Struggling to understand Autodesk Bifrost? Start with this Absolute Beginners Guide.

hello and welcome to another video this is the first video in a series aimed at introducing beginners to autodesk by frost so if you're mainly just an artist and you've got little or no knowledge of scripting or programming you might look at bifrost and you want to get into it and start using it but you may find it just a little bit intimidating so this video and others like it are going to be aimed at you and the reason for that is i looked at some of the tutorials out there for bifrost and they're very good and they cover some really really good topics but they still can be very intimidating to the absolute beginner because sometimes they just have an assumed knowledge on the viewer so what i wanted to do is really take things from a very basic level and build up the knowledge and competency with each video and then gradually over time you'll begin to experience by frost get to know more about it and then hopefully you can do your own stuff inside bifost itself so i guess um a good starting point would be now to ask the question what is bifrost well by fast is a visual programming environment and framework that allows artists and tds to create complex and procedural effects using a graph editor and this is something that autodesk have been working on for quite some time and they've taken a very long and varied journey to get to this point really and that kind of started back in 2008 when they acquired softimage now softimage had introduced a new technology to their 3d package called ice and that stood for the interactive creative environment and that too was also a visual programming framework but it was groundbreaking at the time because it was one of the first proper examples of a node-based visual programming system inside a 3d package and it was also built to be multi-threaded which means it could take advantage of multi-core processes which were appearing on the market for the first time and with the exception of side effects of houdini there was nothing else out there really like it and it proved to be very popular with the users and the community and there's lots of videos and examples online where you can see the type of stuff that people were building with it and it also predates many of the visual node-based systems that we see today including uh blueprints in unreal now despite a lot of work autodesk couldn't really make ice work outside of softimage so we need to fast forward now to 2012 where an autodesk acquired a company called exotic mata and they were the makers of a popular fluid simulation software called niad and at the time there's a lot of speculation as to the future of nyad but a year later at siggraph the team emerged with a short tech demo that appeared to have everything that nyad had but combined with maybe some influences from softimage's ice and that accumulated into a project codenamed by frost that appeared to do fluid simulations but also a whole lot more now despite appearances autistics were very clear to point out that this wasn't just a niad version 2.0 and it wasn't really ice 2.0 either but it was something entirely new and it was standalone which meant it was its architecture was completely independent of software like max and maya however if you look at it it did look like that nyad and ice had somehow come together on a whiteboard and then bifrost was basically the result of that so then a year later in 2015 we get the first release of bifrost in maya which was very simple for the time had very basic functionality just creating fluid sims using a flip solver and that was really about it didn't have any proper nodal nodes in there or a node or graph workflow but eventually over time they've worked on it more and more and then in 2020 um we got a proper graph editor in maya and now with the latest version of maya 2022 we've got a fully functional graph editor and we can really start to really dive into by frost and do some really cool stuff with it so at the moment we can only use bifost inside maya however the key thing to remember here is that it's still actually standalone so the architecture does sit outside of maya and in the latest version of 3ds max um the fluid solver in that software is based around bifrost and autodesk have already kind of teased people with a short video showing the bifrost graph editor inside 3ds max so at the moment it's purely speculation of what's going to happen with that but it would seem to indicate that eventually we might get by frost into 3ds max however all we've got is maya so that's what we're going to basically use for this video and also the subsequent videos as well now because bifrost is kind of standalone it's actually a plug-in inside maya and that plug-in gets installed by default whenever you install the main version of maya but because it's a plug-in it also means that it can be loaded and unloaded independently if you go to your plug-in manager you'll see it here listed in amongst everything else so in order to use bifost you have to ensure that all these plugins are actually loaded but at the same time if you want to unload them because you don't need to use bifrost then of course you can just make sure they're not loaded and it's not going to be appearing inside your software but the advantage of doing this means that the team can essentially run independently and deploy their versions independently of the main core version of maya if you go to the area community site from autodesk there's a bifrost landing page and you can actually download bifos for maya independently and that's really useful if you're running an older version of maya because it's very common for people not to update to the latest version straight away they could be in the middle of a project and they're just not able to update straight away but they can still use the latest version of bifost and you can see here that we can download the current version for 2022 but also for maya 2020 and also 2019 across all the supported operating systems if we look at the release notes as well and go back to the my documentation you can see the type of versions they've got as well and you can see how at the moment they've been updating by frost independently but in line with the point releases so the main 2022 release