Hi-
I have a complex pool shape for an animal exhibit, with curved acrylic, rock, and an underwater acrylic tunnel. How can I have (a) the water confine to the shape of the outer edges and (b) not be inside the tunnel?
I’m finally getting some usable results with Phoenix and am really excited, but defining the complex shape of the water is pretty important.
Thanks!
not sure that understand the question, the liquid fills any shape, just create the geometry of the pool and use the initial fill up option. is the tunnel above the water?
The pool shape is defined by multiple rocks modeled individually, a non-flat bottom and some curved acrylic panels. I’ve tried to Boolean copies of all the various shapes together including a solid tunnel shape to make a solid shell but the water still forms to the shape of the Phoenix rectangular grid. I’ve (hopefully) attached an image showing what I mean.
The tunnel is below the water line so it would be great to not have any water be inside.
Perhaps I need to make a singular low poly object that is close to all the various rock forms rather than trying to attach/boolean them together.
Thanks!!
no need to make union of the different parts, phoenix reacts with each body in the grid. i suppose the default inscribed voxel mode combined with low resolution is to blame. increase the resolution and/or change the voxel mode to circumscribed
Thanks for the fast replies!!
I will run another sim with the circumscribed voxel mode as you suggest shortly.
Attached are my settings so far - do you think 30mil cells (3" cell size) for a sim this size is too small? From my settings, are there any changes you might suggest? I’m rendering 500 frames now and it’s looking good - could use more foam and splashes. I ran a sim the other night that crashed at frame 78 of 500 with .aur files of 2GB each…so I’d like to avoid that is possible 
Thanks again for your assistance!
(sorry if attachments double post)
Use resim for a particles, u can save huge amount of time
Will do, thanks - love saving time!
I’ve not used this but need to soon - you run the whole sim with splash and foam turned off, and then switch them on and click re-sim?
the image looks promising
ok, about the tunnel
you can just “dig” it in the render setup.
see the attached scene, it illustrates my suggestion how to manage this.
1. no need to cover the deep water with simulation, the surface is the important one, you can reach much bigger resolution if the simulator is as thin as possible.
2. render in cap or ocean mode. this will produce infinitely deep water, and you can put the bottom geometry where you want. if you use ocean mode, the land will hide the infinite surface extension, but you still can use part of it if no simulation is needed, if the entire pool needs to have some simulation, render in cap mode, this is the same as ocean, but without infinite extension. the water in both the cases is infinitely deep.
3. do not simulate the tunnel, just create a cylinder and assign a vray material with ior=0.8 (or less if you want to make it more visible)
why 0.8? the air ior is 1, but the tunnels have walls that are are made of glass. this changes the appearance significantly, because more light is reflected at the glass-air interface. you can spare efforts to make the glass corpus using this little cheat with the ior option of the “air” material. if you prefer the honest setup, create cylinder that represents the air, create a tube with thin walls that particularly overlaps it, and set ior=1 for the air and ior=1.6 for the glass tube.
pool.zip (26.5 KB)
Thank you for your input! The tunnel solution is great.
I am still not able to stop the water at the inside edge of the tube - in the scene you sent, the tube represents a glass edge we have in 2 locations of our design where people can see underwater. So in your scene, if you make the tube Radius2 something like .76m the water is not contained inside the tube (which is what we need) but rather is the shape of the simulation grid.
Is there a way in your scene to only have the water inside the tube? I tried selecting the tube as a Gizmo and Invert Gizmo in the Rendering rollout but the water is still the shape of the grid.
I think I’m really close to being happy with the results, but I do need to solve how to keep the water inside the pool along the tube.
I also tried replacing your tube with a cylinder (then edit poly - delete top face - add shell modifier) to create a solid “cup” shaped geometry and use that as a Grid Gizmo, but that didn’t work either…
i see.
the initial fill up option fills the entire container, there is another technique that allows you to fill arbitrary part with liquid.
however, i still recommend to use rendering tricks to create the areas that must be empty.
the tunnel method will work even if you put the camera inside (perhaps the normals must be flipped, not sure), but there is another option to cut off pieces of liquid. you can render in implicit surface mode and use the render gizmo option.
Things are looking pretty good - thanks for all your of help!
I noticed that render times went from around 12min to 50min using implicit surfaces…I take it given what it’s trying to do, that’s normal? I may have to find a work-around or try come up with a “render trick” that you mentioned
Using the script to render when the sim has completed is great!! Is there a way to send each frame to a renderfarm machine once that frame is done calculating?
yes, the implicit surface is slower. you can use mesh mode and boolean operator as alternative of the gizmo, but i think it is slow too.
about the scripting, i think the "DOSCommand " is the magic word you need. newer tried it, just looked in the help right now. it allows to execute system commands as if you type them in the cmd console. try with
doscommand “copy full_source_image_path \\dest_machine\dest_path”
try first in the listener, to see the result immediately, it’s not tested and you have to adjust it.
Ok thanks - scripting is out of my league, so we’ll try work around it.
I appreciate all your timely assistance and advice! I’ll try share the final results if we can…
Ok guys - I’m still working on this simulation scene but have another question. The body of water I have is pretty large (about 170’ x 80’) with a cell size of 3" I’m at 30mil cells and 22-40MB per frame.
Ivaylo, you mentioned trying to make the grid thin just near the water surface, but, I have a wave generator that causes splashes against rocks and I have around 20 animals jumping in/out of the water, also causing splashes and bubble trails - I want those bubble trails to follow them deep underwater around an acrylic tunnel…so the height of my grid extends to cover those high and low areas of the sim.
Is there a way to make this more efficient besides having one huge grid with a cell size of 1-1.5" which would give me 200+mil cells - for 1300 frames!!
Many thanks!
well, my suggestion was based on the scene that you sent to me. i didn’t have an idea for the animals and the wave generator. it’s possible that you need really all the volume and my suggestion is wrong. but 30M cells is not too big for production, you can see our ship scene has 50M cells, and we have customers with even bigger setups. well, 200M is really heavy sim, but nevertheless it will proceed with about 2 min/frame, that is still acceptable. actually the performance is very sensitive to the foam setup, you can have very slow sim/rendering even with low res grid. beware of the bubble count and the bubble rendering. i recommend you to use separate pass and compositing.
however, i still believe that you can reduce the grid size using some tricks. perhaps separate low res grid for the foam, and hi res for the water surface. never tried such a cheat, but it can help. to prevent the interaction between the grids, put them in include interaction mode and specify the objects that must interact with them.