Restrictions on how to map source?

[ben_hamburg]

Hey there,

I´m working on this Freezing Effect right now:

https://youtu.be/nQ0DC4Vf6H0

I achieved that by creating a mask in mudbox (12 udim tiles on UV channel 1), than piping that into a compositemap and revealing it with an animated noisemap (mapped via UVW xyz on UV channel 2).

Now I want to add a cold smoke sim on top.
The source discharge should follow the frostflowers animation, aka grow slowly with them, so I used the same mask as described above and piped it into the source discharge map slot.

Its hard to see the result with lwoer grid resolutions, so I´m now already test simming pretty highres and can´t quite tell til its done, but to me it looks like the discharge is ignoring the Noise map mask.

Can you confirm that this map setup should work for the discharge, or do I have to map it differently?

I´m on build 31200.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Since 3.12 we found and fixed a problem where texture chains longer than 1 map might not work correctly when plugged in many places in Phoenix - sources, volume rendering texmaps, etc.

My first suggestion would be to grab a latest nightly and check if it looks better.

Cheers!

[ben_hamburg]

Ok, thanks, that sounds like it could be it. I´´ll upgrade next chance I get.

[ben_hamburg]

So, I got the latest nightly, but I´m still not sure it works.
looks like only the noise mask is working, that is revealing the frost flower texture map.
Maybe it just looks like that, because my grid resolution is too low and it doesn´t show correctlly.

I can add another nosie map on top and then the combined in the comp map definitely works correctly, so maybe its also an issue with mutliple udims or with bitmaps in general in a comp map.

Anther thing I noticed: I tried to animate the discharge back to zero towards the end, but that doesn´t seem to do anything.
For now I just put another mask on top going back to black, to zero out the discharge at the end.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

If you plug a checker into the source, does it work as expected? If yes, then gradually building the more complicated texture setup, is there a point where it stops working? This is how you can catch where something goes wrong.

[ben_hamburg]

Actually I´m not sure its not working anymore. I just finished the higher res sim and that looks close to what I was expecting. Might have just been the lower res making it seem whiter in places it shouldn´t be...
If you say you fixed it and nobody else complaings, I´m fine with it for now, since the setup now looks like I want it too, so I´m probably not gonna do more trouble shooting to double check.

Like I said, if there is something wrong, its probably because of the multi UDIM and thats probably a pretty rare case....

[ben_hamburg]

https://youtu.be/5XMhGd_-RN4

[ben_hamburg]

There is generally some weird stuff going on with composite maps in 3ds max, with maps not showing correctly in he viewport or unloading from memory (with Pflow birthtexture etc).

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hmm, this is good to know!

[ben_hamburg]

Yeah, its terrible, because it makes it so hard to tell if the simulation is doing what its supposed to do.
Still not sure it works correctly, but I´m also making the same mistake as always: Testing too many parameters at the same time. Not a good way to troubleshoot sims...