of maya has got down to by frost 2.2.10 but then in the 2022.1 point release there's an update and also another update in the 2022.2 release here and again we can look at the document the documentation and see what's actually all in there and again you can even look at the previous versions as well and really go back to quite some way so this really makes the whole thing a lot more flexible for people as well it's very much like what they do with arnold where the arnold versions aren't necessarily uh in a line with maya and they can essentially run at their own pace and deploy updates when they need to we know that by fostering meyer is a plug-in so the first thing that you must ensure is that that plug-in is loaded correctly so go to your plug-in manager and make sure that one you've got the bifos module here in your list and two that you've got them all loaded if you don't have it in your list then you're going to have to go to autodesk's area web page go to the bifrost landing page and you should be able to download wi-fi separately and install it then once you've got it installed activate the plugin so now you've activated the plugin how how do you access bifrost because it's not exactly very clear in the ui as to how you sort of fire it up how you start with it now there's different access points depending on what it is you want to do with bifost i guess the first and most obvious thing that you might notice is the bifrost shelf and you've got a number of different options here which i'm not really going to go into there's just real two main sections here you've got these kind of shortcuts which are pointing to things like aero solvers and emitters and so on and that's to do with bifrost fluids and then you've got these two options here which to do with the content browser and also the bifrost graph itself so i'm just going to bypass these for a moment and stay instead focus on other parts of the ui because if you're looking at these menu items there's nothing here that really resembles bifrost and even when you start flipping through some of these modules you won't see anything to do with bifrost except when you get to effects and here you'll see two menu items which are directly related to bifrost first one is this one here by foster fluids and the second one is this boss menu these two menus represent essentially bifrost fluids in maya the first one here which is obviously called fluids that's the main simulation system for creating fluid and any kind of fluid effects like liquid emitters controlling the gravity interacting with objects etc the second menu boss is the bifrost ocean simulation system this system lets you create realistic ocean surfaces with waves ripples and wakes and you can combine these two together to create all those demo scenes where you've got essentially water crashing against rocks and foam is being generated and acceptable you've got an object or a ship going through uh what looks like water and it's generating awake this that you can do all that with these two menus here i'm not going to go through all of these essentially because these are all documented and we'll probably cover this in another video but one thing to also notice as well is that you can pull up some examples here as well under the biphos fluids menu there's a get example option if you select this this will bring up the actual maya content browser which is where all the kind of uh sample and demo scenes are contained and there's a section called biphos fluids and this is where you can import these into your scene now these are loaded in the same way any other samples are you click it and you can sort of right click it and import it in and when you import it in you'll get a whole load of nodes in here which you're probably might not going to understand and i'm not going to try and play any of this back because none of it is cached correctly and it probably won't work straight away but we can cover this in another video but if you want to load any of this stuff up and then start caching things out then you can do so and it's not a bad way to start if you're looking at diving into biphos fluids but it might be a good idea just to take your time with it because it takes a while to decipher what some of these things are actually in your scene now much of the stuff here is documented so it's definitely worthwhile not trying to skip all that and actually taking some time to go through some of the documentation because it often explains about how to import a demo scene preview in a byfost simulation with the scratch cache and how to make it work because most people will load this scene up press play and then expect it to work and it'll go really slow and i won't understand why because basically there's a lot of computation that has to happen here for it to actually work but if you spend a little bit of time on here make it work then it will play back perfectly fine but we're going to skip over this anyway and not go through this right now and we can always cover it in another video so i'm going to reset my now and just start with a whole blank scene and i'm just going to keep these menus open here now the next thing to look at in terms of bifost is two other menus and that's the create menu and also the windows menu here and these have got two options here one is called uh bifrost graph under the create menu and the other one is called the bifos graph editor and also the bifost browser so what do these actually do well first off we'll deal with the bifos browser because this option is also available here on the bifrost shelf under this option here if we click this what this will do is it will it will open up the bifos browser which will contain any number of demo scenes all of them covering all the current uh capabilities of bifrost in maya and there's lots of variety here they've all been categorized into different things but you'll notice that these are a little bit different from the biphos fluid stuff that we just saw a moment ago because this is being loaded by the my content browser and this browser is specific to bifrost but it looks like that at the moment autodesk haven't populated this biphos browser with any of the fluids and they're still kept separately but just as with the fluid examples these examples here all able to be loaded up and