Problems with Simulation and render

[Lummers]

Hi,

I'v used Phoenix Fd now a few times, i have enjoyed using and the results i get quickly.

I'v just started at a new company who have purchased Phoenix Fd, (v2.25.01 Nightly (rev.1608036879) from Aug 3 2016), using with Maya 2016 and the latest Vray on Linux.

Now when setting up basic scenes, which i'v done before fine i'm getting a few problems:

1st problem:

When simulating a cylinder on fire, the sim works well for a few frames and then this happens:










After this , anything i do after, it happens again. If i rebuild scene it 'sometimes' works ok.
This also happens if i have a sim working on say, a grid size of 0.200 and then bring the cell size down to 0.100.

Any ideas?

2nd Problem:

When it does work and i leave a simulation running, when it gets to the end of the time line (length of sim needed) Maya just crashes, and bombs out?? Never had this happen before? Any ideas?

3rd Problem:

Once i have a sim and then go to render, the quality of the render is not good, and whatever i do it never looks as smooth or good as what im used to getting.

The image below shows the preview fire to the left with the render image to the right, it feels really bitty??



Any ideas on this?

Thanks

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Would it be possible to share the render settings for the first problem? It looks like it may also be a compression issue - do have your Output settings at defaults?

For the crash - we really have to fix this - would it be possible to send a scene to Support so we can debug it?

Regarding the rendering - you can change the sampler on the Rendering panel from Linear to Spherical and it would smooth out the render. If this does not help, can you go into more detail of what effect you are trying to achieve and we'll figure the optimal settings

Cheers!

[Lummers]

Hey,

Thanks for getting back to me.

For the first problem,In Phoenix the output settings are default yes.
Its quite random when the sim does this as sometimes the sim will work fine and then other may do straight away,or halfway through the sim,or like i say when i change the cell size.
Heres a pic of render settings:



For the crash, i can send a scene but its not just one scene that does, its everytime the sim gets to the end of the time line on every scene. Once sim is running, i just up timeline and it ok.

The image sent of the render did have Spherical turned on! Im trying to render just the fire with no smoke and i just thought it would be a lot smoother looking within the flames.

Cheers

[Lummers]

Also, one other question...i cant seem to get the flames in the alpha, it just seems to be smoke???

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Sounds like your Fire Opacity Mode is set to Fully Visible - check here https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/...nderFire-Color. This is 3ds max's docs, but the rendering part very much applies to Maya as well.

As for the crash - I can't reproduce it here with the Aug 3 nightly - if you just put a spehre, connect a source, set the timeline to 30 frames and start the simulation with all defaults, does it still crash?

As for the smoother look, I'm not sure what you are after, so I'll be guessing - you could simulate with a higher number of steps per frame, or if literally want to smooth out the flames, you could do so from the Input panel's 'Frame Smoothing' section.

However, it would be best if you could drop the crashing scene and the one that produces the white zones to the Support team so we can make sure those are fixed.

Cheers!

[Lummers]

Thanks for this, when i get round to rendering i will take a look at these.

In the mean time im still getting crashes whilst simulating, and getting this:

Frame 15


Frame 16


If it helps we are running Linux Ubuntu 14.04 'Trusty tahr'
Maya 2016
Latest Vray

Here is the scene file which has produced this:

[CCX]

we had a similar issue and turning the storage quality up from 14 to 20 in the output panel helped us. You might give a try and see

[Lummers]

Thanks, will give a go! Hope it does help, very annoying!!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, we reproduced it - setting the quality to maximum is the workaround indeed. Thanks a ton for sending the scene!

[Lummers]

Yep all good, thanks for your help!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Should be fixed now, the fix will go into 3.0 for Maya when we release it.

Thanks very much for finding this!