Selecting Bifrost nodes in the Outliner

- [Narrator] A by-frost fluid simulation consists of numerous nodes, that you must select, in order to adjust their properties. And the easiest way to select the nodes, is from the Outliner. I also recommend, enabling the display of shapes, in the Outliner. Go into the Outliner menu, and choose display, shapes, and now we see, not only the transform nodes, or the position, rotation scale nodes, we also see the shape nodes, which controls the object's actual renderable surface.

And let's go into one of these, such as floor, open it up, and we can see that the top level node just changed to an arrow, and that's a transform node icon. And below that is the shape node. So, we've done that for all of the nodes in the Outliner. Scroll down to the bottom, and we've got the bifrost, transform nodes. Open up bifrost liquid one, and inside that is bifrost liquid container one, which is the shape node.

Select that, and now, you've got access to the global solver settings, or the bifrost liquid simulation. If you select the transform node at the top, then you might get taken to somewhere else, that you don't necessarily want to go. And therefore, I recommend enabling shapes, in the Outliner. I'll select bifrost liquid container, once again. We can see that, at the very top of the attribute editor, we have an evaluation type parameter.

And, it's different depending upon the type of node we select. Bifrost liquid container one, is the global solver node. And so, it's evaluation type, is simulation. If we select one of these other ones, we'll see a different evaluation type. Open up bifrost liquid properties one, and select it's shape nodes, and it's also of the type container, but has different evaluation type, this time, property. And if we go for the bifrost emitter props one, open that one up, and select emitter props one, shape node.

It's of the type, mesh property. So, it has a connection to a polygon mesh. The bifrost container node, is our connection, to the bifrost engine. Which is a procedural framework, running independently of Maya. The bifrost container, is the proverbial rainbow bridge, between the bifrost engine, and the Maya's standard scene graph, also known as the dependency graph, or DG. The other significant bifrost node, seen here, in the Outliner, is the liquid shape node.

And this is the renderable output, of the liquid simulation. If we open this up further, you can see that this has it's own associated transform node. So, here's the true shape node, and it provides attributes to control view port display, and other very important functions, such as rendered properties, and bifrost meshing. If we scroll, in the attributes editor, of the bifrost shape node, we can see, there're all sorts of interesting options, such as the bifrost meshing.

We'll take a look at this later, in the course. In the Outliner, we see, a mesh node. And it's currently dormant, because, bifrost meshing is disabled. So, there's a mesh object in the scene, but it has no polygons. Meshing is optional. We can render the bifrost shape node, directly. This is known as rendering the level set. Where the liquid density is represented as an iso-surface. But this type of rendering is limited by voxal resolution, whereas the meshing, can produce smaller, more fine details.

That's how to navigate the bifrost fluid node structure, using the Outliner.