bifrostShape attributes

Render

Controls the appearance of the bifrostShape object when rendering voxels with mental ray.

Render Quality: Controls the relative size of each raymarching step.
Filter: Controls the amount of surface smoothing when rendering the voxel's isosurface. A value of 0.0 means no smoothing. Values higher than 2.0 can create smoothing artifacts.

Display

Controls how the shape is displayed in Viewport 2.0.

Display Bounding Box

Displays the shape's bounding box.

Particles

Displays the shape's particles. Use the Particle Display attributes to further control how the particles are displayed. Note that particles might not be visible if voxels are also being displayed.

Voxels

Displays the isosurface of the shape's voxels. Make sure that the viewport is set to one of the shaded modes. Use the Voxel Display attributes to further control the display.

Voxel Type

Controls how voxels are rendered in the viewport.

Volumetric renders the accumulation of the smoke channel through the volume with a transparency gradient. Use this for aero simulations.
Levelset renders the surface of the fluid opaquely. Use this for liquid simulations.

Particle Display

Controls the display when Particles is checked in the Display attributes.

Type

Displays particles as Point sprites or Sphere instances.

Max Particle Display Count

Allows you to display fewer particles in the viewport than are actually simulated, to speed up drawing and free up graphics memory while still displaying a useful preview of the overall particle flow.

Note that for very low values, the number of particles displayed may exceed the value of Max Particle Display Count because the particles get distributed as evenly as possible across the liquid voxels.

In addition, particles are drawn in batches, so it's possible to display more particles than can fit in graphics memory at one time. However, drawing and interactivity will be slower.

Note: If this value is small compared to the total number of particles, you may notice artifacts in the viewport, such as repetitive particle distribution. However, rendering is not affected.

Point Size

The size of Point sprites in pixels.

Sphere Radius

The radius of Sphere instances in scene units.

Render Particle Size (foam shape only)

Controls the size of rendered foam particles.

Min Level, Max Level

Restricts the display to particles stored in voxels between the specified tile depths. This can be useful for spatially adaptive simulations. In non-adaptive simulations, particles are always stored at level 7.

Color

Displays the selected Color Channel as a color ramp. This can be useful for previewing or diagnosing your simulation. Use the Color Channel Remap attributes to control how the color appears.

Color Channel Remap

Color Channel Min, Color Channel Max: Use these attributes to choose the range of values to map to colors. Values outside this range get clipped to the corresponding end of the color ramp.
Color Ramp: Use the color ramp to define a gradient from Color Channel Min to Color Channel Max. Vector attributes use the magnitude to drive the color ramp.
Value Ramp: Use the value ramp to modify the color channel values before applying the color ramp. This provides finer control over the display, for example, you can clamp and bias values to focus on a specific range.

Opacity: Uses the selected Opacity Channel to control opacity in the viewport. Use the Opacity Channel Remap attributes to control how the color appears. They work in the same way as the Color Channel Remap attributes.

Numeric: Displays the numeric values of the selected Numeric Channel in the viewport.
Tip: Reduce Max Particle Display Count to get a readable sampling of the displayed values.
Vector: Displays the selected Vector Channel as vectors in the viewport.

Voxel Display

Controls the display when Voxel is checked in the Display attributes.

Filter

Controls the interpolation used to render voxels in the viewport. Tricubic gives smoother results than Trilinear, especially for aero simulations.

Quality

Controls the relative number of samples for drawing voxels in the viewport.

Diagnostic Color

Toggles the display of channel colors for diagnostic purposes.

When this option is on, you can select a Color Channel and use the Color Channel Remap options to adjust the color ramp. They work in the same way as the Color Channel Remap attributes for particle display.
When this option is off, the viewports show a preview of the fluid's surface level-set with lighting.

Clipping

Clip Input Mesh lets you preview a slice of the bifrostShape using a mesh object as the clipping boundaries. This is useful for visualizing what is happening in the interior of the simulation for diagnostic or other purposes.

Tile View

Displays the range of voxel resolutions in your simulation as a color-mapped tile tree. This is useful for visualizing what is happening in the interior regions of the simulation for diagnostic purposes, especially when Adaptivity is on.

See Preview Bifröst vowel resolutions using Tile View.

Display

Enable: Toggles the tile tree display on and off.
Min Level, Max Level: Use these controls to set the range of resolution levels you want displayed. There are eight display levels starting from very coarse (level 0) to fine (level 7). These levels correspond to the range of voxel resolutions in your simulation.
Focus Level: Lets you focus the display on a specific level between the set Min Level and Max Level range.
Focus Falloff: Sets the width of the focus by controlling the transparency between each level displayed. Increasing this value makes it easier to see all display levels superimposed. A value of 0 displays only the level set by Focus Level. A value of 1.0 displays all of the tiles that are defined by Min Level and Max Level.

Clipping

Clip Input Mesh: Lets you use a polygon mesh to set clipping boundaries of the preview. This lets you isolate a slice of simulation for investigation.

Color

Use the color ramp to set the start and end colors for the visible tile levels. Color is driven by voxel resolution. The ramp's left most marker sets color for Min Level and right most marker sets color for Max Level.

Bifrost Meshing

Enable: Generates a polygon mesh for the bifrostMesh object.
Droplet Reveal Factor: Creates and preserves detail around splashes when generating and smoothing the mesh. Lower values result in smoother meshes, while higher values give more small, high-frequency detail.
Surface Radius: The radius of each particle blob used to create the surface, in multiples of the Master Voxel Size.
Droplet Radius: The radius of each droplet, relative to the Master Voxel Size.
Kernel Factor: Controls the width of the surface smoothing kernel. Smaller values give sharper features and higher curvature in the resulting mesh. Larger values result in smoother features.
Smoothing: The number of smoothing steps performed on the mesh.
Resolution Factor: A scaling factor for adjusting the particle resolution before the mesh is generated. Higher values create more high-frequency detail, but take longer to calculate.
Hole Kill Threshold: Increase this value to eliminate meshed holes in the interior of the fluid. Such holes can occur especially when using high Resolution Factor values with spatially adaptive simulations.
Flip Face Normals: Reverses the order of the vertex indices in the triangles of the final mesh so that normals are flipped.

Clipping

Clip Input Mesh lets you preview a slice of the Bifröst output mesh using a polygon object as the clipping boundaries. This is useful for visualizing what is happening in the interior of the simulation for diagnostic or other purposes.

Channel Transfer

Velocity Scale: A set of XYZ scaling factors used when transferring the velocity channel from the voxels to the vertex color map on the mesh.