Liquid Simulator Only Creates a Brick

[zdravko_pavlov1]

Hello Kenneth,
I'm also looking at your scene now and can't find any errors, bugs, or anything that looks like what you were describing. I'm not exactly sure what your goal is and what you are trying to achieve, but let me point out a few things that might be relevant.

Inside the Rendering Rollout, the "Pure Ocean" option is enabled. This option prevents any simulation data (cache files) from being displayed. You will only see a simple (pure) flat ocean surface being generated.

Here's a snippet from the Phoenix documentation explaining this feature:

Pure Ocean | pureocean – Creates a flat ocean surface up to the Ocean Level height. It does not need loaded caches and if there are any, it ignores their content, so no simulation details will show. Thus changing frames and generating the ocean surface is very quick. This allows you to preview the behavior of the Phoenix FD Ocean Texture when Displacement is enabled or if you want to set up your texture for the Wave force. The option is available for both preview and rendering in Ocean Mesh or Cap Mesh modes. During preview, it requires the Show Mesh option to be enabled in the Preview rollout.


Then, you have an Ocean texture set as a displacement map. This offsets (displaces) the flat (pure) ocean surface. In this case, you don't need the Wave Force. It will be ignored entirely.

In case you do want to run a simulation and see the result, you need to disable the Pure Ocean option and leave the Wave Force with the Ocean texture plugged into it. In this case it might be better if you remove the Ocean texture from the displacement slot or use another instance of it with more details and a smaller scale. The displacement is not part of the simulation, so you can do this after the simulation has finished.

In other words:
1. To run a simulation and see the results, disable the Pure Ocean.
2. Leve the Ocean map into the wave force. It will push the liquid particles and generate a wave pattern.
3. After the simulation, you can refine the look with another Ocean map as a surface displacement and add small ripples if you decide that you need to do that.

I hope that this is helpful.
Cheers,
Zdravko

[kenneth_cetamanaolcom]

Aloha Slavina, Mahalo for the help! Any idea what that odd ball "brick" is in the fifth post (#5)? It sure was a pain for a couple days - especially when I am just learning the new 3ds Max! It is still there as an artifact when you hover over the Sim and I cannot select it. Fortunately, the phantom brick has not shown up in any of my other scenes. I will save that scene for posterity! Mahalo again for the help. Aloha

[zdravko_pavlov1]

Or, perhaps you do want to use the Pure Ocean and have a quick, instant wave pattern representing those 16-foot swells?
In this case, you don't really need the wave force. You can delete it, and nothing will change.
In the file you sent, the swells are created by the displacement, not by the wave force.

[kenneth_cetamanaolcom]

Aloha Zdravko, Mahalo for the help! I will try to apply your comments and citations. One thing I have learned with this new 3ds Max and plug-ins is that they are very time consuming when rendering, and I thought the earlier versions were time consuming, so your effort is greatly appreciated. Fortunately computer speeds have sky-rocketed. I have a number of modeled and animated innovations and inventions (all ocean related) that I have worked on since Autodesk's 3D Studio days. It was easy to see that as proofs, they needed to be updated and that is what I am doing now in my old age. I am really happy with the quantum leap in realism we can see in the new versions. This is and is going to be a lot of fun! Mahalo again for the help! Aloha