New Sparse Simulation Technology and Rendering

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

477

Simulate only in active regions where there is present voxel data. The active region is implicitly controlled by where there’s visible stuff (e.g. smoke), or through a explicit use-controllable activity map to combine with a pre-defined region.

Currently limited to a huge 8192x8192x8192 virtual simulation space for technical and performance reasons, meaning anything that fits within a 8192x8192x8192 bounding box is supported. Further lifting this restriction is planned for post-2.0.

EmberGen 2.0 combines both more efficient memory utilization techniques and sparsity to effectively simulate roughly 10-15x more voxels when directly compared to EmberGen 1.x, how much depends primarily on the sparsity of the simulation setup, with the possibility of even greater improvements. Roughly speaking you can take the bounding box of an EmberGen 1.x setup and multiply the voxels on each axis by 2-2.5x and get the equivalent level of detail in a similar setup in EmberGen 2.0.

• A 6 GiB GPU can simulate up to 200 million active (sparse) voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 1 billion (dense) voxels in EmberGen 1.0
• A 8 GiB GPU can simulate up to 300 million active voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 1.5 billion voxels in EmberGen 1.0
• A 16 GiB GPU can simulate up to 600 million active voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 3 billion voxels in EmberGen 1.0
• A 24 GiB GPU can simulate up to 1 billion active voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 5 billion voxels in EmberGen 1.0
• A 32 GiB GPU can simulate up to 1.5 billion active voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 7.5 billion voxels in EmberGen 1.0
• A 48 GiB GPU can simulate up to 2 billion active voxels, which is roughly equivalent to 10 billion voxels in EmberGen 1.0

The maximum number of active voxels by design is 2,147,450,880, which requires roughly 48 GiB of VRAM alone too store and operate.

All numbers above are without any kind of upscaling (higher resolution for certain components, e.g. 2x smoke resolution for 1x velocity resolution). It will be possible to simulate over 8 billion active upscaled voxels, which will be able to use more than 48 GiB of VRAM. This is roughly equivalent to 40 billion upscaled voxels in EmberGen 1.x.

It is also possible to trade VRAM efficiency for performance efficiency in certain ways if you don't need to simulate as many voxels as your GPU supports.

All of this comes with a newly optimized renderer for sparse volume representations.

Unified Renderer - Improved Mesh Rendering

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

111

The time has come for us to build a renderer to unify our products and streamline development further. Over the years, each product had its own independent renderer and we have constantly replicated features across products. The unified renderer will sync features across all tools and allow us to make changes to all tools at once without issues. The unified renderer will support PBR materials, importing many meshes and fully textured environments. This will be a massive improvement over current mesh rendering in EmberGen and import limitations!

MacOS Support on M-Series Chipsets

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

391

You've asked for years, and we are delivering. EmberGen will run on compatible M-series MacOS devices.

Spline Shapes & Forces

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

163

Long asked for, finally delivered.. create custom shapes and force fields with the new spline tool in EmberGen. Export splines as JSON.

New Combustion Model

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

240

Combustion in EmberGen 1.0 is convoluted and difficult to get right with a wide array of difficult to understand parameters. In EmberGen 2.0, you have full control over how fast, big, and bad ass your combustion simulation is. Streamlined and easy to understand, more realistic combustion has never been easier.

HDRI Support for Skyboxes

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

117

Fully dynamic indirect lighting will be supported by sampling from an environment map, typically a HDRI or a simulated atmosphere.

We will support an adaptive refinement scheme, where the result is coarse (but good!) during preview and while simulating heavy scenes, and it will progressively improve itself as the simulation is paused, or during exports.

The technique used effectively gives you correct ambient occlusion (effectively average visibility) for free. The performance is generally quite good, and will always be turned on.

Supports rotating the environment map as well for fine tuning of your lighting.

Unified Renderer: Materials

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 28, 2026

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

15

We're working on a unified Renderer to work seamlessly across all products. This particular card deals with custom material features such as:

• Roughness
• Metallic
• Sheen
• Clearcoat
• Iridescence

Coarse Splat Rendering

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on March 16, 2026

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

26

We are currently experimenting with Gaussian Splats for a coarse and dirty renderer that uses about 64mb of VRAM. These are simply splats on a voxel grid with no stretching. We're investigating this as a performant method for rendering when VRAM is at a premium.

