Problem rendering Smoke

[naik]

Hey guys,

i have problems renering smoke within PH.

Just a basic setup ( defaul values ) and you can recognize
that the viewport feedback is totally different ( regarding the smoke )
and the rendering. When i render my scene there seems
to be no smoke at all. In my viewport i can clearly see massive
smoke.

Am i missing something?

[Ivaylo Katev]

the viewport represents the content of the simulation result, it is not designed to be a rendering preview. the connection between the physical channels and the rendering is controlled by the "colors and transparency" dialog.

[naik]

thanks for the heads up!

So therefore i have to edit the parameters there?
To be honest, i think the "colors / transparency rollout/window quite unintuitive.
Seems to be a real struggle to get the desired result, but maybe i have to dig into that part more.
Is that right that the GPU preview will not show my modifications at the
color / transparency rollout?

cheers

[Ivaylo Katev]

Is that right that the GPU preview will not show my modifications at the
color / transparency rollout?

no, it will. however it does not show the diffuse color, i.e. the smoke will look black.

[naik]

okay cool.

But one thing which is really strange.

I have got a quadro 4000 and a dual 6 core Xeon.
When enabling the Multithreaded option it really seems that everything gets slower
Why is that? Also the overall performance is really not nice, but in my view
my workstations specs are good enough to get some decent
viewport feedback.

[Ivaylo Katev]

the multithreaded conservation uses a technique that gives advantages only on certain architectures, so it is disabled by default.

[naik]

okay i will definately do some decent test.
Our company is about to buy some fluid plugins and i must say
that phoenix looks nice. But one thing is really a pain in the a**
in my view compared to fume.

The color and transparency rollout ( emission )
In order to get the desired effect /color /result it's way to cumbersome and unintuitive
in my view - maybe i'm doing something wrong or maybe i have to dig into that more.
But this simple feature should be working ad hoc without studying the manual in my view

[wxyz]

which architectures support multi-threading well?

[Ivaylo Katev]

just empiric observations
one possible reason for the performance loss with multithreaded conservation is to have less available cores than the system declares. check in the task manager for background running processes consuming significant processor resources.
and another important info - the bottle neck of phoenix is not the CPU speed, it's the memory speed.