topic Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to in Bifrost Forum

"wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

brandaosa — Tue, 07 May 2024 02:13:32 GMT

I am trying to achieve an effect where I need to generate fields in a certain way.
Longstory short, field values should increase with height.

But I wanted to use this scalar to tweak individual parameters (magnitude, or frequency, in a turbulent_wind_field).

Can't find a way to connect fields to drive individual parameters so I am using two sets of parameters (YELLOW) and unsing an extra scalar field to blend (GREEN) between these two parameter sets. Which is very limitting.

Considering a node like turbulent_wind_field as example. Is there a way to control individual parameters by an array of floats or vectors, or fields?

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

morten.bojsen-hansen — Tue, 07 May 2024 08:52:58 GMT

@brandaosa Which version of Bifrost are you using? In recent versions we have wind_influence and turbulence_influence which do allow you to modulate the parameters using fields.

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

brandaosa — Wed, 08 May 2024 02:05:44 GMT

Thanks for your reply! This is 2.9.0.
I see. These nodes are to be used with solvers. I am trying to create an effect without relying on particle simulations because of reasons.
Maybe a naive approach, but using something like a turbulent_wind_field + a curve to control volume animation would be more affordable. Not the most intuitive way to build this tree, but works, except for that kind of tweaking where an array instead of a float would give more freedom to create.

Wonder if my graph could be reduced...

Didn't have time yet to explore creating nodes from Python...hope this could become more user friendly. Doing "everything" by nodes takes longer sometimes.

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

morten.bojsen-hansen — Wed, 08 May 2024 08:29:24 GMT

OK. Maybe I misunderstood your question. Is turbulent_wind_field your own node? If you want your nodes to be able to work with both float parameters and field parameters, you should leave them as type auto (not set them explicitly to float type). For more advanced uses you need to use e.g. interpret_auto_port_as_scalar which can convert inputs into arrays of floats.

There is a wind field in the grass_wind browser graph example. Perhaps you can use that as inspiration?

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

jason-t-brown — Wed, 08 May 2024 20:07:56 GMT

You can also retrieve the field from the influence thus:

Hope this helps

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

brandaosa — Thu, 09 May 2024 02:01:16 GMT

Turbulent_wind_field was there when I updated bifrost... not a custom node.
I will investigate interpret_auto_port_as_scalar node! Thanks

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

brandaosa — Thu, 09 May 2024 02:07:41 GMT

Thanks for the reply. Converting influence to fields would surely help. Let me see.

Re: "wrangling" Fields parameters - How to

jason-t-brown — Fri, 10 May 2024 13:34:11 GMT

So I had a look at what you are trying to do here, and maybe this is a very simple solution. This one is specifically driving the field by the height of the object, but it can be applied to anything you can make a property out of (so basically everything).

Hope this helps.