I'm going to get rid of our original. The strand wrap. I don't want to see that actually, that graph, so I'm just going to hide that. So I just see the particles now.

So I can see them moving. And obviously, we can get this particle system to animate along the curve anyway, but I'm just showing you how we can use two separate tools to create one new one. So I'm going to increase the particle count to about 600, and I'm going to make those particles lift forever.

Speed of those I'm going to put down to about one, and then in a moment, we could add some turbulence and noise. So let's just rewind and play. See what we've got going on. Starting to look pretty funky. I really like the way that this is all clumping together up here.

So maybe we'll go into curve influence, and we will add a little bit of turbulence. Let's go three. Also, we can play with frequencies there. Put six in and noise. I'll be a little bit careful and just put one in there. We've got surface flow. There's a real lot in this tool. It's really good.

So now we're starting to get some cool movement, and it's actually doing some crazy dampening going on. To be honest, I really like that look, so I'm going to think about leaving that in there just for this example. Anyway, it looks really cool. So what can we do with this now?

So the next step I want to do is probably pretty crazy, but I'm going to look into the Bifrost graph again. Sorry, the Bifrost browser through Maxime's tools. And there's a whole bunch of stuff in there, and this is what you need to start realizing is that you can string all of this stuff together just with a small amount of technical knowledge.

And just try stuff because you'll create something completely new that you'd never have thought you could do. So look, this braid system here. Let's import the braid system. So there's a whole bunch of nodes coming with that. I don't think I need them all, but I do like the look of this create braids from strands.

So I wouldn't have actually known that that was there unless I'd opened this example in the Bifrost graph. I might have had a look through the menu and come across it, but to be honest, I could see this here. I think I'm going to use it.

So the cool thing is that I can just go control-C and go back into this graph again, and I can go control-V. And then we're creating these brain-- braids from strands. Braids from strands are coming in here to the particles. So let's put that to the side.

But the first thing I want to do before we go too far is to create trails from particles. So if we get a create particles trails node, and I do know that when we're in the particle solver, we need to just tick on this label point ID because that's going to help us in a little while.

I will drag a new selection down to the create particles trails, and for now, I'm just going to plug that in to the output and just see what these trails are looking like. Let's give everything a minute here. Let's hit rewind and play, and we can see-- I'll just click on that. We've got trials coming in and flowing these vectors, which is pretty amazing.

So there are the trials. Let's just get them to show up. There are a couple of ways I can do this, but I might just start typing in strands here. But I want a set strands shape node. There we go. And so I'm going to unplug that and plug that back in there and just plug this back in here up here.

And just to be tidy, I'm going to delete this trails. So it's set strand shape, and I'm going to turn that into a tube. And I'm not just targeting one there. And rewind and play. And then if I was to render that, let's just a little look, shall we? If we just stick in an Arnold light wherever you like there.

Let's bring this up and just rotate it slightly. I'm not going to do anything too fancy. And let's just have a look at what we've got. So it's going to go render view. Drag this in here, press play. I'm probably going to need to change my exposure and whatnot on the light. Give this a second to do its thing.

And it will be unresponsive here, but there we go. So we see there it is. We've got strands in there, and the light is not working everything. We haven't got any shaders on anything. So let's just be lazy and just stick an overall shade on everything. I was going to assign a material like that directly to the body there. I'm just going to go into the attributes of this light. I'll just stick that up to 10 and get the exposure up to eight maybe. Seven.

So we could start to see the-- what we've got. So the next thing I want to do is now that's all rendering and whatnot. I'm going to think I'm going to get rid of those particles. Just get our Bifrost graph back. Let's get rid of these particles because I just want to deal with the strand shapes now.

So I'm just going to close the graph for a minute because this occurred to me the other day when I was messing around in the browser is that we could actually use braids over the top of our strands. So if I have to stick that in there, and output this here on some crazy magic I'm hoping that we are going to get braids from our strands.

So I'll get playing that. Obviously, it slows down a bit because of what we're doing, but if we zoom in here-- And maybe I'll get a render going, and see what we've got.

I'm going to flip these around. So I'm going to set a strand shape after the fact, pluck that back in there, unpause the graph. Rewind and play. Just a small amount.

And then if we have a look here, we can actually see that we've got braids showing up. Just bring the exposure down a bit. We can see that we've got braids showing up on our strands, which is pretty amazing because that's a serious amount of stuff going on there.

So if we look, we can just see that tunneling around. And what's super nice about this is that we can indeed just go back into the Bifrost graph, and because it's procedural, we've still got everything to play around with. I can change the braids, what sort of size they are, the frequency. I can even get them moving independently if I want.

