Maya PhoenixFD-> rendering issues

[patrick_ortman]

I am new to PhoenixFD, and I need a little help please. I did a fire sim (really just the preset fire sim with some adjustments). It looks good, and rendered fine the in VRay Frame Buffer. It also looks good and renders when I choose a single frame to render locally. It ALSO looks good and renders when I use Chaos Cloud to render a few test frames (but ONLY when I render the frames from the start of the scene!). However, when I batch render it locally, I see nothing. No render of the fire at all. Everything else, looks good. But no fire. What am I missing, please? Thank you!

[patrick_ortman]

(maya 2022, VRay 5.20.00, PhoenixFD downloaded a few weeks ago--> but I am fairly certain this is a "me" issue and not a software issue)

[patrick_ortman]

Amended: Chaos Cloud only renders the fire when I begin at the very start of the sequence (Frame 0, in this case). Locally, I can only see the fire on frame 0 (or any frame) if I only render the one frame. If I do a batch starting at frame 0 locally (or any frame at all it seems), it does not render the fire.

[patrick_ortman]

For what it's worth, I'm still not sure why I'm having this problem. Is it a bug/feature that we can only render frame ranges from the first frame on? Again, I am new to PhoenixFD but it seems to me if it is writing files for every frame (it is, I see them in my data folder) that I should be able to batch render, say frames 50-400 locally or on the cloud. As it is, I'm missing something important because locally I cannot batch render and show the fire at ALL (although rendering individual frames is no problem), and on Chaos Cloud if I start at the first frame it renders. But if I do not start at the first frame, I get no fire whatsoever. Weird, right? It HAS to be me missing something important.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

These are two separate things.

AFAIK there was a bug in the Cloud submitter where the starting frame did not work correctly, but it should be fixed in the latest cloud client. Can you try updating to the latest cloud client and ping me if there's still an issue?

And with batch rendering it's a very different story - Maya copies the scene and it loses the connection to its simulation cache files, so you gotta browse to the cache files from the Output rollout and make sure you have a full path there like "D/Caches/cache_####.aur" and not some of the $(something) macros. Here is a page with a a bit more info: https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4M...gwithMayaBatch (the Rendering with Maya Batch section)

Cheers!

[patrick_ortman]

Thank you, Svetlin. This makes sense to me, and seems to be an easy fix/change for me to make. I'll try it and if it does not work I will let you know. Thank you again!