Best Practices for Clouds

[Georgi.Zlatarev]

Joelaff hey I think we forgot to mention that the orthographic views in 3dsMax should work properly now. Next on the list of related tasks is to make the views preview simultaneously.

Regards.
-Georgi.

[Joelaff]

Oh, awesome. I will get a new nightly. We just wrapped up the big project. Phoenix worked quite well, and all your fast updates really helped. Thanks, Chaos.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Woohoo! Great news!

[3dwolf]

(A while ago I had to work with tons of static clouds and at some point started to link every cloud to a spline-object which was handdrawn to show the shape of the cloud and on a different layer an optimized snapshot of the cloud's meshpreview. This way I was able do hide the grids but had reference for moving them around. Only unhid them before rendering.
Nice to see the progress for this subject . Most workarounds are nice to leave behind.)

[Joelaff]

Cool idea, 3dWolf.

The improvements in the nighties are great, but it is still very slow and cumbersome with more than a handful of Phoenix or volume grid objects in the viewport.

We wrapped our project OK, but it was a little painful at times. Had to turn the grids on and off to speed things up.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey guys, an update - in the latest nightlies, the cache converter can increase or decrease the grid resolution of caches:

cache_converter.exe -srcfile "PhoenixFDLiquid001_####.aur" -dstfile "PhoenixFDLiquid001_res_####.aur" -gridresscale=2.3

The new option -gridresscale will decrease the resolution if you use a value below 1.0, and will increase it when using a value above 1.0.

Note that increasing the resolution will simply scale the grid but will not add any extra detail.

Cheers!

[Joelaff]

Awesome! Thanks,