So they'll be going around the curve but also undulating upon themselves. We can plug the particles back here, so that we can see both the particles and the braids at the same time. And then of course, we can go back to the wrap deformer and change anything there. We've got our original curve shape.

And of course, we've got the curve influence to make a whole lot of changes. So before you know it, we've got a very simple looking graph that yes, is reliant on some other graphs, but we have created something that is extremely complex. Really, if you think about it, obviously we could spend more time tweaking this-- these braids to get those braids to maybe look a bit more like chains or something like that. And they will all follow the various vectors and whatnot.

But anyway, I hope you enjoyed that one. I will show a little animation of this on screen now.

So we've created that, and that's all good. But let's just take it further and try something completely different but using some of this network that we've created. So if I go to the Bifrost browser again and look through Maxime's tool-set, I can see there's a plexus tool-set there.

And I know everyone was just crazy about plexus at one point, a certain other plug-in and certain other software. But we're just going to import that in. So again, I can look through Maxime's graph. I can be like OK, where's the Plexus stuff?

Obviously, we've got fractal field there, which is going to help the plexus move around and-- But this is really what we're looking for, this create plexus from points. That's cool. That's what I want. So I'm going to pause this because I don't want anything going on when I'm simulating the other scene.

So I'm going to control-C this, and I'm going to come here. And I'm going to control-V in here. I'm going to pause this graph, and I can create plexus from particle points. So I'll just stick those in there, and I will put those in there.

And if I just make my particles a little bit smaller, I'll just go to 0.4. And let's get this out of the way and this out of the way. And now if I want to play-- Yeah. We've got plexus network running over our particles. That is very cool.

Obviously, we can go in and set it up because these are just strands at the end of the day, so we can go in and set up our strands rendering and whatnot to get those rendering. Maybe we want our particle size to be a bit smaller. So we could just jump into particles and bring those down to about 0.1.

Rewind and play, and then we've got the plexus system working around Bruce's curve influence node working on a particle system using Maxime's plexus style strand. And this is how you need to be looking at graphs. When you open up the browser, we don't just want to look in here and go these are of no use to me. You want to look in here and go what can I make from this?

We can make some super cool, very, very complex stuff out of all this. Putting it all together, creating our own stuff, and obviously, we can combine all of this with arrow as well if we want. If I want smoke coming off of those particles, I'll join the-- Well, I have smoke coming off of those particles. It's all doable. But we're going to jump into something else now, move away from this. And yeah, let's get to a new scene.

So here's something else fun. I've been working on. This is a mocap character from the Rococo library from within Maya, and as you can see here, I've swapped out the actual character for a whole bunch of badges or pins. And each one has got a different emoji face on it.

We zoom in here. We can see a little bit more detail. Each one is modeled as a badge. They're not just flat, squashed cylinders, and it all renders really quickly and looks really cool, nice and bright and colorful. So this is using the scattering system in Bifrost.

So we could just go in and have a little look at this. So here it is. Just run in here, and I'll just rewind to the first frame. And we can play through it. Obviously, we've got quite a bit going on here, but it's not particularly slow either. There is a lot of geometry on this character at the moment. So yeah, let's just have a look at how I made it.

So I started off with something from the Bifrost browser. You go into there. The devs have kindly given us a scatter pack, some various different graphs to play with. I think I started with the basic scatter pack, and then I stole something from the scatter orientations, I believe, and then opened it up. And you can see some of the notes from the devs in here.

So if we just go into this in a bigger window. I'll just maximize that. The only thing that's changed here is this scatter on animation. That's a node that I published myself. If we go in here, we can see that I can bring in, if I just type in scatter on animation that comes up. So this is a node that I put together, but I had to be shown. It was actually Maxime Jeanmougin that showed me what I needed to do.

Because when you initially scatter-- And I'll just jump into here for a minute. And this is the stuff that I've set up. But basically, this is the scatter node that you'll see when you open up the scatter file. This is a scatter node. But I noticed that when I was moving my character-- that character is in a limbic file, actually.

When the character moves, the instances were sequencing, and that wasn't what I wanted. So Maxime showed me how to create this little node network, and I'll just quickly plug our Bifrost channel on. It's actually called Bifrost Addicts on Slack. At the moment, we've got 200 members on there and growing.

And it's completely Autodesk unofficial, but it's a great resource. You can come in and read the rules, and we've got general showcase, help, tutorials, and a lot of help is given on this channel. As I said, it's completely unofficial. I'm one of the admins on there. We've got a bunch of amazing admins, and everyone's just really, really, really trying to help each other.

