Hi guys , iam working on a short with lots of fluids in it . i have to cache all the fluids before render ,
‘BUT’ the cache files are gigantic , can i use any compression for this files so that i don’t have to loose my HDD space
“CAN ANYBODY HELP ME WITH IT ???” 
If you don’t need velocity grids for rendering you can perhaps disable those in the caching to make the sizes smaller.
Hi Duncan , iam only caching density & velocity as matter of fact .
You see in ‘houdini’ you can add ‘.gz’ after file extension and it will Zip your cache files and it will cut down on file size .
Do maya have any thing wich can cut down the file size without compromising on any data to save on disk .
Thnx,
If you are caching density+velocity then just caching density will use a 1/4th the space.
Unfortunately we don’t have a compression option. I suppose if you are using per-frame files you might be able to rig up your own call to zip … perhaps using a time change message with a callback when caching and a pre-render script to unzip the current frame before rendering. You should try it on some of the frames to see how much space you might save before implementing it. It might not be that much if using an auto resize fluid.
Maybe you can have a look at field3d. There exsits a plugin for maya. It compresses, can use half float and can use sparse voxels what means if you e.g. have a huge fluid box with only a few voxels are filled, the caches are tiny.
not to mention the pre-frame scripts not working as it suppose to be in 2011 and 2012. (not sure 2013 or 2014)
i tried to reload mip_proxies, making it updates every frame with pre-frame. so i will have animated proxies.
and it didnt work when in batch mode, but the same mel works in the pre-mel slot.
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