again they're not a bad way of uh just starting to play around with by fast and experiment with it and just see what's going on and kind of how it actually works and there's some really good examples here as well and how they all work and many of these are also documented as well if you load any one of these up for example just click on it and just click the import button this will load it into the scene and you'll notice that the graph opens straight away it's annotated and you can start going in here and then exploring it and noodle around with it if you want to so that's the byphos browser then next thing we've got is under the windows menu is the byphos graph editor so if we select this here this window will appear and this is exactly the same option that you would get if you selected this option in the shelf so you've got biphos graph editor here and by fast browser here now this seems to be essentially the main access point into the bifos graph editor because you've got a very simple welcome message here and you've got three options you can create a graph you can access the bifus browser and also there's a link here called getting started which will take you to a whole array of bifrost tutorials on autodesk's area community website so this is really i guess the main starting point because you can create a graph and when you do that this is about what gets created and straight away in the outliner you now have a biphos graph object in your scene and i can close this and also just remove this anytime then finally the last option is under the create menu where you can actually create a bifrost graph and if you select this this bypasses that main welcome uh window and it just creates the graph straight away and you'll see that here's my graph there's the nodes and the byphosgraph object has now appeared in my outliner so that's really the basic difference and again if you notice when i delete the graph there it's been deleted and it defaults back to this welcome screen inside the graph editor itself if you already know what you're doing and you just want to start with the graph then you go to the create menu and just create a by fast graph and that will create a graph that's either empty or related to an object that you may have previously selected now one thing i've also noticed as well is that you can actually start to create graphs from the actual graph editor even if you've got nothing else in your scene so for example if we um if we actually bring back the the by frost browser and let's just re-import that example again now you notice the bifos graph editor is open straight away and if i close the browser we don't need fluids anymore so we can close that and also the boss so we can close that as well we're not going to use crate so we're just going to focus on the editor itself so we don't need this anymore so this just closed the graph editor so then i've got nothing else in my scene now even if i deselect everything so i've got nothing else selected if i now choose by frost graph editor here from the windows menu or from the shelf it will automatically load up the bifrost graph that's in my scene irrespective of whether or not i've got any other objects in my scene so if i was to close this and just say create a whole bunch of objects and in my scene even even if i deselected them graph editor again it will detect a biphos graph in my scene and automatically load it now if i was to have multiple by boss graphs in my scene which is very very uh possible and this i'll just use any one of these and just import them in and again automatically opens up so again we can close that down so now i've got this object here which is bifrost graph and then this object here if i deselect them now if i open up the bifrost graph editor it doesn't actually open up a graph instead it actually goes to this welcome screen and shows me what graphs are in my scene so i can choose which one to actually open and the reason for this is because it doesn't make an assumption as to which graph you want to open it's just giving you the choice so again i can choose any one i want and open that but also if i want to open the other one as well at the same time then i can do that here this little plus symbol if i click that it will give me an option between opening up the other bifrost graph or choosing an entirely new graph here so i can choose the smoke plume and then i can also create entirely new graph and once i've got that you'll see the bifrost graph node has actually been created here so essentially i guess the main starting point if you're beginner is the biphos graph editor either from the shelf here or from the window system i would perhaps leave this create menu alone because you can you can essentially do the same thing via this graph editor as well and you can close this down um you can close any one of these graphs down there's a little x next to each tab where you can cycle through so again i can just quickly close them and as soon as i close everything it defaults back now to the welcome screen and now of course it's detected three graphs in my scene and i can choose whichever one to open up when i want to now another thing to mention here is the differences between what is created with the bifrost graph and also what is created by this the bifrost fluids menu so this just say for example i just create a basic uh liquid emitter here or even arrow it doesn't really matter if i click this and i've got my objects here but if i bring up my graph editor they don't appear in my list and there's no way to actually create them here either so what's going on here why can't if this is bifrost liquid why aren't they appearing in this bifrost graph editor well i believe the reason for that is because the options here that are available as fluids they are kind of regarded as legacy now because they came about when biphos was first being implemented into maya so although these are very good and you can do some great stuff with this um the team haven't retrospectively made it work with the graph editor what you can do if you wanted to is bring up the standard maya node editor here by the windows menu node editor and you can see that there are a few nodes here to do with the various graphene if you want to and you can begin to explore them here although this perhaps isn't