New GPU Particle System

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

345

Particles in EmberGen 1.x are performance heavy and a bit convoluted. This rewrite will serve as a new foundation for future GPU particle emitter improvements. Over 500 million GPU particles supported on a 24 GB card. Better collisions, easier controls, and a lot more boom.

Volume Caching for Scrubbable Simulations

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

258

Since the beginning of EmberGen's life, customers have asked for caching simulations so that you can scrub through them. Ask no longer, because it's coming in 2.0!

Import VDB Files

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

137

Import static and animated VDB files. The data is usable by the simulation to resume the cached simulation state, even if it is from another tool.

Inject: Fuel, Fire, Smoke, Temperature, and Velocity

Selectable Viewport Items

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Completed

The feature is completed internally. This does not mean the feature is available publicly.

101

In the viewports of all products, shapes, emitters, colliders, and more generally aren't selectable, but we are working on changing that. All items will be selectable with new gizmo graphics and shaders to go along with this new feature.

Curve controls for more parameters

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

86

The curve UI Widget is relatively new to EmberGen 1.x and was a by product of GeoGen development. There are a lot of parameters in EmberGen that could benefit from being remapped via in-node curves and we plan to investigate more use cases for these curves during and after the development of EmberGen 2.0.

Mesh Based Particles - Debris & Mesh Instancing

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

123

Sometimes you want to be able to instance meshes onto particles inside of EmberGen for debris simulations and this enables that behavior.

Animated 3D/4D Volume Textures for Games

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

81

4D Volume slice exports for games

Variable Component Injection - Custom Voxel Data (Multi-sim)

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

78

With EmberGen 1.0 there are a lot of limitations as to what information voxels can store and hold on to.

With variable component injection you will be able to store different values for fuel types, smoke color, and more to allow for multiple unique simulations and voxel types within your scene. A great use case to think of is if you have a bomb that explodes in the dirt, you would have a mix of white smoke from the bomb and brown smoke from the dirt. You may also have a scene where there are two types of fuel present that give off varying colors of both fire and smoke.

Emission from textures

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

132

We used to have it, then we didn't, now we do.. :)

Retiming Simulations & True Scene FPS Options

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

192

Users need the ability to retime simulations to match the desired frame rate, or have variable frame rates to support transitions to super slow motion, etc. Depending on your project you may need unique frame rates outside of EmberGen's default 60 frames per second. Easily switch your scene to run at 24, 25, 30, or even 23.97 frames per second if you're weird.

USD Format Support

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

110

Import and export support for USD (Universal Scene Description) files.

Wedging & Batch Processing UI

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

37

You can already export infinite variations within EmberGen within the file menu tab. We will add further UI enhancements to make variation exports more accessible.

Scriptable API

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

95

Use a scripting language of your choice to interface with, and automate our products.

Paintable Emission On Ground & Meshes

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on March 16, 2026

On Target

The feature is on track to be included in a particular release.

25

A sparse painting workflow will be available in EmberGen 2.

Volume Modifiers for Distortion

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

53

Sometimes you may want to twist, bend, flatten, bop, and sculpt a volume. Volume modifiers will allow you to do just that!

MP4 Export

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

48

Export MP4 video files directly from EmberGen

VDB Compression

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 28, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

83

VDB's are huge and compression can make them small! Maybe we'll attempt to lessen the file size burden of your VDB exports.

Bake textures for performance gains

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

37

Description coming soon

Real-Time Path Tracing

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

76

A unified real-time path tracer that is shared between all products.

DeepEXR

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

69

DeepEXR for more advanced external compositing.

Granular Solver for dirt/sand within explosions

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

75

Not guaranteed, but useful for blowing dirt, sand, and snow to smithereens.

Export VectorFields

Nicholas Seavert

Posted on April 17, 2025

Delayed

The feature is delayed and it is highly likely it won't make it into a particular release.

54

.FGA and JSON vector field support for velocities per voxel.