vray / Phoenix FD versions compatability

[baro]

A first grader question - is "Phoenix FD 3.03.00 V-Ray 3.0.... " suppose to be fully comparable with "V-Ray 3.50.04 ...." or V-Ray 3.0 means just V-Ray 3.0, not V-Ray 3.xx.xx?
Reason I'm asking is: I reopened a scene which, I recall, used to rendered for less than 2 min. now, with the above mentioned versions it takes 8+ min. I think before it did use even half of the 24 gb ram (@ 800x450 res). Now the 24 gb are not enough. is there a way to find out how much more ram I need to add to this old machine to render a scene without scratching* the hdd?

cheers
pl

[George Barzinski]

Hi,
can you give more information about the scene and the versions of software you use. In general, this issue is not related to V-Ray. So, If you have an ocean try to decrease ocean sub divisions.

Cheers!

[baro]

sent the scene to support. ticket#944574



with ocean subdiv=8 scene renders for 5m37.5s (right)
with subdiv=2 render time 4m25.2s (left). not a whole lot of time saving for much worse image quality

please let me know do you see anything wrong with the scene/versions/sim or render setup.
any comment, recommendation will be appreciated (other than "buy a new computer"

cheers
pl

[George Barzinski]

Hi,
there is nothing suspicious in the scene. So, I'll give you some recommendations:

Currently, the scene uses 16 - 17 GB RAM. To minimize this use you can:
- decrease ocean subdivisions and increase Level of Detail in Phoenix Ocean Tex. This is just to optimize RAM usage.

Optimize render time:
- If the resolution is low or the camera is far away from the object you can switch bubbles shader mode from Bubbles to Points. Sometimes Point mode is more appropriate than Bubbles (it's faster and gives you nice result). Additionally, you can change their size.
- Increase Light Cache Speedup
- In render setup, GI tab, set Primary Engine to Brute Force
- In Environment and Effects (8 - shortcut key), Atmosphere roll-out select PhoenixFD and then go to PhoenixFD Atmosphere settings and check Use Probabilistic Shading. If you use GI, experiment with GI Samples. Find the approciate setting for the scene. If the parameter is to low or too high the render time would increase.

Hope that would help!

[baro]

Thanks for the tips George,
those tweaks cut rendering time in half.
now foam is not that... foamy now but perhaps playing with size multiplier will help

cheers
pl

[George Barzinski]

You are welcome. And, yes... the foam would be less foamy but it's quick and could give you clear idea what's going on. For the final production rendering, you could switch back to bubbles of course.

Cheerz!

[vanpixelguy]

Just curious. Did you get an answer regarding which versions of V-Ray a given build of PhoenixFD is compatible with? That was your original question.

I'm interested because we have productions using version 3.40.03 of V-Ray for Maya 2016.5 on Windows but the FX artists want to use version 3.10.00 of PhoenixFD for Maya 2016.5. I know that our version of V-Ray is old, but production is "locked" onto that version until the show finishes. At the very least we're testing the combination. I did look through the documentation and didn't see any notes on compatibility. If you found out anything please let me know.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

It would be great if we could provide you with a list of things that are definitely not working with Phoenix and older V-Ray 3 version, but unfortunately we don't have such compiled data at the moment.

Theoretically everything up to V-Ray 3.0 should be compatible with Phoenix, but in practice the farther back you go, the more things have a chance to not work correctly. This would however most likely affect IPR, vrscenes and maybe some textures. Production rendering should function okay. If you find any issues, it would be best to just ping us and we'll figure it out

Cheers!

[nikola.bozhinov]

Hi,

One major change in Phoenix FD 3.1 you should know about is the format of the .aur cache files. You won't be able to load such new cache files into the Volume Grid of V-Ray 3.4.
However you can still render them using the Phoenix FD Simulator node or you can still use the Volume Grid if the cache files are exported as .vdb. The changes in the .aur file format were first added to Phoenix FD nightly builds in the end of January and builds after the changes will still open files in the older format without problems.

[vanpixelguy]

Thanks. I was expecting that such a new version of PhoenixFD would not work at all with a 2 year old version of V-Ray, but this shows what we are finding from our testing, that things seem to be working

1) I'll let our FX team know about limitation of reading new cache files into the VRay 3.4 volume grid. I think the benefits of the new release and the existence of a workaround outweigh staying on the previous release of PhoenixFD we were using.
2) When installing, I did notice that openvbdio_phx.dll no longer ships. This used to get installed into the V-Ray folder. I am assuming now that VDB is now internal and we can discard the old copy of openvdbio_phx.dll that's sitting in the V-Ray area.

Take care and thank you for the quick response.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey, yes indeed - the openvdbio_phx DLL was merged in the main Phoenix DLL and maybe the same will happen to the Field3D DLL at some point in the future, and there will be less files to think about

Cheers!