CoP 3: Triangulating My Research

In my dissertation I am asking 'To what extent does technological development in production impact on animation?', but I'm also addressing the use of particles in 3D software simulation that produce character for elemental effect. The reason for this is because I have an interest in visual effects and particle simulations and how they developed over the years and what technological advancements have been created to produce effective visual effects and simulations. Throughout my research I have come across multiple papers, practitioners, and studios that create particle simulations using different softwares and techniques. Here are some different ways in which technological developments in production have impacted on animation.  

Devon Penny and Nafees Bin Zafar, authors of 'Rapid: An Artist Friendly Particle System' state that "a particle system is a heavily used tool in every effects animation department in the world.", and that they have developed a new system that would allow easier use of particles, while allowing them to leverage existing procedural point manipulation tools to control simulations. (Penny.D, Bin Zafar. N, 2015) They called this new system 'Rapid'.  They've created this so that other artists would be able to create quick simulations and complex effects using Rapid.
Other practitioners have also come up with new ways of speeding up the production process using different technological developments they have created. Muller.M, Charyapr.D, and Gross.M have developed a particle-based method for interactive fluid simulation and rendering. Their thesis is based on smoothed particle hydrodynamics and uses special purpose kernels to increase stability and speed. The results are not as photo-realistic yet as animations computed off line. However, give that the simulation runs at interactive rates instead of taking minuets or hours per frame as in today's off line methods. ( Muller.M, Charyapr.D, and Gross.M, 2003).
There are two systems in which particle simulations are used the most and they are Bifrost in Maya and RealFlow in Hybrido. They are both very powerful FLIP solvers, realflow has been considered to be the industry standard for dynamics, however Bifrost is a recent integration tool added into Maya and it can now create large scale fluid dynamics. The differences between them is that in Maya, Bifrost has some fields like gravity built in so you don't need to do anything extra to get them applies to your particles. However, other nodes will need to be added like colliders or killplanes. Where as with Hybrido, RealFlows relationship editor, when you connect nodes together RealFlow automatically works out what the connections are. So if you have a daemon connected to a Hybrido domain, it makes the particles be affected by the daemon force. This makes it a nice workflow and once you get use to it, becomes one less thing to remember. Another thing different about these two systems is the actual simulation itself, in Maya it doesn't cache any of your simulation automatically, instead it caches it to a scratch location, which means if you close your project and then reopen it the simulation will not have been saved and you'd have to resimulate. On the other hand, in RealFlow, whenever you simulate it will automatically export the thing in your scene to your disk under your RealFlow project. (LeFabvre, D. 2015)