Phoenix for maya questions on large scale scenes and distributed sims

[izotripp]

Hi,

Please excuse this repeated question, but the responses I found while searching the forum were old and may relate to the 3dsmax-version.

First I would like to ask what would be your best bet on how to approach creating a large scale ocean using phoenix?
Second, which sort of relates to the first question. I wonder if I can distribute calculations on a network or a farm?

Background info:
We will be using phoenix to primarily create all fx on an animated feature and we're very happy with the quick results we're able to achieve for fire/smoke/steam and small scale fluid effects, but a few shots in the film require larger simulations. I've tried scaling up the surf-scene to approximately 50m wide, increasing the cell count to around 16million to try and get some detail but it's actually not even enough and my machine is already too bogged down to see what I'm doing, if I could run this on the farm I'd be better off, any chance of pulling this off? Any other thoughts on this?

[TSR_trix]

Do you need some boat to sale on the sea, or what sort of collision is needed?
I mean, why use grid sim for the ocean surface?
If you need boat wakes and foams, I may try to do it only kind of a locally in directly where the boat is sailing. Then match it in comp with basic deformed geometry surface.
Ive made such test long ago: https://vimeo.com/43100881
My example though work only in close shots.

[izotripp]

Thanks Tommi for your response.
I've seen your example and I like it alot, well done. We will reframe and match partial sims in comp where possible.
For many shots where the interaction with the surface isn't visible, we won't sim of course.

The shots I'm referring to are wide establishing shots of a small island in open stormy sea with waves crashing in, so we need to generate foam on top of the peaks and from the waves breaking on the shoreline. Also there's a large ship approaching the island, so this very scenario might not be ideal for phoenix, just wanted to hear some thoughts from other phoenix users before going to my producer about taking a different approach...

[TSR_trix]

Sounds nice project izotripp

Yeah, in that case I would like to hear also from Ivo or someone, is it possible to create noise like movement in Phoenix water surface so we could have nice splashes and foams only by moving a ship in grid box?

[Ivaylo Katev]

i made one attempt few months ago, in this scene i used a moving geometry as wave generator. another option is to use the setup of the breaking waves sample scene. perhaps you can put some additional displacement to the water surface

[izotripp]

Thanks Tommi and Ivaylo,

I'll make some tests with geometry for waves, also I can probably get the pipeline TD to write me any scripts needed for custom emission of fluids like in the surf-scene.

As for my other questions? Regarding distributed calculations on the network? We have installed Phoenix-renderslave on the entire site, can I sim on the other machines?

[Ivaylo Katev]

there is no distributed simulation yet, we are working on it.

[izotripp]

there is no distributed simulation yet, we are working on it.

Ok, thank you.