Crash At 533 million cells.

[tommygdawg]

Hey all,

I've got an issue here. I'm simulating some explosions with 9 phoenix sources and one phoenix simulator. I'm using adaptive grid set to expand via speed. It starts out with approximately 24 million cells, and about half way through the sim it gets to 533 million cells and crashes Max. I tried it a few times, closed GPU preview, etc. I've got my cell reduction for preview set to 6 reductions, so there's no lag with the UI. The settings are all pretty standard, no external forces or anything.

Any thoughts on what to do? So far, the only thing I've found is to drop the resolution a couple of times, so my starting cell count is around 6 million. I can post the Max file a little later if you all need it.

Thanks for any input!

- Tommy

[Ivaylo Katev]

the usual reason for hi res crash is the ram overload. phoenix needs about 50 bytes per cell , for the simulation, but this is the level zero, some advices for such sims:
- use adaptive grid with preliminary RAM allocation, or even better do not use adaptive grid. in both cases you can be sure that if the first frame is successful the entire simulation will be ok. i prefer no adaptive grid at all, because the non visible parts are also participating in the simulation, and because it's predictable.
- switch off the preview of all the channels, this will spare the RAM needed to load the cache file.
- try to use temperature based smoke instead smoke channel, in the most cases you can achieve the same visual appearance playing with the opacity curve
- disable the backup frames. when phoenix saves a backup frame, it needs more ram than ordinary frame, and this may be the point where the ram gets overloaded.
- close all the software greedy for RAM, for example the internet browser, you can check the ram usage in the task manager.

[tommygdawg]

Thanks, Ivaylo! Your advice was very helpful, really appreciate it