Glu3D, Fluid System for Maya By Todd Widup
by Todd Widup

Glu3D is a new fluid plugin for 3DS Max and Alias Maya from 3DAliens. To be honest, the first thing I thought when I was asked to review it was why. I was going to be reviewing the Maya edition and Maya Unlimited already has a fluid system in it, then I say the price, 5. At that point, I figured well, if you need fluids, you could go with Maya Complete and pick this up…if it was good, so I decided to go ahead and review.

Installation was as simple as pretty much any Maya plugin. It goes in and creates a shelf with several buttons for you, that let you get going with it pretty quickly. One of the first things I noticed was that there is no wind or gravity, but if you happen to look in the outliner, when you create a glu emitter, it also creates a gravity field. 3DAliens got really clever with this one, and instead of recreating a bunch of their own fields, they just access the build in fields from Maya’s native dynamics system. To me, this is a brilliant idea as if the user is familiar with Maya Dynamics, they can get going with Glu in no time. Actually, I have done any particle work in about 3 years, and this was a blast to play with and test.

The Glu emitter is a particle emitter with additional properties. It also uses a nurbscircle to display where the particles are going to be emitter from. This is nice, but I wish you could scale the nurbs circle directly rather than editing the glu property Radius.

The question I bet everyone is wondering is how fast is this. Well, you can control the LOD of the mesh it creates, which is great, and from my testing, there is usually no difference between the way an LOD 20 (default) and an LOD 80 fluid sims, other than time. So, you can prototype the effect with a low LOD and then just increase it when you are ready to get it rendering, after a resim of course.

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The more complex the geometry you collide with, the slower it gets as well, but all in all, its more than fast enough for production work. All in all so far, I am really impressed with it. Now to the gripes.

My first one, and 3DAliens already knows about this and is looking to fix it, is that you can only have one surface. When Glu generates a mesh, no matter how many glu emitters and different properties you have, it only creates one. Now if you were doing something where two fluids of different densities had to collide and interact, it wouldn’t work, as there is no way to have two meshes. Like I said, they are already looking into changing this, and I have a feeling it will happen quickly.

My next one is a minor one, very minor actually, and that’s the GUI. I really just don’t like it. Its really simple and there are occasional issues with its updating when you add a collision object. If I new what mel commands they are using, I would gladly create them a new one…hint hint.

Anyways, that’s my review of it. Its really nice to see a developer taking advantage of whats already built into a package and adding to that, not recreating it from scratch again. This is a 1.0 release, and I have a strong feeling that 3DAliens is going to do well with it and the 2.0 release will probably be a very strong upgrade, whenever it is available. Their price point on it definitely makes it worth while, even for small shops.

Check out these Animations showing what can be created with Glu3D:

Todd is currently serving time in the Great White North, slaving away as a lion tame and koala groomer. He is working with a great crew that is really pushing the boundaries with their lions and koalas.