Don't understand setting the SPF lower limit to a value of less than 1.0

[drosselmir]

So think I understand the SPF limits a little bit more after finding some great posts by Ivaylo. I liked the one stating that Phoenix calculates its own internal SPF and that can unclamp the upper and lower limits to find the "natural" spf for your particular simulation.

However my team has found some of the example scenes for smoke and such have lower SPF limits of values like .01 Isn't that like telling phoenix to jump every 10 frames? Setting it to 2.0 I see it makes it sample a minimum of .5 frames. (frame/2) so wouldn't (frame/.01) force it to skip frames?

Also it seems to make our large scale cloud and smoke simulations look nicer :0) so I'm not complaining, just looking for more understanding and insight.

LOVING the tools guys, thank you!

Dave

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, phoenix can drop below one step per frame, that is very helpful for slow moving simulations. of course you have an output cache file for every frame, don't worry about this. the resulting animation looks pretty smooth, no jumps every 10th frame.
i have to mention something here. phoenix has a play speed multiplier, that works in a similar manner, it transports the content of the grid using the velocity data to generate intermediate frame. however the slow moving animations made by the low spf method are better than the fast animations slowed down by the play speed multiplier.

[drosselmir]

Thank you sir!

my Phoenix training continues.... So I understand for sure. And I have started playing with the play speed multiplier and using Velocity as the method, though it seems to take a little bit of a hit on calculation when playing back... and have had crashes when using that on large simulations.