hey guys,
I was just watching this tutorial:
and saw that there were way better alternatives to manta flow (sorry blender). my first option was to go to embergen but when I realised it was not free I didn’t buy it (I’m cheap). does anyone know of any alternatives to embergen (that are free) (and easy to run)?
thanks in advance,
Tom
Developer of EmberGen here… I don’t think you’re going to find any thing as fast and easy as EmberGen. Its worth the money and we’ve put years of work into this. 
I just saw the Embergen to blender via Octane. I think it’s the bomb. (good pun intended).
@JanganFX, you got an outstanding product. I can see this side by side in a full production pipeline with Blender.
I’m afraid Mantaflow in Blender IS the cheap/free alternative to Embergen. Houdini Indie is roughly the same price, I guess. Embergen is already pretty cheap, especially considering it doesn’t need to run within some other 3D package.
Yes, as far as free software for simulation goes, I only know of Blender. Its one of Blenders main weaknesses in my opinion meaning its one of the few features that I cant really make use of in the daily VFX work. But its also a pretty nische feature for a software to be good at.
There is another software called storm fx 0.5.0 which really has lots of potential but it’s not free
Houdini 18.5 aprentice with Nano VDB, free, most powerfull and blazing fast. Orders of magnitude faster than blender and the best looking sims, period.
Sure, free, but not fully featured in terms of render resolution and export options.
Noob question, but can Embergen simulations be rendered using Cycles without issues or just Octane? @JangaFX
You use our standalone and export VDB’s to blender. In that case you can use Eevee, Cycles, or Octane. Any renderer that supports VDB works.
Plenty of tutorials on youtube about going from EmberGen to blender.
Nice. Thanks!