Cascading explosions workflow

[crimea]

What would be the best way to set up multiple explosions scattered around? They are close enough to each other that they will affect one another somewhat, but also far enough apart that there is a lot of wasted cells if only one big box is used. What would be the best way to set this up? Make a couple phoenix simulators and connect them together somehow? Even if it was just simulating all 7 of the explosions independently, that would be fine. Don't want to spend a week sending off 1 sim every night. But again, best is probably if it's just one sim and all of them are interacting with each other...

Thanks.

[catche]

Bump! Me again, but from a personal account. Was really hoping to get to know the best solution soon, if it's explained somewhere I'll be able to follow the tutorial/docs, just need to be pointed in the right direction. Otherwise I'll just sim like 2 or 3 and rotate them to make them look a little different at least.

https://i.imgur.com/zdVmOkz.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/ups2N8k.jpg

Doing lots of explosions on a hillside like that and inbetween objects, so will be difficult to reuse actually.

By the way, why can't my work account post in proper forums? It has several phoenix licenses attached to it.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

If you don't have posting right, please drop a mail to Support and they will fix that.

Otherwise, not sure how we can help since you've got it straight - it's either one big sim or several smaller ones. In case the smaller ones happen strictly one after the other, you could use cascade simulations with a grid texture for transferring velocity like in this attached scene: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...968#post981968. Also, you can save some time by queuing simulations to sun one after the other - in Maya there is a built in option for that, and for Max you need to enable Script in the Simulation rollout and uncomment the piece that runs the next sim, substituting the name of the next sim.

Cheers!

[catche]

Thanks. The script solution sounds perfect, that's the help I was looking for. Scripting is not my forte, but I'll see if I can make it work.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, okay Hope it helps you sim all the grids more quickly - if you have any trouble with the script, please ping us, but I think it should be easy to get it going. I think there were some topics here in the forums about that too...

[crimea]

I got it working in a simple scene, but now in the proper scene it just refuses to remember the output file type and name, it jumps back from vdb to aur constantly and won't let me sim. Any idea?

Also, would be great if it stopping the sim would stop all of them, or at least make it possible to stop all of them and not make me have to sit and wait for each one to slowly begin before I can cancel it.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Huh, strange. what is the output path you set and what does it change to?

[catche]

It did eventually let me sim somehow, but the issue with not remember file type and name is still there if I recall correctly. It does remember the path, just not the name or file type.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Is there a way we could reproduce it with a scene from scratch, or can you grab a video of how the issue happens? Which Phoenix version/build are you using right now?

[catche]

3ds max 2017, phoenix 3.04. Not sure if it's reproducible, it happens in this one scene at least. Did almost no investigating to for example see if it's only this simulator box, so I know there's not a lot to go for you to further investigate, sorry about that.

I might record a video. Is there a free simple video recorder with no adware, and possibly a straight to gif output? That would be amazing to have some times.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Roger that! Not sure about gif, but OBS is pretty good and mp4 are nowadays often smaller than gifs...

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

A colleague sometimes uses ShareX for his home projects, and it can save to gif too.