Chocolate on cookie ripples artifacts.

[jstrob]

Yes I noticed when the mesh was more low res that it was also culprit in creating the artifact and the layer is very thin on the cookie at the end.

But for now I seem to get pretty good results with frost even with my current sim. But I rendered only some fixed frame. I want to render the whole animation my render farm but it does not work. For some reason I can't render frost meshing phoenixFd particles on the farm. I am able to render it locally and the regular Phoenix mesh rendr on the farm too. rendering another frost object on the farm works too. So now I have to figure out if the culprit is Frost (but it is installed on all my nodes) or Phoenix particles...

Are the particles included in the grid cache? It looks like so cause when I open the scene on another computer I can see the particles...

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, the particles are in the grid.
in few days we should be ready with the prt file export, so it can be used as workaround

[jstrob]

All right!!! great news!!! You can be sure I will be the first one to try it! Another workaround would be to cache the mesh. But I don't have Xmesh of Supermesher yet.

[jstrob]

Paul Rondeau at Thinkbox software found out why Frost could not mesh the PhoenixFD particles on the farm (but could locally). It was due to the fact that I disabled the renderable property of the phoenixFD simulator object. I did this to make frost render instead of Phoenix. If I just reenable it, both will render. So I tried many things to work around that like selecting the mesh rendering mode and adding a delete mesh modifier, but the particles also disappear and frost can't mesh them even locally. So I chose the "atmosphere" rendering mode and in the 3dsmax environment and effects windows, in atmosphere roll-out, I disabled PhoenixFD atmosphere. That way I could render Frost meshing Phoenix particles over the farm! (When I chose the mesh mode and disable the Phoenix atmosphere, I was getting both mesh to render).

So there should be some kind of bug in the way the phoenix particles are handled. We should be able to disable the renderable property without loosing their secondary effect on the scene like the ability for Frost to mesh them.

Tonight I will render all 4 most interesting mesh types to compare them: PhoenixFD mesh & isosurface and Frost Zhu/Bridson & Anisotropic.

[jstrob]

duplicate post

[jstrob]

I finally had time to output my video and upload them to youtube. So here are 4 meshing modes I could use for meshing my PhoenixFD liquid chocolate simulation (this one with higher resolution). The four types are:

1-PhoenixFD implicite surface

2-PhoenixFD mesh

3-Frost Zhu/Bridson

4-Frost Anisotropic

So the implicit surface is the best looking in the edges highlights but the top part has some artifacts that we can't remove with modifiers because it just can't accept modifiers.

For the phoneniFD mesh and Frost Zhu/Bridson I added an animated volume soft selection and a relax modifier on top to successfully remove the top artifacts.

The Frost Anisotropic is amazingly smooth even without any modifiers but it took a very long time to mesh. I tried to use xmesh for caching both frost meshings, but caching with xmesh is also a very time consuming task that would need many licenses to calculate accross many computer (a 495$ license for every computer you would use) which makes it an expensive solution for what it does. On the other hand, rendering frost on the fly requires only one license and distribute the meshing task at the same time. The only drawback is that if you render a second time you will have to mesh again.

A problem I found in all the meshes (phoenix mesh and both frost meshes) is that we can see the polygons in the highlights in many parts even if we use insanely dense mesh. The only mode with which we can avoid this is the PhoenixFD.

My conclusion is that the best result I could achieve with this simulation would be to render both PhonenixFD mesh and implicit surface and then use masks in comp to combine the best parts of each.

I still have to try what you talked to me about in post #30 :"try with as low as possible non newtonian, and some attraction to the cookie (use the right button dialog)." But I don't see any right button dialog for creating attraction on the cookie... How do we access that?

[jstrob]

And so here is a mix (in comp) of the mesh and implicite surface.

[tsetso]

For the attraction:
Right click the cookie - Phoenix FD properties, a dialog opens.
There is a parameter called "Attract liquid and smoke". This parameter produces attractive force toward the body's surface.
You can then control the attraction further via the "Attraction effect" rollout of the simulator.

(This feature is present in the nightly builds after 13.01.2014)

[jstrob]

ah ok I have to update to the latest nightly. Thank you Tsetso

[dpolcino]

Here's my take on chocolate!
https://vimeo.com/90388544

[Fragster]

there is a technique that i forgot to mention, it was used in the previous chocolate sample (of 2.1) but in the last sample is not used because it looks smooth enough. i speak about the smoothing feature placed in the input panel. this feature modifies the input data before it is passed for rendering
see the attached image, there is a big difference

This option may be helpful in certain cases but unfortunately here it is only of limited help because you also lose a lot of detail.