floating object on ocean surface

[Truffi]

A barrel is floating on my beautiful phoenix ocean.
Currently I am using a meshed version of the ocean simulation and a conform space warp and an attachment constraint to achieve that.
It works but the mesher slows down the max scene considerably. I have a feeling that my workflow is too long-winded.

Is there any way to get a helper bound to the Phoenix surface..?

[Ivaylo Katev]

for now you can use particle flow operators test and force to make particle to float. we are planing to add floating/moving of the objects for 3.0, so if you are not in rush you can use directly this tool in the nightlies when it is ready for testing.

[Truffi]

With Phoenix Force I could get the pflow particles attached to fire and smoke, but not so to an ocean surface. The problem is I found no way to get them in the right position and then get "locked".
Might be helpful to have a feature in the Phoenix Birth operator, that generates Pflow Particles on the Initial Fill Up level. They would then need to just move with the Wave Displacement. There is Temperature, Smoke or Speed Channels, but they don't seem to do the trick for the ocean. Maybe I missed something but in the current build's Force or Birth Operators, at least there are no settings referring to this.

[Ivaylo Katev]

you can adjust the birth position by hand, and then the force operator will keep it locked, but as you said the displacement must be added, that is much harder. there is a displace force that can be used, but i suppose it is not a vector oriented and will not produce the proper shift. seems like your solution with the conform space warp is the best one, if the mesher slows down the calculations, you can use cap mode (it is faster) to precalculate the floating object positions and then turn the mesher back to ocean mode and render.

[Truffi]

Indeed - plus what maybe also improved the performance was the effect of two modifiers: Volume Select and DeleteMesh applied to the PhoenixFD Simulator with the ocean. Only the area of relevance within the Volume Select's Gizmo Box is not deleted and will be meshed. I ended up with two versions of the sim a low-Res simulation for the Conform Space Warp and a high-res copy using the same OceanTex, which interacts with the floating object. Not exactly straight workflow but it seemed to increase perfomance a great deal for floating objects.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/...oenixOcean.gif

[Ivaylo Katev]

looks good, hopefully in the future this will be achievable with few clicks