as intuitive as using the new bifrost graph editor so you could say that many of the effects here are very self-contained and not really accessible however there are ways in which you can make these nodes here talk to the graph editor and also with the new graph editor here and also its functionality you can begin to build up liquid particle and error effects with this new bifos graph editor so i think what the team have decided to do is not focus on trying to fit in the legacy stuff they've left it there they've left it accessible but going forwards you're going to want to start doing stuff by the graph editor as well and you can make these these menus talk to each other very very easily and there's various ways in which you can query the emitter you can connect to the mesh shape that's being generated and then plug it into your graph editor to create all kinds of different effects but it's something just that it's worth being aware of in case that you create a liquid effect of bifrost and you're wondering why it's not appearing in this new graph editor when everybody's telling you that you should be using the graph editor now before we wrap up this first video and move on to our first tutorial i just want to spend a few moments exploring the functionality of the the graph editor because we're going to be spending a lot of our time here i'm not going to use bifos fluids up here or the create menu i'm just going to go straight into graph editor each time and i'll probably use the shelf to access that and also the bifos browser now we know that because we don't have a biphos graph in our scene when we open up the graph editor we get this welcome message with these three options we can create a graph here or we could do it up here in the create menu new graph or we could choose the little plus symbol here and also create a graph there now once we create a graph all these kind of menus and windows start to become uh live you might say or they're all they're activated so on the right side you've got a very simple panel here that's got parameters and information so i guess when you select input here you've got some basic parameters that you can control a bit like the attribute editor and also there's an information panel here which is designed to explain some basic information about the node that you you've actually got selected and when you select a node you'll notice it's got a white outline so you can you you can just click once to select it and then left left mouse click and drag to move it around in your actual graph the navigation is very simple here we can mouse wheel out to zoom in and out and also if we if we hold down middle mouse button and we can drag around in the same way that it works in the main maya window we can right click in open space here and we get this menu here which is very similar to some of the options here about frame all and frame selected which we've got up here as well so we just really make a little bit more accessible we can right click on a node as well we can show node information we can rename it or even delete it and even select the connected nodes upstream and downstream and that will become clearer once we start building our own graphs there's even things about naming the display mode as well whether you want values and names and again that will become clear once we start trying to do stuff inside by frost itself now another thing you might notice if you open up one of the uh example graphs or these windows around some of the graphs and they're called backdrops and they're really handy at doing any kind of annotation and grouping notes together that you want to maybe kind of highlight for some reason now you can create a backdrop here from the main menu or even right clicking a in a graph here in the main window great backdrop and you just get this very simple square which if you click and drag around it you can drag to wherever you actually want it to be and once you kind of make this larger by clicking on this triangle you can scale it up if you double click the triangle there in the bottom right corner like so you can change the color of the actual of the window itself and if you double click inside the backdrop here the outside now becomes a dotted line you can actually start typing so this is really handy if you want to start providing information on your graphs because the purpose of bifrost one of the main purposes is to create effects that you can share and distribute to somebody in a team or in a studio so being able to annotate things and put some information and notes in there is going to be beneficial to anybody opening up the scene for the first time and they just want to know what it is they're actually looking at if we double click just inside the window again that will go solid and again we can move that around but then once you move a node inside of this this almost encapsulates everything that falls within this this this border so now when i click and drag everything moves around inside it and if i want to take it out i can just move it away so you'll see this inside some of the example scenes so if i bring up a sample scene now that i had before this is to import that it will open the graph these are some of the examples here we've got and again we can see how they're just there just to give some basic information about what it is i'm looking at and also explain certain things about we'll click here this is what this node does etc now many of these nodes have different points and data types you might say but again if i click on this dummy geometry you can see i've got more parameters being exposed and again the more things i click on the more information it can be now exposed per node so you can see there's quite a lot of information here on this scatter radius node it's all very clear and explanatory so there's a lot of things to go through if you want to now there's lots of information about what these ports mean etc as well i'm not going to go through everything right now because that will take too much time but we'll cover a lot of that stuff in the in the tutorials as well it's easier to mention them whilst we go instead of trying to do everything right now now if you wanted to explore any one of the bifrost examples there's a few things to look out for and be aware of gonna load in a very