So if you need to pick up something extra from Bifrost, and you're stuck, because that is an international Slack channel, there are people pretty much online all the time. And that's where I got this idea from. So I was shown how to make it, so that my instances stay in one place. That that was these free nodes.

And then what I decided to do was well, I don't want to do that again every time. I'll just create a publisher node. So all I did was got an input and dragged all of these out to an input because I want to be able to show these on this backside here. So that I didn't have to keep diving down into the node.

So we can see it. We've still got everything here. We can see it. And all you have to do is, if you're going to use some moving objects, is you need a static version of that object where the instances can look at and go right, this is the placement.

And then you have your deforming object animation. Whether you created that keyframe animation in Maya or whether you've brought it in as a cache, the deforming geo goes into here. And like I said, I just created-- I have actually posted this node on the Slack, but I can get it up somewhere else if anyone needs it.

But anyway, that's so-- We're being scattered here, and these are the instances. The instances are coming into the create instance node here. We've got probability of different instances that we can have show up, and we can stick as many instances in here as we like and also change the amount of them.

So I can just stick this down to 500, and we can see that it's dropped them right down there. And then, obviously, performance picks up a little bit as well. I'll just drag this back up here for a second.

So instances, and then we've got some little settings around here. All of this came in from the example scene file. This just helps us rotate a little bit more and do some other randomizing functions. And then out of the back of that comes the out points.

I've got an assigned material there, which I don't need. Because I have textured these individual badges, those textures are coming through. And so I've got Arnold shaders in my hub shade. I can go in and tweak those and change the textures or whatever. We've got that going into an output.

But obviously, we can take it further. There's an out point here. If we've got out points, we can do pretty much a lot of other things. So once again, I did a get position, constructed those points, now then I plugged in the plexus node. And I just used the strands from it, and I also created braids around those strands in that instance.

Set a strand shape and then Arnold settings. So we can plug this in because it's currently not plugged in. We just get that in there. Now obviously because it's got braids on it, it does slow things down quite a lot more, but it still looks cool.

So let's just make sure that I've actually got a material on there, and I'll just bring up Arnold and hit play there. I probably need a bit of tougher material on that for you guys to see it, so let's just quickly drag something else in. I'll just create something new here quickly, and it will be on a standard surface. What else? And I will just drag that into the graph.

Obviously, we are rendering, and we've got a live graph at the moment. So it's probably not the best way to start plugging things in but whatever. Let's just do it. So I'll just drag that in there. Things will compile, and we should be able to start to see those strands turn up fairly quickly.

And obviously, Arnold is rendering it, and there we go. We've got strands turning up as well. That looks pretty amazing if you ask me. Let's just drive in here a bit further and just take a look at what is going on.

So these braids, I'm setting them up so they look a bit different. But you can get into some real detail into something like this. Some of it looks really, really different. And yeah, that's it, really. Obviously, we can change the shaders on this and tweak our braids, so they look more like chains or whatever you want them to look like.

We can obviously go in and sort out these rotations on various instances, so it's all up for grabs. But I just wanted to briefly go over scattering, and how you can quickly get somewhere, again, by using the Bifrost browser. And all of these little setups here, especially this particular one, I will now go and create a preset from it.

So that I don't have to come back and do all of this again, and that will just show up in the graph editor when I publish it. So I'll just grab all of this and publish it, and that will be it. Next time, I'll just come in and plug-in a few nodes. Incredible.

Someone asked me a little while ago-- I posted a little example onto Twitter. If you want to follow me on there on Twitter, it's @StrangeBox_ltd. I post a bunch of experiments. But yeah, someone said oh, how long did that take? And I was like 30 minutes. I just got the Rococo mocap and just quickly set up all of this. It really doesn't take long.

So yeah. And if we spent a long time with this, we could start to create some really, really complex stuff. So yeah. Let's move on to the next one.

So here's another file that I had some fun with. So this is a really simple little arrow graph. I've just got a sphere in here, and I'm just emitting the arrow in the direction of Z. It's fairly fast, and it's just hitting an invisible wall here colliding with it.

I'm not too bothered about what the arrow looks like. I'm just in this for the arrow points. So let's just stop this animating for a second. So basically, a sphere, a saucer here where we've got quite high initial speed and a collider, which is our visible cube, a little dissipation influence.

If you're going to use the arrow points, you need to add an arrow refinement settings node and enable emit points. So from there-- Excuse me. From there, I cashed out a VDB sequence from the points pull straight into a file cache here where we cache the points out as a VDB from here. We were at point position and properties. I probably didn't need that, but I'll put it in.

