.aur files - 60gb for 220 frames...is that normal?

[brit_bunkley]

I am new to Phoenix. I am slowly working my way through the tutorials.

I have been trying to create smoke in a scene (appearing randomly in the center of the scene). I simply made a small box emitter and then clicked on the "Setup a large-scale smoke sim..." button and let it go. After a couple few hours I had 140 frames. I stopped it and then clicked on restore. All 65 GB of memory were being used, plus disk drives and it slowed to a crawl. After another few hours of calculating, I had 220 frames and stopped the calculations. I looked at my cache folder and saw that it was 60GB worth of .aur files for the 220 frames. Is that normal?

[georgi.zhekov]

Hello,

The cache file size depends on its contents - the higher the grid resolution the more data there will be and the caches will be larger. Depending on the data, you can have a situation where a cache frame is between a few MB and a few GB.
Your case seems normal.

If the disk space is a problem - you can try changing the storage quality value. You can find more about it here - https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAX/FireSmoke+Output
Note that if the caches are too compressed some artifacts may start to appear.

[brit_bunkley]

My last 20 cache frames were over 1.5 GB each I can handle a few of these folders. Then I need to render and delete. The last one for just 250 frames was 125GB!

I'm a beginner and just trying it out by just clicking on the default icon "set up a Large scale Smoke Sim...." and letting it go. This last one got to about 249 frames (out of 400) after many hours and slowed to such a crawl that the stop button disappeared and I had to reboot the computer. The computer was so overloaded (with 65 GB RAM) writing to disk that I couldn't bring up the task manager.

This is going to be a steep learning curve!

Two more questions. If I want to change the background of the scene and also make the simulation object smaller and then save the scene under another name, is there a way to do so (relinking doesn't seem to work) without copying everything over including the 125Gb of cache files to a new folder?

When I copy the scene and cache files over to my laptop and I open it, the sim object is missing. Any idea why?

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

Sorry for the late answer.

If a sim needs more RAM than you currently have - probably Windows will start using the hard drive to store some of the data and this will be slow. In such cases lowering the grid resolution from the Grid rollout of the Phoenix simulator should help.

As for changing the background - this is not related to Phoenix so you should be able to that in the most suitable way for you. About making the simulation object smaller - if you mean scale - you can just scale down the simulator object using the 3ds Max Scale tool.

For resaving the scene under new name and opening it on another machine - by default the Phoenix caches are using a macro for their output location - $(scene_path) – $(data_dir)\$(scene)_Phoenix_frames\$(nodename)_## ##.aur
This macro relies on the scene name so if you change the name of the scene - Phoenix will ask you if you want to copy the cache files over. If you don't wish to copy the data as 125GB is quite a lot - you can just set the Input and Output paths of the Phoenix simulator to a dedicated location on you hard disk - something like D:\Caches\Scene_name\

If you wish to reference the caches from different machines - it's best for the caches to be stored on a network location.

For the case when the caches were on your laptop - make sure that the Input path in the Input rollout points to the correct location of the cache files.

Cheers!