Complex pool shape

[deano]

Ok guys - I'm still working on this simulation scene but have another question. The body of water I have is pretty large (about 170' x 80') with a cell size of 3" I'm at 30mil cells and 22-40MB per frame.

Ivaylo, you mentioned trying to make the grid thin just near the water surface, but, I have a wave generator that causes splashes against rocks and I have around 20 animals jumping in/out of the water, also causing splashes and bubble trails - I want those bubble trails to follow them deep underwater around an acrylic tunnel...so the height of my grid extends to cover those high and low areas of the sim.

Is there a way to make this more efficient besides having one huge grid with a cell size of 1-1.5" which would give me 200+mil cells - for 1300 frames!!

Many thanks!

[Ivaylo Katev]

well, my suggestion was based on the scene that you sent to me. i didn't have an idea for the animals and the wave generator. it's possible that you need really all the volume and my suggestion is wrong. but 30M cells is not too big for production, you can see our ship scene has 50M cells, and we have customers with even bigger setups. well, 200M is really heavy sim, but nevertheless it will proceed with about 2 min/frame, that is still acceptable. actually the performance is very sensitive to the foam setup, you can have very slow sim/rendering even with low res grid. beware of the bubble count and the bubble rendering. i recommend you to use separate pass and compositing.
however, i still believe that you can reduce the grid size using some tricks. perhaps separate low res grid for the foam, and hi res for the water surface. never tried such a cheat, but it can help. to prevent the interaction between the grids, put them in include interaction mode and specify the objects that must interact with them.