So then we've got a read open VDB points cache that we looked up. Just a simple little time node too long into the frame there. That enables us to read the sequence, and then let's first talk about what I did down here.

So again, I've got Maxime's plexus node. So we're creating plexus from the points of the VDB points. We're setting the strand shape, and we're setting the Arnold strand set into there. So if I just plug this one in, we get firstly, a much faster simulation to look at. I can just scrub through this a lot faster.

And we can see that those plexus and those points are being picked up from the arrow stimulation. So you can start to see a-- Start to create some really amazing stuff. And with the help of the-- Excuse me. --the velocities that you get from the arrow simulation.

So just to add to that, once we've got this, We. Can add on top of that. So I took the point position from the points, constructed those, set a point shape, and created the Arnold points as well. So we can get the points for the plexus shape as well, and then we can just add any existing material I've got floating around.

We can separate that out and put two assigned materials in, and they have different colors for each rings. And we can just quickly art direct this now because it's a VDB, and it's a cache sequence. We don't have to worry about simulating.

So we can play with the shaders, get the look we want, and then move on to create even more complexity over the top of it. So the thing is because we've got these points now, we can add pretty much anything to it. We could even add another plexus over the top of this. There's a lot we can do from here.

So I personally think caching out scenes is beneficial in this instance. So I'm just going to show my light that's hitting at the moment. Oh, sorry. It's on display like this where we can't see it. So then we'll just get Arnold to render that. It doesn't seem to be doing at the moment.

What have I done wrong here? Let's do that material on again. There we go.

So it renders pretty fast for what it is if you think about the complexity that's going on here. These portion sizes, for me, are probably a little big, but we get some really lovely detail around here, really, really nice detail. So if I just get the graph open at the same time, we can start to art direct this a little bit.

I don't quite know why that's gone and hidden itself behind that. So if we could just bring this down to 2 maybe. Let that update. Now we can see our work a little bit better.

So get inside there. We can render out a nice Z depth. And we can see that it's just some really cool stuff going on, and we can add to this. So yeah, that's something else I like to do, is to use the point information from arrow simulations. And we can do this with explosions. Pretty much anything. We could do a particle system. So yeah. That's one more example of what we'll just share. Let's just get a new thing going.

So here's another one I'd like to just take a look at quickly. This is, again, Bruce Lee's compound. I'm actually emitting-- So I've got two curves going on here with two spheres, and we're actually in MPM. So the bottom one is MPM snow, believe it or not, and the top one is MPM sand.

Both have got a high viscosity to them. The snow at the bottom has also got a high firmness setting, so that really, if you can see that twist around there, it's actually latching on to the sand and then twisting around it as it twists round.

Which is pretty amazing if you think about it. that it's just doing that because it's just the nature of snow, really, the way it would just wrap around another object. Let's just have a look at that doing its thing. It really opens the doors to some serious VFX. So let's just have a little look through the graph.

Here we go. I've got a curve going into curve influence and another curve going into another curve influence node. And then up here, the two spheres. I've got one which is snow and one which is sand. The show has got high cohesion and a higher initial firmness with viscosity at 0.4. 0.4, not 4. And that's enabling it to twist around the sand.

And these two, because they're part of the MPM collection, they will interact with each other anyway. So we could go ahead and put in MPM fibers or MPM fluids and get them all interacting together, which is absolutely incredible. So we could cache this out now, and that would run nicely. And we could shade it up and whatnot. So yeah. That's MPM working with the curve influence node.

So I've actually just figured this out while I'm here actually. Let's just get rid of this and this. Let's get them out of the way. Because it is MPM, and it works with this curve influence, we should be able to create some kind of fiber.

I'll create a sphere, and I drag that over here. Let's just get rid of this curve for a minute. And I'd put this curve this-- Sorry, this sphere swear in here at the beginning of the flow point.

Now, if I drag that sphere into here, and I'm just going to pull this graph for a minute. Let's turn that sphere into strands using a little node. Mesh to strand. So if we just drag that mesh into there, and for now, we'll just pull that out into-- Let's just undo this for a minute. Let's just pull that out into the output to see if that's worked.

So let's give ourselves a bit more geometry to work with. Let's go 60, and let's just hide that sphere. And I'm just going to unpause the graph. And so now, these are strands, which is good. It's a good start.

So we've got strands of the sphere. So let's unclog these. Now, fibers work by simulating over strands. So if I have to do the fiber. Make MPM fiber and strands into geometry section fiber, and then that into sources.

