mparticles

[super gnu]

anyone used these much? ive made a simple little waterfall, works fine, but even though ive saved a cache in the massfx world, and it scrubs in the viewport, when rendering it spends longer and longer each frame prepping the pflow, up to 3 mins a frame now, with a 20 second render. ive got another 700 frames to render and i dread to think how slow it will be at the end. does the cache not work when rendering? do i need to redo the cache if i reopen the file? still seems to be using it in the viewport... ive got the viewport set to display 100% so its not just cached a simplified version.. i think...


i also tried the new cache to disk operator, but it doesnt seem to do anything when i hit update. not clear from the documentation if it works with mparticles.


one thing.. would having mblur on require further pflow calcs at rendertime?

[joconnell]

Motion blur puts up memory overhead and vray calculations alright - if you've got two steps of motion blur, vray will effectively duplicate the geometry and see where the vertices of an object have moved from one frame to the next. As far as I remember they've had to jump through a lot of hoops to get the data they want out of pflow also which doesn't help. Ideally I'd try and bake it out to get it away from pflow if possible.

[super gnu]

well im not sure if ive forgotten something, but ive just tried creating a mesher of the pflow setup, with the idea to proxy it, but my mesher is static. has no particle animation at all.. is this another thing (besides cache to disk) that doesnt seem to work with mparticles? or am i being dumb?


if this is a no-go, any other suggestions? my render time went from 3 mins calc time to 8 mins in the space of 100 frames, so im likely looking at hours by the last frames.

[jacksc02]

You can cache a normal Pflow sim out but I am not sure what the workflow is with Mparticles. The documentation is lacking a lot of information

[super gnu]

ok so i tried again (same file/same settings) and the mesher worked. typical. so i exported to an animated proxy.. but.. now, even though setup time is eliminated, the render takes ages and i get no motion blur at all on the particles.

anyone suggest a workflow to get a cached set of particles that dont take ages to setup per frame ( i stopped my initial anim when it got to 15 mins setup time per frame.. ridiculous considering it took less time than that to cache the whole 1000 frame sequence in the massfx driver.) and will work with moblur?

this was supposed to be a quick hack to test something else.. didnt realise i was opening a can of worms.

[wxyz]

Did you try Supermesher?

[super gnu]

i just checked it out, never heard of it before...! ill try the demo, but i dont see any reference to motion blur on the product page..

[joconnell]

Xmesh has done wonders for us in vfx land.