In this masterclass, Bifrost Product Manager Marcus Nordenstam will teach you how to use Bifrost visual programming to create a disintegration effect on production assets with UV mapping, animation, and deformation.
Note that this masterclass assumes you are using Bifrost 2.1 or later, and also requires compounds from the “Rebel Pack”, separately downloadable from Bifrost.
While creating the effect itself can be useful, perhaps the real value of this masterclass is in fact the exposition of how one uses Bifrost to do visual programming in general. This should come as no surprise as any comprehensive effect will draw on many disciplines.
Bifrost Visual Programming Masterclass – Part 1 of 2
The focus of the masterclass is visual programing, and while sections of the video are technical, the concepts should be familiar to most 3d generalists. Subsequently, the author hopes that motivated Maya artists can use this information as a stepping-stone to go beyond the built-in restrictions of Maya and achieve whatever creative purpose they desire.
Bifrost Visual Programming Masterclass – Part 2 of 2
Tasks covered and discussed in this masterclass:
• Understanding and working with 3d mesh and point geometry in Bifrost, including UV coordinates and animated geometry
• Creating and working with user-defined per-point and per-face properties
• Creating custom topology editing operations (such as making all faces of a mesh disjoint/detached) • Creating point clouds and meshes from scratch
• Doing closest point queries (point-cloud lookups)
• Creating custom compounds like points-inside-convex-mesh, or bounding-box-from-point-cloud
• Rolling your own particle solvers
• Transporting (advecting) particles with aero sims
• Attribute (property) transfer
• Using noise and randomization
• Visualizing point property values and point-cloud lookups
• Techniques for troubleshooting your graphs and compounds Course Requirements: It may be useful to watch some of the very basic Bifrost tutorials before watching this masterclass – such as the ones in the Maya Learning Channel.