So we need to get the fiber strands out. Let's delete that and get a nice new output. So fiber strands out. That means that everything is as it should be. Curves? Yeah. So we already see something is working here.

So if I play that now-- Well, that's pretty amazing. So those strands are moving along but from a fiber's simulation. So that should mean that they should be able to split apart.

So if we just rewind this and go back into the browser, I'll go to the fiber. We'll make this terrible, terrible. Tearing, not terrible, and play. We should get some tearing based on the forces.

Actually, let's put a bit of twist on that. Let's put a bit of twist on that influence around. Just give it 8. Let's rewind and play that.

So we can see we've got the twisting going on, and hopefully, at some point, we're going to get some splitting. Yeah. That is splitting apart completely, so that opens up a plethora of new doors because now we can run fiber simulations down a curve using all of the influences that are part of Bruce's node. And that's incredible. We can see it all twisting around, and pulling apart, coming apart.

And it should mean that we could have more than one bit of geometry. So if I just go back here, and let's just pause the graph for a second. I don't know. Let's just make a torus maybe. Bring that over here. Let's just rotate it this way.

Put another curve a little bit, and change some of its section radius, and give it some more of that. And let's just get it down a bit.

So let's just get the graph open, and we'll drag that into here. So now we need to just create another-- Let's control-C, control-V. Copy that, and we can put it into the same fibers or create another fibers node where we could have different settings. For now, I'm just going to put it into the same fibers, and unpause the graph, and hide the torus.

That's selected. So that is there inside it, but we could actually scale it up. I shouldn't really do it while our graph is unpaused, but I'm a bit of a rebel. Let's just scale it up again a bit more.

So now we can see that, and let's just hit play. Let's see if it all works together. Indeed it does. So I had seen some examples of this where they were showing cloth working on it, but I didn't know if anyone had even looked at fibers. I'm not sure whether they have or not.

But if we play with some of the settings, we'll be able to stop the tearing, and start the tearing, and-- Yeah. We could also use long strands of fibers and obviously attach things to fibers. So this could make some really interesting debris-looking kind of stuff. Like if you wanted to do your particle system and then put this debris over the top of it.

In fact. In fact, where is our original sphere? It's there, right? There's our original sphere. So why don't we just use that quickly for-- I don't know if we have time. I'll just use that quickly for a little MPM sand. MPM sand? A little MPM sand emission. Get that going on as well, and then we'll just have to put granular particles out as well.

And the sand, let's just have it emit three frames. And viscosity 0.4 and cohesion at 10. Let's just get it all sticking together. I'm not going to run this for too long. I just really want to see what it all looks like together. Probably mentally. But let's just give it a quick play.

So being as the MPM, they should all interact with each other. Sand should interact with snow should interact with fibers. Which I guess is going to slow this down significantly, but there you go. It's not too bad. So yeah. They're all working together

So the next step really would be to go into the graph editor, and we'd want to give those strands some size using some Arnold settings and some size profiles. Get those particles a bit smaller. And then maybe I would try and direct it a bit and scale that-- A new sphere down, so that we had a particle stream and with the fibers around the top of them. So they all fly down together.

But yeah. There you go. Bifrost is becoming an absolutely insane tool, and you just have to know how to build on it. And yeah. Just create some absolute madness.

So if I just create a cube here, I'm just going to scale it up a little bit. I'm just going to barrel the edge and a few segments on it. Perfect. And then I'm going to go windows, Bifrost browser. And I'm going to drag in the MJCG tools. Basic ivy growth, which is pretty amazing.

And that's going to bring in the ivy growth and a cube there, but we're going to swap out our cube. So we'll bring this cube in here, and you plug it into the ivy surface. Currently, the default one is there, so we'll just get rid of that. And we'll put our cube in.

Now the ivy seeds have a value. They need to be close to the edge of the geometry far as I'm aware. So if I just go hit 4, we can see that that's the seed generation there. So what I will probably do is just lay down an input and drag the X, Y, and C values into there.

And then they will now turn up into the ivy basic growth Bifrost node, and I can just drag until I get it where I want it. I could have just moved the cube to be honest. But there you go.

Well, and this is great if you're creating ropes or some ropes across a bridge in some really old scene, or garden scene, or whatever. This is amazing. The interesting thing about this is for one, there's a whole bunch of options. You can change just loads of stuff. You can change the max iterations, but at the moment, it is set to its rate.

We can also set this to simulation, so if I rewind and play, it's going to grow over time. That's cool. But it did make me think of something else. Currently, this doesn't work with any kind of motion, so our source can't be moving. Neither can a topology change. I don't know whether that's going to be updated in the future, but it would be cool if it did.