On Thu, Jul 25, 2013 at 6:33 AM, adrian wyer <adrian.w...@fluid-pictures.com> wrote: > lets face it, if the AD higher ups can't see that houdini is trousering them > in the vfx dept, and that their best hope for a procedural approach to vfx, > is to hit the ground running with ICE, then they deserve to be buried by the > competition
Autodesk is doing the right thing in that context. What they have done with Naiad is add expertise about scalable, distributed, out-of-core simulation that's also platform agnostic, which ICE is not. ICE is a module built deep into XSI that does threaded operations on block of data that reside in XSI's RAM and that's it. At the user group, they did a tech preview of something called Bifrost with its GUI running in Maya, which is the standard linux studio platform, and that's a totally a reasonable thing to do given also its extensive SDK. Things might make more sense if you understand that Naiad was not just a fluid solver, it was meant to be a complete simulation framework, like Houdini. It's not something you plug into ICE, it's an alternative to it.
