RFX

Take a look at some of the features that make Exotic Matter's Naiad exceptional for production dynamics.

• STATE OF THE ART NUMERICAL METHODS. Naiad's fluid solver is written from the ground up using the latest state of the art methods in fluid mechanics for complex, variable-density, variable-viscosity flow.

• DETAIL. Naiad produces fluid simulations with unparalleled detail in the desktop market. Naiad users are not forced to add displacement maps, non-physical particle systems, or other tricks to hide the lack of detail. With Naiad, you can pretty much hit "simulate" and use the results with little extra work.

• SCALABILITY. The Naiad system is completely multi-threaded and scales amazingly well on multicore processors. Run a simulation and watch all the cores light up like a Christmas tree.

• STABILITY. Naiad offers tremendous stability and robustness. Demanding, real-world projects ranging from Avatar to Shark-Night 3D rely on Naiad's ability to run simulations reliably without constantly crashing or numerical instabilities. You can throw very tough problems at Naiad, and it will give you a great-looking simulation without breaking a sweat. This is an industrial-strength 3D fluid dynamics solver.

• PREDICTABLE RESULTS. Expect predictable results when you go from coarse, low-resolution simulations to high-resolutions. The flow features do not suddenly change unexpectedly, instead the main features of the flow are preserved. You get more detail without losing the overall feel and flow of the simulation. This is due to the Naiad solver technology making the most of available resolution, unlike techniques such as Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics which must smooth away a lot of particle detail to work reliably, or even advanced engineering solvers which only begin to converge once flow features are resolved across several grid cells.

• NODE-BASED WORKFLOW. The flexible node-graph workflow allows you to rewire what it does at will, including where, or even if, file i/o occurs. Together with an advanced expression language, just about anything an artist can dream up is possible with an elegant graph.

• DETAILED FLUID SURFACING. The Naiad mesher is unmatched in speed, scalability and faithfully capturing all the detail present in the fluid particles. The mesher can also produce a decimated mesh, based on camera/view and surface curvature parameters. It can (nearly) make you coffee.

• ADVANCED VISCOSITY MODEL. Advanced viscosity modelling allows simulations that achieve superb accuracy, detail and motion ranging from low-viscous flows to ultra-viscous coiling and buckling flows, all the way to the rigid-body limit!

• REVOLUTIONARY 3D GRID TECHNOLOGY. Naiad's volumetric 3D tiling technology allows the system to solve massive simulations while using a very low memory footprint, since Naiad adaptively tracks the fluid and only creates "fluid tiles" in regions where the fluid is. This frees the artist from having to manually manage an axis-aligned rectangular "fluid domain". The tiles can cover completely disconnected and irregular fluid structures without any problems.

• SCALABLE FILE I/O. The EMP file I/O system in Naiad employs fully parallel data compression, decompression, and on-demand data loading completely automatically. This means you can run far larger simulations without spending an eternity waiting for the software to write each frame to disk (or load it), and the file sizes are very reasonable.

• PRODUCTION-PROVEN SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURE. Naiad has a clean client-server API and a full plug-in system to allow the maximum flexibility in pipelines. Adding I/O functionality for custom file formats, adding hooks to integrate with other products, or adding new simulation features for your artists - it's all a breeze. Open Naiad Studio, a clean GUI front-end for graph editing, running and visualizing simulations, is fully open source along with a whole suite of "buddies" for Naiad to smoothly interoperate with a variety of other packages.