PBR force field & physics
With the upcoming node-based way of doing the above, it would be great to have : hurricane force wind , F2 tornado , F5 tornado , 10 foot wave, 30 foot title wave you get the gist.
Wet mud avalanche...snow avalanche
With the upcoming node-based way of doing the above, it would be great to have : hurricane force wind , F2 tornado , F5 tornado , 10 foot wave, 30 foot title wave you get the gist.
Wet mud avalanche...snow avalanche
3 Comments
Also, not sure where you got that term, but I don't think "PBR physics" is a thing?
"PBR" is not a synonym for "realistic" ; it stands for Physically-Based Rendering , which is a set of shading conventions that makes texturing more intuitive for artists (i.e. the workflow with the Principled BSDF that uses base color + roughness + metalness texture maps, instead of the classic diffuse + glossy workflow).
It would be cool to have things like friction maps to make physics more accurate. Dark values could have less friction and light values could have more friction.
Imagine a plane emitting wind where each point on the plane has different speeds. A map could define what parts of the plane blow hard & soft. With a video texture, you could have moving wind patterns.
Gravity maps would make certain areas have more gravity and others have less. In real life, gravity fluctuates based on location. Gravity maps could be useful for realistic transitions from land to underwater because thing sink slower than they fall.
Cloth simulations could have maps that define where they bend easiest. If you have a cloth that's stiff in one area and bendy in another, a bendiness map could be a quick solution.
I think 3D procedural textures would have an advantage over 2D textures for soft body simulations because they can define the strength of objects in 3D.
Vector maps could be used to make waves by defining the direction & strength of forces. Blue means vertical force. Red and green would be different horizontal forces. Dark values could have low force and bright values could have strong force. Combined, they could map out the top view of waves and tell Blender which direction the waves go and how far. Rather than being a complex fluid sim, it could be like the ocean modifier and it could use fakery to quickly make realistic looking barrel waves and tsunamis.
A quick way to make barrel waves is desperately needed (in probably all 3D software). The fluid simulations take, literally, forever for making those super nice looking high definition waves with foam & everything... from what I've heard.
Simulations are finnicky & complex, so sure, presets could be nice. Where in the UI do you see them? Something like the Object > Quick Effects operators? In the physics settings for a field object? How do you think nodes would help? (afaiu how physics nodes will be implemented is still very much an open question.)
I suspect that the existing Force Field options are not up to the task of delivering physically plausible effects like you imagine, in a robust way that doesn't depend on other details of the scene (e.g. the mass/size/shape/number of the objects blown around by the tornado). Assuming there could be a physically sound, robust way to e.g. convert between a wind speed and the Strength parameter of the Wind Force Field (which I don't think is possible, b/c it's a force field, not a fluid simulation that actually takes into account aerodynamics) - wouldn't it be more important to be able to put in that wind speed number, instead of having a preset that does nothing more than a quick internet search for "F2 tornado wind speed"?
Something like "make a snow avalanche" is extremely complex, beyond the scope of something e.g. vanilla Mantaflow could achieve, and there is no obvious way to get it right. Afaiu the way pro VFX studios achieve such effects it is combining lots of different tools, employing some weird hacks to work around limitations, using dirty tricks that only work from one camera angle or for this specific scene layout, and making tough art direction choices. You could conceivably package all this into a "preset" (probably just a whole .blend file), but it would limit you by having made stylistic choices for you, and probably wouldn't be very tweakable without breaking it - making it pretty useless, unless you want everyone to have the exact same Blender Stock Snowstorm #4™ in their scene.
So yeah, I agree that ways to make it easier to get started on simulations are sorely needed, but whether presets are the right solution really depends on the details.