FumeFX

#881

The flickering is usually related to licensing errors. If you restart max and go straight to render it can sometimes alleviate the problems… if that doesn’t work, email afterworks support, and see what they can do to help.

Unwanted smoke looks like it might be from adding smoke at the source – maybe try and turn source smoke off, and just use fuel creates smoke option in the simulation tab…?

It’s a little bright, and there’s probably a bit too much smoke as well, I suggest looking at reference videos of flamethrowers (youtube has some good reference) I think the smoke would also be a bit lighter and more transparent, not so dark and opaque.

#882

hanks Solitude

The manual says something about too spikey or drastik opacity afc-s for smoke which could render sudden changes in lighting so I adjusted that and it looks to be working. It might still be because of licensing and startup problems though…

The other thing is that some particles that get separeted from the bigger bunch render the fire too uniformly around them is there a way to randomize the radious or some other params. concerning the size of fire emited? Seed is just for the initial randomization it wont change with time if im correct…

Oh and one other thing: did anyone use the source controllers yet? I understand what they do I just couldnt realy think of a situation in which I would use them, well it might be becaus Its not totaly clear what they are good for

thanks all

#883

Sorry olipoli1, I actually saw your clip the other day, and well got a little overwhelmed at work and forgot to get back.

Looks really good, I agree with Ian on the over brightness and the density of the smoke. Really nice motion in the smoke though:)

A couple of things I noticed (nothing big), there seems to be some large surges from your emitter (you may have done that on purpose), it looked like you had some strange bleed going through some of the geometry (near the end on the back wall in the doorway), and the amount of expansion seemed a little excessive at the end (acted more like an explosion than an accumulation of fuel). All in all a great shot. Couple tweaks and it will be there IMO.

And by source controllers I assume you are talking about the gravity vector?

#884

Hey Guys…Am having some problems with Fume…it seems that after a few frames of Simming My Max crashes…I have a config of 2.4Ghz Quad Core and 4gb of Ram and the grid spacing of FFX is 80x80x80…Any clue why?I mean it is a pretty low res sim…:shrug:

Regards,
Entrancea

#885

Entrancea: I’ve had some similar issues… I can’t quite nail it down yet, so I haven’t posted it as a bug, but I believe it has to do with Direct3d display on my machine (and at least 1 of the other machines just like it) If I turn my preview window off, or start other programs or switch to other windows, fume is very likely to crash. This is only in 32 bit max too btw. 64 bit works great for some reason. I switched my 32bit max9 to opengl and it has so far fixed most of the fume crashes.

#886

Hi

Anyone experienced this?

Know what it could be?

Using 2008 and scanline

#887

Thanks JR its good to hear thats it not that bad.

The huge expansion is on purpose altough Its a bit out of controll…but I tought as the big amount of unburnt napalm splashes on the wall with this velocity it suddenly ignites on a larger surface it gets sprinkled on. The particles behave a bit wiered because I created the sim in Real Flow and I wanted to do a thick, stiky kind of fluid and when I had something not so bad I started to tweak the Fume sim… I might go back and refine the RF particles as well. Oh yeah an you spoted the bleed… well I cant realy tell why it happens the geometry is considered by fume and it was there when I simed the particles… so Im not sure.

Source controllers are (by the manual) adittional constrains you can set on the different emission atributes(fuel, Smoke etc.) of a source. You can set a linear dependence betwen a source atribute (like fuel or temp or smoke) and a chanels data. Sou you can say that the fuel chanel is controled by the Smoke source controller: if there is X or less amount of smoke in a voxel, fuel will not be emitted if there is more than Y amount of smoke in the voxel, fuel will be fully emitted… maybe the manual explains it more clear.:slight_smile: So for instance you could say that when there isnt the desired amount of fuel in a voxel dont create smoke there or in any other combination of chanels and controllers.

Entrancea: I had max crash after diferent amount of rendered frames but only with renderers other than the default scanline. I might try what Solitude suggested with the preview window or the opengl setting.

Hordak: I didnt have that yet but I saw someone reporting this kind of thing before on this thread. I didnt realy remember what others suggested for a solution but there were some ideas. It was a good 20 or so pages back i think.

#888

hey olipoli1

I changed my display drivers from direct3d to software… that fixed it.

So now you know:)

#889

olipoli1, hehe, I didn’t mean to imply it was bad it all, actually looks like you spent some good time on it;)

yep:), for some reason it wasn’t clicking in my head last night what you were asking about source controllers…something I haven’t fully dove into yet…for some reason I was thinking, well you know what I was thinking:P

Hordak, I have seen that issue in max2k8. Turning of multithreading gets rid of the spots in renders. That’s 2k8 though haven’t run into that issue in 9 in d3d or ogl (sparse use of ogl these days though, only when I am in modelling mode)

#890

Hordak, I have seen that issue in max2k8. Turning of multithreading gets rid of the spots in renders. That’s 2k8 though haven’t run into that issue in 9 in d3d or ogl (sparse use of ogl these days though, only when I am in modelling mode)

Thx JohnnyRandom

That’s nice to know

#891

Hey

Its intresting… I cant realy see how licensing could envoke a problem like the lighting flicker but what Solitude sad is working great! If you render right away after starting max the flickering disapears… I have no idea how these things work intrenaly, does anyone have a clue?

Oh and Im sure you guys have seen this ad, do you think this is fume and krakatoa all the way, and especial at the end when the chock bar unfolds? Ithink it looks great!

http://studio.adbeast.com/files/00000022/2211724_Snickers-Russian-Smaller-H264.mov

#892

^ It’s a “feature” put there by the programmer to help weed out piraters, or at the very least not give them a proper working plugin… the problem however is that I often still get this issue, and have proper licensing set up.

#893

Ian:Thanks for the info dude:D …Well do you have a dual boot system with both 32bit and 64bit XP…Cause Then what I could do is I could do my Sim and Render in my 64 bit and then pass the Targa or PNG or whatever in the 32bit and then the rest is in the comp…But do you use both 32bit and 64bit XP?

olipoli1:Yeah dude,my driver is set to Direct3D…:shrug: …SO I’ll be installing WIn64 on my machine…And lets see…

Regards,
Entrancea

#894

Nope. We only use XP64. We do use max 32 and 64 max though.

#895

Hi Lasse!

Sorry to post it here but your private messge box is full, so got rejected by the system.

Wow thanks for the nice comments on my stuff! Its funny that you are asking for my settings becuse I was just referencing yours:). I folowed up the thread to recent times (untill my post) and I checked most of your works and they were prety awesome I have to say! You wouldnt belive but I had a raid setup that just messed up its reference table yesterday, so all those stuff is unaccessible at the moment! I might have lost it forever:( but anyways Im at work now so I will try to remember my settings when I get home and forward it to you. I actualy tweaked that stuff you saw, even further but as I sad it might be lost.

Olip

#896

Just thought I’d share with you guys a little memo we got from out IT dept.

“FumeFX caches are using almost 50% of project storage
19,000 files using .75TB of space, average file size of .fxd is 38MB”

:eek::eek:

#897

Eh Eh! Same here. On our last project I had sims that had 300Mb/frame fxd files. Not ideal when doing stuff across the network.

#898

mmmmnnn fibre channel NAS:drool:

EDIT: what do you guys use?

Hey anybody tried solid state drives for a scratch disk?

#899

Man that sounds insane :slight_smile: I am also interested in SSDs, anybody tried them? Also, how exactly does FFX multithread? Like rendering, or worse?

#900

No Idea… not the hardware freak I used to be. :slight_smile: