FumeFX and transparent materials + multicore PF question

#1

I have this annoying problem, while using mental ray renderer, if I make a FumeFX simulation, and try to render it, it will render fine, but if I place a mental ray glass material box between the camera and the simulation, the simulation wont show. I have tried with multiple transparent materials, but the result is always the same. How to make the simulation show through transparent material object?

I also tried particle flow, and krakatoa, but PF hangs like hell while updating scene objects, using only one of my cores 100% instead all of them. Is there a solution to any of these problems?

(I tried not to make two threads, so I combined the main quwstion to the smaller problem, sorry if I failed somehow)

#2

What kind of mr Glass material? It seems to work fine with ProMaterials Glass and a mr Glass (lume) shader.

Particle Flow is only single threaded. Anything that requires updates from pflow will get bottlenecked. Your best option is to split the Save To Sequence the pflow system with Krakatoa. I am going to write a script for this one day… better yet a true implementation in the Krakatoa Partitioning Rollout would be sweet :slight_smile:

It is a bit convoluted a little bit a PITA but in the long run will save you xTimes the amount of time as you have cores.

1.Take the amount of physical cores your system has and divide that into the duration of the timeline (less one if you want to do other things).
2.Start as many individual instances of max. Set each instance’s Affinity in Task Manager to a unique core (Reserve core Zero for the OS, web surf, anything else you want to do)
3.Open the scene in each instance and rename it something more specific to the duration of time.
4.Set each Krakatoa Save To Sequence to correspond the chunk of the timeline.
5.Set the Save to Folder to the same as all other instances.
6.Start each Save to Sequence
7.Wait…
8.Create a new PRT Loader and load your new sequence.

*I am not in front of max so I hope I did not miss anything.

#3

OK; I get the idea of “mult threadding”, thanks :slight_smile:

I think, that 3ds Max 2012 doesn’t have pro materials anymore, and I found a way to get the simulation look through “glass”, by using autodesk water shader, but it looks at some times a bit not as I planned it to look (reflections, refractions, colour etc.)… How do I get this stupid feeling, that there is somewhere a simple button, that I need to click to get things work.

#4

Yeah, so you are not truly multi-threading per-se but caching and using a more optimized loader. It is faster.

I am pretty sure they just renamed the “ProMaterials” in 2012 to “Autodesk”+ material name.

#5

Autodesk materials don’t work.

#6

Hmm, I was able to get it to work with MentalRay and Autodesk Glass. Try rotating your glass object a little bit, see if that works.

#7

I’ve tried a few angles. I think that there is something I didn’n notice, but I cant get the smoke or fire see through the glass.

#8

Ok, well then, here is a working example with Solid Glass and CarPaint maybe it will help :slight_smile:

http://www.vimeo.com/26036972

#9

Have you tried enabling the autovolume in the raytracing options? Thats the first thing showed in the fumefx help about mental ray. :wink:

This way it works fine with arch&design and the glass solid preset.

#10

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