Camera culling etc. for simulator

[LarsSonparsson]

It could be nice to have some kind of camera culling behavior to simulator when simulating. Not for rendering.

When I'm simulating fire with smoke, I'm using adaptive grid with smoke threshold.
Everything is pretty fast, until the smoke starts to rise high enough and the grid extends to be really big.
Like, if the highest point where camera see is in 3m, the grid has extended to 10m height or more.

So, if we could have some option to force the grid not to expand over the viewport, that could speed up some cases a lot.
Of course there should be some falloff over the view area to get a proper simulation.

-LarsSon

[Ivaylo Katev]

the idea is not bad, we should add some grid limits anyway.

[instinct]

Second the wish. With the grid beeing able to literally expand to everywhere it would be nice to have some countermeasures. Culling is a nice one.

Another one would be the ability to set the phoenix source to set Channels in a cell and not influence the sim itself. That way together with an "invert" option one could pretty effeciently limit
the simulation area using polygonal objects.

Regards,
Thorsten