Clarification on short tips for simulate Ocean with foam and render it.

[lzmihich]

I am searching everywhere , for tips while I wait for a tutorial.
Ivaylo, I need more info , please , you are a Genius , but I am angry at you , nothing personal, everyone knows Genius are unbearable:

1)When I try to use , let's say , the same scale of the submarine scene , exactly the same Max units , I have a grid that is 100 times smaller. Why is that?, than my system unit have to be 100 inches instead of 1, weird.
You said you didn't use a source for the submarine file.Does Ocean simulations work without a proper source ? if not Why you always hide it from us ? and use a script or something only a developer or expert would understand ?
2)You have explained How to setup the foam with 0 birth rate on the liquid simulation and use foam on hit on the splash with value 1, but what about other splash settings ?because if I use birth rate =0 on the splahes
,for me , it is not generating splashes or even foam at all, instead I have to give it a birth rate of 90 or more !I am also confused on How it is supposed to be the size mutiplier at the foam/splash shader.
I think this randomness can be very confusing to a newbie, and everyone is a newbie while waiting for updated tutorials .We are having a hard time trying to make the simulations work for us.
3) Also it is very difficult even knowing How to tweak the Ocean and displacement , wind wave etc... to avoid clipping , 70% of my files have clipping returning and hauting me, and it is almost a miracle not having an ugly box formated inside our Ocean spoiling the realism,and finding the right value for the ocean is time consuming , but possible... not always.What can you do from the developer's side to save us from this enigma misery?!
4) Most importantly, and again forgive my ignorance, which exact button or slider do you mean with high subdivs on the image sampler.
Please don't forget to be specific ,I am using point , not splashes for my splash shader, but please, do you mean refractive index ?, bounces or what ?
Please be patient as We don't know Phoenix 2.1 yet. If you want to avoid all this questions, I beg, record a Camtasia video , sing for us, you have the know How right?, takes half hour at the most,
I know already you Guys are working on it, although ,I Can't understand why the process is that slow.
I wanna remind that usually a new service pack, comes with tuts, and the manual is just info, dictionary like.It is just not enough !

[Ivaylo Katev]

i'm surprised, you were the first one who posted a video with ocean.
1 - how you make the grid? in the most cases i'm drawing it by hand, and it's size is the needed one by default. the initial cell size is 1, so after the grid is created, you have to adjust the resolution to some reasonable value.
the submarine uses the initial fill up option, see the liquid panel. no script or sources are involved.
2) you can start using the default splash settings, in the most cases the only parameter that need to be changed is the birth rate.
3) yes, the clipping seems to be a serious problem, in general just keep the camera high enough or decrease the wind speed. i promise we will remove the clipping in some future version
4) the image sampler is part of vray, it's not phoenix option. you can find more info here
the totorials are going slow, because for each test we need one or two days to see the full result. there are many small details that are important, and we discover them during the scene setup and rendering.

[lzmihich]

Thank you for the prompt reply.
I was the first to submit a vídeo , and I managed to have a nice sim,all right, doesn't mean I am already making the most of Phoenix 2.1, I lack experience.
1)No problems making the grid , the problem is with scale discrepancy, as explained above
I misundestood that and I was using a box a source and not initial fill, like the first big water simulations before 2.1 version.this is understandable as I am still adapting right ?
2)is it ok to use a birth rate bigger than zero? ,but don't know why it is so low on the submarine scene, now I understand it is all about the scale.
3)Good news, Hope next versions will be clippingless, managing my horizon is very hard right now.
4) I suspected , you were talking about Vray settings, but I got confused because in the submarine scene you use the very low , the 4 default value for the DMC adaptive.
for the tuts ,I Hope the tests go well and will keep my fingers crossed.

[Ivaylo Katev]

well, it's my bad when i assume (wrongly) that something is obvious. when you asked me about the source, i looked into the scene description in the help and really nowhere is mentioned that initial fill up is used.
thank you for the questions, because they are helping me to find the hardest point in understanding phoenix.

[lzmihich]

Yes Ivaylo.
I am actually very grateful for all , and I am glad that my sometimes ,(very) silly doubts can help in someway and give you some feed back , at least !
When I look back , do seem pretty obvious, as no source is mentioned anywhere, and Ocean is almost an independent module .