Thursday, January 10th, 2013 Posted by Jim Thacker

Watch Next Limit’s RealFlow 2013 preview event

[Originally posted on: 22 October 2012. Scroll down for updates.]

Next Limit has posted footage of its RealFlow 2013 London preview event, which took place earlier this month.

In the video, which lasts just under an hour, The Mill’s Andy Guest outlines how the studio created the Sharmaa fluid creature for Sky1’s Sinbad TV series. (You can find an extra making-of video here.)

Obviously, this isn’t a conventional video tutorial, but Guest does run through some of the actual settings used for the shot. If nothing else, it’s an interesting insight into the way RealFlow fits into a production pipeline.

Lumiere Studios‘ Duncan Burch then discusses the company’s simulation work on recent commercials; while freelancer Stewart Armiger discusses Aardman’s The Pirates! Band of Misfits.

Updated 18 December: Next Limit has now posted a second video from the event (actually a re-recording of the original session) revealing some of the technical specifications of RealFlow 2013.

One of the most interesting is the new hy-flip solver integrated within Hybrido 2. The FLIP simulation method has previously been implemented in Naiad and Houdini, and promises faster, more stable simulations.

Next Limit also reveals that RealFlow will support Alembic not only as a format for geometry interchange, but for particle interchange, alongside Sony Pictures Imageworks’ open-source Field3D voxel format.

“This will be important [with] Hybrido 2, because the file caches will be massive,” notes product manager Gustavo Sanchez Perez.

The video also runs through other new features coming up RealFlow 2013, including the new node-based scene and batch graphs, option to network render sim previews, and improvements to the RealFlow RenderKit.

Updated 10 January 2013: Reseller Novedge has released a recording of its recent webinar on RealFlow 2013 and Hybrido 2, again presented by Gustavo Sanchez Perez. The 75-minute video includes a Q&A.

Read more about RealFlow 2013 on the RealFlow website