simple example here the smoke trail and when i load that in it will load in the graph automatically that we know so i'm going to just zoom in slightly and just press play now of course it's just trying to play it on the fly so the performance isn't going to be great but we can see we've got a move-in uh sphere and then we've got some kind of smoke trail coming out the back of it so it looks pretty good so if we bring up our graph editor now so this is the graph that's creating that effect and what we can now do is we can start to explore it and this is one of the best ways in which we can learn by frost and learn what it's actually doing now this may look a little bit scary and intimidating if you're looking at it for the first time because you're not always going to know what half these nodes actually do or mean but that's really fine because you can just play around with it you can unplug this stuff and try connecting things up but also it can be a good way of just understanding the actual graph itself and the general anatomy of it and what things actually mean bifrost is a pure data flow graph so there's always data flowing through the graph and it flows you could say downstream but essentially it's left to right so when you look at any graph in bifost you'll always notice that on the extreme right there's always this output node and everything has to go eventually into this output node this is what bifrost is doing to essentially execute all these nodes because this is visual programming so these nodes essentially represent you could say lines of code if you were to write this out in code or as a script you'd have to write various lines of parameters and string booleans and all these commands well you can do that in series of notes which is going to be a lot easier for you if you're not particularly skilled at writing scripts and you just find it easier to work in a more visual way now on the extreme left is where the there will usually be an input or any kind of input as to data coming into this graph and then once you've got data in the graph then you can begin to manipulate it or do something with it so we can see here if we zoom in the animated sphere so this is probably the basic thing that's come into the graph because that's what we want to drive this particle effect from so that's going to be the starting point and then from that we can essentially follow the trail so we can then say well there's two outputs here and all these nodes can be expanded out and there's a few options here that you can look at and uh and you'll begin to pick these up as the more you go into the graph editor using the one two three of your keyboard you can expand or collapse the nodes into different things so for example if i just uh click this node here and do one it will sli it will collapse it right down if i do two it will partially expand it and if i do three it will fully expand it would but there isn't much there to really do anything if i do it with one of these for example let's go down to one and then two and then three you can see the differences uh between the um the options there but we can follow the the lines and the connections so we've got this node here it's going into this node here very inherit and there's also an annotation here which is telling us what exactly it's doing so this is the inherit velocity that creates the push back for the smoke trail so varying it so that it's not constant creates a more turbulent trail so you've got a very basic uh explanation there and when you click it you've got some parameters that you can change around and again just try this out to try and change these values and play it back it might take a while to recache or recalculate each time but it really is a good way of experimenting and then here we can follow this one down to here where this line is going all the way down to this option in fact it's going all the way straight out so we've got the mesh coming in and also it's going all the way straight out but also along the way it's being branched into this this tree here so again reading from left to right always start on the left and always eventually end up on the right so essentially the mesh is going out here but then along the way the mesh is being used to drive and create and emit the actual effect we want it to so we've got the fog density there we've got some kind of source air which is the try different speed modes to create various trail effects again you can experiment there and then you've got this thing where the actual simulation goes into here and then there's a file caching option here and you can send you can start to set the file name and some properties as well so you can do that then you've got an option here to change the mode to enable the file cache so again it's clearly an option here to play around with so again if you may just want to noodle around and just have some fun with it even if you don't know what it is you're actually doing it can be good just to experiment and you'll begin to get an idea of just how interactive biphos can actually be but it's all about understanding the basic principles of um the graph so there'll always be an output mode node of some kind and there'll always be some kind of input coming in and then everything happens in between it and these these nodes essentially act as a series of commands and then they're finally being executed here so that was a very basic simple and high level overview orientation of bifrost for maya i haven't gone too deep into the nodes and all the details yet we'll we'll do that in the next videos and in the next video we're going to be creating our first bifos graph and our first bifrost effect thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video

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Views: 28,959

Keywords: bifrost graph, autodesk maya, 3d animation, maya bifrost, visual programming, autodesk maya 2022, maya bifrost tutorial, autodesk, autodesk maya beginner tutorial, bifrost, autodesk bifrost, autodesk bifrost tutorial, autodesk maya bifrost, autodesk maya bifrost tutorial, bifrost graph editor, autodesk maya tutorial, visual programming tutorial, maya bifrost 2022, bifrost maya, maya tutorials

Id: wg3-q4xNF1U

Length: 32min 52sec (1972 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 12 2021