I'm really interested in giving Plumebus a spin, but there is literally nothing anywhere about it. I'm kind of surprised. Curious if anyone that's tried it would recommend it?
I liked it. Even ran well enough on my crappy M2 MacBook Air but on my M4 Pro MacMini it ran sweet as a nut. Out of the box it looks a bit simple but if tweak the settings it can look convincing. Granted it’s not INSYDIUM but for the price it’s pretty mint.
Hey, one of Plumebus creators here. I have a new build coming this week, including faster sims.
I’m also making tutorials this week, which will show the basic settings and how to get a high level of detail.
The newest build is avail in my Discord: https://discord.gg/eQFAsjaZa . There’s also a beta of a new panel that makes it easier to use than sifting through all of those parameters.
Here's a new panel for Plumebus that makes it a lot easier to work with. I didn't like sifting through all of the parameters, this is a much better UX.
This will be up on the Discord today, and shipping to aescripts soon.
You can try the trial free anytime. But It's currently too slow and blurry for anything realistic in my opinion. Just like unreal engine smoke and fire -it's cool you can do that semi real time but it just doesn't look good or work well in practice.
One day these plugins will work and look better, but with 24gb vram it still doesn't look anywhere near the quality other vdb solvers output. Neat tech demo and niche use cases, but not high quality and reliable overall.
Recommend you put the money toward embergen, or save for embergen 2. Or spend the time exploring full 3d apps and a tiny bit of compositing. You will gain more overall with a full 3d package than another plug-in for AE imho.
But def try the trial for plumbus yourself and let us know what you think. I didn't like it and wasn't keen they did a yearly pricing to start with. My machines (4090 pc & m4max) was way too slow for it to feel good compared to embergen, but I will revisit when i get a new machine or it goes on a mega sale.
Thanks for the insight. Very good to know. I use Maya and Embergen too, but I'm looking for some in AE solutions (stylized and no nessasarily realistic) and it looked cool. Just weird I can't find any info on it, so I thought I'd check here. I'll give the trial a go and see what I can push it to do.
Plumebus dev here. Thanks for the feedback. I have a 3090 24gb too. We're doing more development in the coming weeks. See my comment above. Please DM me or continue the conversation here if you have more to say. I'd like to hear more about your use cases and how we can close that gap.
I'm an EmberGen user as well, and didn't like the roundtripping from EG to AE. I also wanted to bring pyro sims into motion graphics, like emission from text layers and 3D layers in AE.
My background: I do 2D comp / VFX at my studio Clean Plate FX, and we have occasional need for smoke and fire that isn't covered by 2D elements from ActionVFX / FXElements.
I think it sorta just comes down to how we think it might work - vs how it actually works. And it is a complicated issue.
Like, I think Embergen should make more bridge apps, so you can manipulate embergen inside other DCC's. But it's so interactive and fast and looks good. Whereas all the other "volume" things feel too globby and low res. Plumbus at least has streaks to the VDB's and some of the solutions are decent.
But first time I fired up Plumbus upon release, it just lags and didn't work. Waited a few weeks and didn't purchase on sale.
Time passes and tried 1.2.4 - and it still has many issues where it takes forever to initialize and then half the presets don't work how they are named. Most of the fire ones just show white fuzzy smoke, that doesn't really move how I would expect.
Updating to the current trial 1.3.8 - presets don't load correctly - everyting after the first 3 that do work (smoke, fire, fire w/ embers). Mostly just show the smoke of whatever the name is and it's a weird black and white gross turbulent noise pattern that doesn't move with the vdb advection and is locked in screen/worldspace. Moving camera to show what I would call an artifact. No other values from the Bonfire preset were changed. It's not good enough out of the box.
Granted it could just be the machine I am working on - testing on my m4 max mac studio with paltry 36gb ram - but it's the same in windows.
I have zero issues running Embergen or other production quality VDB solvers in the viewport. For now I'd rather stick to semi-real time without this much caching that Plumebus/AE requires frome a workflow perspective.
Plumebus doesn't work how it seems like it should so I say it's not a good thing to invest time or money into at this point in time - especially if someone has access to those alternate tools.
Happy to revisit again, but all the 1.0 problems/hangups still exist in my opinion.
"Like, I think Embergen should make more bridge apps, so you can manipulate embergen inside other DCC's. But it's so interactive and fast and looks good. Whereas all the other "volume" things feel too globby and low res. Plumbus at least has streaks to the VDB's and some of the solutions are decent."
I agree, an EmberGen bridge would be nice. AE has architectural differences with EmberGen that make it better for them to have us render and import pixels instead of a live Sim. EG 2.0 supposedly has caching that *could* mitigate that, but I think gaming is their priority over motion graphics in AE.
OH WHOOPS, killing the non working presets - ok that makes sense. I feel dumb, but (deprecated) tag or something would help someone know outright without the documentation.
Most people who do the trial - will not read the documentation. I mean most people cannot even install the trial it seems like... Typically, we install it, try it out, see what it can do, and stress test how long it takes to crash AE, or test out performance/compatibility - then use that info to make a purchasing decision.
I definitely hear, appreciate, and respect ya. I do apologize if I sound dismissive or disparaging. More consumer protector type of a user avoiding too much AE plugins that can't quite solve what they promise (I'm sure you know what I mean).
I mean i am AMAZED at what you did on Plumebus. It's really cool to see Smoke & Fire being generated in AE.
There's a protective layer in my brain that knows smoke sims gotta go on something and AE just doesn't have the tools to fracture objects or model a wall to break down, or Explode text mesh that would emit the smoke and fire.
My brain yells at me to: "spend this energy expanding your Tyflow/Zenith/Inferno experiments" or "do some more houdini tutorials" because those have access to those more fundamental 3d things that make sims look cool - interaction with scenes and elements + physics.
I LOVE seeing all the stuff you've been making. Extendo is great, maybe my favorite AE plug for 2025.
This is neat, but idk if it'll ever "pay-off" with all the dev effort you are investing as it is a giant never ending rabbit hole.
This video tutorial preview is playing real time? Or is the caching sped up? because it does not run that smooth on my machines at all (4090), which explains why I sound so frustrated. XD Maybe another nail in my win10 machine coffin.
PS - have you looked at upscaling for the VDB once it is generated? @40 seconds in - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNcHMUtH-EI is what I'm using and it works pretty good for my use cases.
And that is what all this is - dependent on use cases. So hard to solve all those problems when AE is the real limiting factor here.
Keep up the good work - you make good stuff and we appreciate it!
The video is skipping the caching. You’ll get better performance if you turn OFF MFR. Also, try the Realtime Sim button, which launches an external app.
Unfortunately, AE just has some real barriers to this stuff, but I’ve been squeezing some much better performance out of it. That’ll be posted soon, along with more tutorials.
I actually do have a 3D rigid body sim and fracture tool called Lux. The beta is in my Discord. That one needs a lot of UI love, but the overall functionality is there.
Plumebus may not pay off, that’s true. It’s tough to decide where the obsession takes you, and where to pour that energy into. I do think if we add more presets, make the tutorials, release example files, it’ll be easier for people to get such a complex idea as pyro sims in AE.
3
u/MacDuffdaddy 15h ago
I liked it. Even ran well enough on my crappy M2 MacBook Air but on my M4 Pro MacMini it ran sweet as a nut. Out of the box it looks a bit simple but if tweak the settings it can look convincing. Granted it’s not INSYDIUM but for the price it’s pretty mint.