Issues with pflow operator: Phoenix FD Force

[joshclos]

Curious if anyone else experiences this - I've been having issues with the Phoenix FD Force operator in pflow. I have a basic smoke sim pushing smoke from geometry normals and when I advect pflow particles, many of them move ahead of the smoke and get stuck outside the grid or they move slower and slower until remaining stationary. There are other anomalies like particles moving super fast and some particles still exist floating outside the grid or suddenly appearing outside the grid. I've managed to reduce much of this by caching to PRT and using magma to isolate and delete alot of this stuff but it doesn't always work so I thought I would ask about the best workflow for simple advection. Drag particles of course are an option but I really prefer to use a real particle system for the added control and the integration into other plugins like Krakatoa.

I've noticed these issues before so I tend to use FumeFX when the job requires advecting because Fume's operator is super fast and I haven't had issues with it. However, I'd like to stop using FumeFX altogether ideally.

Any advice is appreciated.
Thanks!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Would it be possible to drop us a scene which has such issues? The pflow operators are a bit rusty and definitely need some tidying up.

Cheers!

[joshclos]

Hey,

Would it be possible to drop us a scene which has such issues? The pflow operators are a bit rusty and definitely need some tidying up.

Cheers!

Unfortunately this was on a yet unreleased show so I can't send the file but I'll try to recreate the issue at home and I can send over that scene.

Thanks as always for the support!

[joshclos]

I recently had some time to set up another scene to test out the PhoenixForce in pflow and I noticed some strange behavior:

- If the PhoenixFD container is hidden, the viewport is very slow even to just orbit around.
- If the PhoenixFD container is hidden, viewport previews also take long even with a very small number of particles, however exporting an xmesh or exporting particles is much faster.
- While a plane emits velocity/smoke very fast (1000cm) the particles sometimes get ahead of the viewport smoke and occasionally get stuck, especially while near container boundaries.

It could also be useful to have an option to remove particles that are beyond the grid boundary to prevent stationary particles.

Here are the files in case it's relevant: https://www.dropbox.com/s/79rcmk6woq...force.rar?dl=0

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

Thanks a lot for the scenes. I have reproduced the issues and I hope we can have a fix for them soon,

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey Josh,

In Friday's nightlies there will be a few additions:
- Option in the Global Preferences dialogue specifying how many Phoenix frames to cache when using PFlow operators. This will speed up the operators but you gotta watch the memory usage.
- Option to delete the particles exiting the container.
- Fixed the issue where particles exiting the grid get weird velocities and some of them stop while other continue and then also stop randomly.

Please check how these work for you

[joshclos]

Excellent, thank you for these fixes!