I have noticed a problem which seems to have been introduced in Phoenix 3.0.
When I try to do a simulation inside my main 3DSMax scene with lots of content (many individual objects) which have nothing to do with the sim. Then the simulation speed slows down with a factor 100 (at least that’s what it feels like).
I have set the Phoenix interaction to only include the three objects that is needed to do the simulation. (collision obj, emitter obj and emitter source). All other objects are ignored (not included).
The only way I can raise the sim speed in the main scene file, is to delete a waste majority of the scene objects. At this point the simulation speed picks up and starts to work as expected.
Available Ram is not the problem judging form windows process overview - There is plenty available.
Potential useful information is that the simulation is preformed in high frame numbers between 10200 and 10400.
Since I need everything in my main scene file, my work around consists of exporting the few relevant phoenix sim objects to a new empty max file and do the simulation there, and then afterwards load the aur files in the main scene afterwards.
Why this issue, which I dont’t remember to be a problem in version 2.2
the slow down is expected, but not with such a big factor, phoenix just has to calculate the bounding box of every object and to decide is it intersecting or not with the grid box.
however, if some of the object have slow evaluation (for example tricky animation), they can be the reason for the entire slow down
to speed up the simulation, just select the objects not in interest and put them in the exclude list, then phoenix will skip the bbox calculation and therefore the object evaluation.
ofcourse there is still some small and unavoidable slow down, for the object collection and exclude list check, but i think it is really invisible compared with the simulation time itself
If the include list does not seem to help things, would it be possible to ask you to drop to Support for a version of the scene that would help to pinpoint the issue?
Again - big thanks for helping with this issue! The address would be support@chaosgroup.com - they will give you additional directions as to how to upload the data.
Alright, got it This was really terrible - with 2000 obstacles completely outside the simulator’s box, a simulation which would take 5 secs per frame took 60 secs, and if you added the obstacles to the exclude list it took 140 secs. Sadly, the actual process of adding a ton of items to the list would still take quite a while as well, but I don’t think we can do anything about it - it’s in 3ds Max itself.
This was really terrible - with 2000 obstacles completely outside the simulator’s box, a simulation which would take 5 secs per frame took 60 secs, and if you added the obstacles to the exclude list it took 140 secs. Sadly, the actual process of adding a ton of items to the list would still take quite a while as well, but I don’t think we can do anything about it - it’s in 3ds Max itself.