How do you test the effect of forces most efficiently?

[ben_hamburg]

Hey,

So I am wondering how you test the effect of forces on your scene...
I am finding it hard to visualize parameters like turbulence in a lowres sim, which I normally do a lot first to get the dynamics and scale right...
Are there any "shortcurts" or are you all just brute forcing it with a lot of overnight sims?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Did yo try this: http://phoenixfd.cgrecord.net/2017/1...e-preview.html

Cheers!

[ben_hamburg]

Ah, I have to add the forces to preview...no, I have not tested that yet. But I still have to simulate the grid in a high enough resolution so I can actually read what the forces are doing, right?

[georgi.zhekov]

No, you don't need to simulate. Just add the forces to the preview tab and make sure that the tickbox is enabled so you can see what is going on.

[ben_hamburg]

Hm, does not seem to work for some reason, I will have to test with a fresh scene...

[George Barzinski]

Make sure GPU and Mesh preview are disabled.

[ben_hamburg]

They are, I cannot test it right now with another scene, I wil get back to you if the problem persists.

By the way, I do not wanna start a new thread right now...Are there plans to fix the GPU preview? I love it and for most cases it works fine, but in my case I have issues with overlap that make it really hard to tell if some FX are working in the viewport. Since Phoenix is always drawn in front of the viewport, It gets confusing when there is lots of geometry that is supposed to be in front of it.
With my scene I am also having problems, where the gpu preview is only visible in the viewport, when the camera is a certain distance a way from it. Might be an issue because my scene is so large...

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey - we have discussed the GPU preview in an older thread. You can take a look here - https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...view-occlusion

[ben_hamburg]

Ok, thanks for clearing that up, that was what I was thinking anyways...I will turn off gpu preview to see proper occlusion when needed and use the GPu preview for the look.
Oh, one more thing: I usually have to turn off all scene lights or the gpu preview is just too bright.
Any work around for this? Otherwise I will have to figure ot if there is an easy way to turn all lights off and on again, right now its quite cumbersome with lots of lights...

[georgi.zhekov]

In the GPU Preview settings there is an Exclude button - you can disable some of the lights that you don't like to affect the preview.
You can use the V-Ray Light Lister so you can turn on/off lights for the render easy and fast.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Just a note - some of the light types have huge multipliers which do not correspond to their effect in the preview. We gotta see how to scale them down to roughly the same range as the rendering.