Hi all,
I’ve been playing around with Phoenix 3.0 and it’s been amazing.
I recreated the ship in ocean simulation but now was wondering what is the best way for me to export it so I can send it to render on my farm, which doesn’t have Phoenix.
I tried setting the output as mesh and export selected as alembic but it seemed to never finish and the file size was becoming immense.
Any tips?
Thank you
If you will render with VRay you can load the caches inside of VolumeGrid and render it this way.
Had no idea that existed, thank you.
How would I set it up?
Load the caches through the input rollout and just use the same render settings as in Phoenix, they should be pretty much the same.
Do I have to manually align it with the original simulation grid and animate it or does it carry it with?
I’ve loaded the caches and the grid is in another place and doesn’t seem to move.
Yes you have to position it by hand and if your Phoenix Simulator was animated you will need to animate the VolumeGrid as well.
Ok this is working but I don’t have splashes or foam. What am I missing?
Can you not install Phoenix on the farm? they don’t need licenses to render.
Do you mean that I can just install the full version without a license to render? Anyway at the moment it isn’t possible to do that
For the particles you can export them from Phoenix as alembic and import them via VRayProxy.
Just make sure to export the whole range.
Ok this is gonna take a while it seems. Let you know how everything goes after
Thanks
The export is at 3% and the file is already 12GB+
Is this normal? Is this gonna be a half terabyte file?
Alembic files are notoriously large 
Never tried this way of rendering as just have Phoenix installed in Render Slave mode on the farm. You are probably going to have a huge file though.
Surely you are still going to need PHX Foam in order to render your foam etc … I maybe wrong, see what the phoenix guys say.
Indeed - a fire/smoke sim would be trivial to transfer to a machine that does not have Phoenix and would render with the VolumeGrid which is basically the Phoenix grid shader. You’d even be able to export and import setting via preset files from Phoenix to the VVG. However, liquids with foam won’t render identically unless you have Phoenix on the render machines - even if you export particles to abc or prt, without a PHXFoam you’d not get the same results. Rendering with Phoenix does not need a license indeed, so whenever possible, you should arm the farm with Phoenixes 
You can get the job done a bit more easily if you use the silent install: Chaos Docs
Cheers!
Yes I kind of gave up on the export and just rendered locally overnight even though it didn’t finish. I need to talk with the IT guy to deploy that on our farm otherwise it’s impossible when I go even bigger on the sims.
Now I want to keep pushing this even further and have two questions:
1- If I want the boat to look more realistic and actually move and tip with the water movement how would I do it?
2 - Now if I want to add more boats in the same ocean I suppose I just create a new sim right? Won’t there be two infinite ocean planes overlapping if I do this?
Point 1 easiest way would be simple hand animation of the boat bobbing up and down. Ideally you would want to use the wave force as well to get more realistic waves crashing against the boat. I could see that being problematic though when it comes to it merging with the infinite ocean as it just wont line up nicely… so I would opt for the first part
Regarding point 2, I suppose you would have to sim each boat separately. Render one of the sims in ocean mode so you get your infinite ocean. Render the other boats in cap mode using the same displacement on them all. Comp it all together
Depending on the camera angle/spacing of the ships from each other It might be worth rendering them all in ocean mode so you dont have to have a complicated setup in comp with the foam trails that are outside the grid. Mask them etc and should be fine but depends if your camera allows it This is just me thinking ahead if I was to do it. Be interesting to hear other peoples thoughts! 
BTW - check your subdivs on lights. Set 'em to 1.
Why is that? I’m not using local subdivs on Vray so can’t really set them to anything
Hmmm I see this needs some experimentation.
For the main boat I guess I’ll hand animate the bobbing.
I forgot to mention some stuff about the setup that might help you give me some help.
The setup would be a marina where one boat moves and the docked ones would move with the wake of the moving boat.
Besides that the ocean can’t be infinite because there are limits to the marina. How would you go about that? Would be nice to get the water going against the walls so I could also get the wet map
So as you can see on the image link I need that the ocean doesn’t continue after the shape because there will be construction and buildings in there. The area in reality would be much bigger and with a complex shape.
I’ve tried the cutter geometry on the render tab but it doesn’t do anything
This would be for an animation btw
What if you use a vray clipper object?