Distributed simulation, any ETA ?

[bigbossfr]

Hi,

We are evaluating Phoenix FD 3.
I want to know if the distributed simulation is in development or not ?
We are a renderfarm here, and the idea is to render simulation as fast we can.

Thank you,
Damien

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Distributed rendering works, distributed simulation in terms of calculating One scene over Several machines simultaneously is in development, but it would need a very long time in order to be made useful. Right now, if simulating a scene over 2 machines would produce 20-30% speedup, one could just as well optimize his obstacle geometry, turn off any preview during simulation or make sure the caches are written and read from an SSD, and this would yield the same performance gain on just a single machine.

With 3.0, there are new simulation licenses that are just a cheaper way to run many scenes on different machines without having a full Phoenix license on each one. We are working to wrap this and make it more user friendly so that you could run copies of one scene with varying settings on several machines a pick the best looking one, or split a smoke/fire simulation in slightly overlapping pieces and send each to a different machine and then blend them together at render time, given each piece does not have a serious dynamics interaction with the neighboring pieces. Or, last but not least, you could just use simulation licenses to run setups on other machines while you are preparing the next ones. All this has to be scripted for now, but I hope that in the coming weeks we would be able to prepare some wrappers with a user interface where one can more easily manage such tasks and submit them directly from 3ds max using Backburner or Deadline. This will eventually be put up on the docs site here: https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...ation+Licenses

Cheers!