FumeFX Particle Optimization

#1

I’m working on a live-action fanfilm to use FumeFX among other things to aid in creating effects seen in the “Dragonball” Universe.

I Love FumeFX’s simplicity and straightforward controls and have little problem getting objects to simulate very nice “Ki” effects consisting of the Fuel and Fire types.

However, I’ve come to realize it would look much nicer to have Ki effects like the “aura” done with particles as nodes rather than having the effect engulf an object, and either way I’d use particle nodes in several other effects as well.

Now obviously a good, dense number of particles is preferable to cover the most area, but I’m running into serious problems as I test the effects in a controlled non-film environment.

Here’s a good example. I test a “Ki Blast” effect, which I hope to appear as a swirling, ethereal force appear from around the actor’s body, and be sucked and concentrated into his hand to form a dense collection of power, which is then thrown forward as an intense, yet vaporous “shell”.

How I would do this is to create a hemisphere that covers the actor’s immediate space, and in Particle Flow, tell articles to spawn at random within the sphere’s volume. A Gravity Space Warp at the actor’s hand sucks these particles into that area, where they die upon hitting a sphere at the center. A separate effect in the hand shows a pulsing, gathering light to mark the energy being harnessed there, and then when the blast is fired, there is a small white geometric object at the center trailing several particles around and behind it, perhaps aided with some other geometric shape nodes for style.

I’m not sure if it’s the number, or the gravity Daemon that helps pull the actual FumeFX voxels into the center, but 5 frames in I’m given a crash. I think it’s the Daemon rather than the particle number though, but I don’t really get why I’m getting a crash. I know, for FumeFX my machine is modest, but even so I shouldn’t imagine it’s quite THAT hurting for power.

My build is Windows XP 32 bit, with 2 Gigs DDR1 RAM, and an Athlon64 x2 3800, with a 512 meg GeForce 8800GT graphics card. I’d love to ascertain the full power I can’t get with 32 Bit, but I’d rather sit and pound sand than “upgrade” to Vista.

I have to imagine if the Daemon is crashing it, there must be a step in using it that I’m missing, but please, if you can help me at all, I beg you to come forward. I’d be extremely grateful.

Thank you for your time.

#2

You could upgrade to 64Bit XP.

With 2GB RAM you could be running out of memory between the particle count and the FFX sim.

#3

Skip Vista, upgrade to Windows 7 so you can take advantage of working in 64 bit. I’ll never go back. The benefit is you can upgrade your RAM to 8GB and you won’t have to sweat bullets every time you hit render on a big project and leave the room.

#4

Hmm…

So, 64 bit XP has the same basic hardware benefits, while remaining XP?

Windows 7 sounds interesting, but I was under the impression it was still only a beta. Although I’m aware that some Vista users get some kind of free coupon to upgrade to Windows 7. The only reason I’d lean more towards XP 64-bit and Vista is because Windows 7 is really new, and I can only assume like with anything that once it’s released in full, that there will be a lot of bug-fixing to be done. That’s a bit inevitable.

But I’m definitely interested in 64-bit XP if it’s really capable of all the things Vista holds you back from.

#5

Sounds like XP64 is the OS for you then, it will definitely get around your bottlenecks. Remember that if you want to take true advantage of a 64 bit OS, you’re going to need to upgrade your software to 64 bit as well. I know in Windows 7 you can run 32 bit software even if the 64 bit OS is installed, I don’t know if the same is true for XP.

I’ve been running Windows 7 for months now on a Core i7 rig with 12GB of Ram and I must say, it’s great. No hastles with drivers or anything, Windows Update found every piece of hardware I had and installed the drivers automatically.

For a while you could just download Windows 7 off the Microsoft site, it’s worth looking into if you don’t want to pay for a new OS.

#6

yeah …your running out of ram thats for sure…as for xp/64 remember most hardware and software makers are going to vista/64 or 7/64. I ran into a bit of a driver problem with xp/64. Depends a lot on what you have. I have ran xp/64,vista/64 and 7/64…7 is the best but I would never go back to xp OS…IMO

good luck with that mate.:smiley:

#7

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.