Glossary

Activation (Impact). The rule for when a group of shards wakes up: on impact, on proximity, or when a trigger releases it. See Groups, activation and triggers.

Atom. The solver for sand, snow, mud, jelly, slime, lava, metal and concrete, based on the Material Point Method.

Backend. The GPU technology the solver runs on: CUDA, Vulkan or CPU. See Solver environment.

Bake. Simulating a frame range deterministically and writing the result to the cache, so it can be scrubbed and rendered. Compare with a live run.

Blaze. The solver for smoke, fire and explosions, on an Eulerian grid.

Blaze Look. The node that shades Blaze smoke and fire.

Bond (Impact). A breakable glue connection between two neighbouring shards.

Brick. A block of 8×8×8 voxels. The sparse Blaze solver only simulates bricks that hold gas.

Cache. Frames stored on disk and in memory after a run or bake. See Cache and budgets.

CFL. The Courant-Friedrichs-Lewy condition. It limits how far material may move in one substep. A lower CFL value is safer and slower.

Checkpoint. A saved copy of the whole Blaze solver state during a bake, used to resume or re-bake from a frame.

Collider. An object or surface that blocks the simulation: an Object Collider, Ground Plane or Kill Volume.

Domain. The box in which a solver simulates. Material outside it is lost.

Emitter. A node that creates particles or gas.

Graph. The BLUX Physics Graph: the node tree that holds every setting.

Helper. An Empty or curve that places a force, collider or emitter. Kept in the BLUX_Helpers collection.

Hydro. The solver for liquids.

Impact. The solver for rigid bodies, fracture and joints, based on XPBD.

Kernel. A compiled GPU program. BLUX compiles them the first time a solver runs and caches them.

Live. Running the simulation interactively as you play. Compare with a bake.

MPM (Material Point Method). The method behind Atom: particles carry the material and a background grid resolves forces.

Multigrid. A fast way to solve the pressure equation on a grid. Used by Blaze.

Phase ID. Which liquid a Hydro particle belongs to. Up to four (0 to 3).

Preset. Either a saved set of values on a node, or a saved graph in My Presets.

Production mesher. The liquid surface mesher that uses pysplashsurf. See Surface meshing.

Rebar. Steel reinforcement along a curve that holds broken concrete shards together.

Shard. One piece of a fractured mesh.

Simulation Output. The node that ends a graph and decides how the result is cached and displayed.

Solver. A node that runs a simulation: Atom, Blaze, Hydro or Impact.

Sparse. A grid that stores only the cells or bricks that are used.

Substep. One small step of the solver. A frame is made of several.

Taichi. The programming language and compiler BLUX’s solvers are written in.

Template. A built-in example scene that builds a graph and its set.

Upres. Adding sub-grid detail to a Blaze bake with wavelet turbulence, at 2x, 3x or 4x.

VDB (OpenVDB). The sparse volume file format Blaze bakes to.

Voronoi fracture. Cutting a mesh into cells around seed points.

Voxel. A cell of the Blaze grid.

Whitewater. Spray, foam and bubbles generated from a liquid.

Worker. The separate process that runs the solvers, using a Python that has Taichi installed.

Wrangle. A node that runs a few lines of your own code on the GPU, per particle or per voxel.

XPBD. Extended Position Based Dynamics, the constraint solver behind Impact.