Krakatoa and direct FumeFX rendering

#1

Hi all,

I was wondering if you could enlighten me on how Krakatoa 1.6.x uses the new PRT FumeFX object. Basically i have a fumeFX sim and i always use pflow. I wish to add the PRT FumeFX object and render through krakatoa, negating the need for pflow. Can someone outline a very brief workflow for this

kind regards
Chris

#2

Sure,

  1. Create a PRTFumeFX.
  2. Goto the Modify panel with the PRTFumeFX still selected.
  3. Choose what you want either Seed in Smoke, Seed in Fire, or both.
    Note: your viewport particle counts are limited by default, actual density will be higher!
  4. Select the FumeFX base object.
  5. Add a KCM modifier or any other deformable modifier if you want.

The only requirements are that you either constantly have seed in fire or seed in smoke if you intend to Save To Sequence. Meaning (and this is something I have complained about) you have to have fire or smoke for the duration of your objects shot. IE Save to Sequence will not work with a fuel driven explosion for example, as soon as all of the fuel is burnt the Save to Sequence will fail.

It will work just fine if you only intend to render.

#3

Great thanks for that :), will give it a shot this evening.

#4

I have been trying to work with prt fumefx (till now i have used only particle flow with the fumefx follow operator) but when i increase the subdivisions of the prt fumefx max crashes (max 2011x64 core 2 duo, 4 GB ram, fume fx grid resolution: 215x215x615) but it does not crash if i leave it on whole night, creating 25 partitions of the fumefx grid! with 25 partitions i am able to get the detail i need in the rendering! (maybe prt fumefx is trying to subdivide in memory? also will subdivision give the same result as partitioning (i think not! partitioning is more random IMO)?)

#5

When you increase the subdivisions, yes, you create a larger memory footprint. It is easy to consume 4gb of physical memory when you increase your PRT Fume Subdivisions.

The reason you can create 25 partitions over the course of the night, you are not running out of system resources. When you combine multiple partitions it can look different simply because you are changing the seed value (when enabled) with every partition. It is not as good (or the same) as increasing subdivisions but if you have limited system resources it will get it done.

Try it with just one or two subdivisions and see if you can get it to render. You can also try the Frost+PRTVolume trick and see what that gets you :slight_smile:

#6

Thanks for the reply.
yea, i think prt fume fx is useful only if you want to render directly instead of rendering with scanline. According to the manual :

[ul]
[li]Krakatoa uses significantly less memory when rendering LARGE FumeFX simulations. For example, a real-world production case called for a FumeFX simulation which required around 64GB of RAM to render. In comparison, Krakatoa used only around 600MB to render the same simulation.[/li]> [/ul]

but this does not account for a subdivision of 5! (i am able to render with subdivision of 2, but it doesn’t give me the detail when i use additive mode or reduce lighting pass density). Will have look into frost! have been using blob mesh and built-in realflow mesher in production so far, I hope Frost will be as revolutionizing as krakatoa was (the realflow mesher is really slow for large scale scenes!) . Will be upgrading workstations too (used to be state of the art, a few years back!) i think an intel xenon with 2 (6 core processors with 3.33Ghz clock i.e. 40Ghz computing power approx.!) with a 3 GB Nvidia GTX 590, 32GB RAM and an OCZ vertex series sdd! should be sufficient for fluid simulation and arch. viz.!

#7

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