Particle Flow Cache

#1

Ｉ am working with PF using 3dsmax2008 and having problems with calculations taking forever to compute (even after caching). Rendering part takes only seconds with vray though.

Cache works perfectly if I turn the instance object’s animation off but that is out of the question.

Is there a way I could lessen the computation part? Do I need box 3? Does box three’s cache provide caching of the vertex animations as well (My intsnace objects were animated via pointcache) ?

Am I resoved to baking the particle positions and linking my animated objects to it? If thats the case can somebody point me to a maxscript or any other solution to automatically change the particles to objects?

Please help. The deadline was a week ago.

#2

Bobo’s Motion to objects, great tut - http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/mxs5/pflow/pflow__MovingObjects.htm

Pflow Baker, great script - http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/pflow-baker

also, Particle Flow Scripting 02 Chapters 13 - 17

How heavy is the shape instance geometry? Have you reduced the geometry as much as possible?

Also you are certainly limited with the Cache op by the amount of physical memory max can access, when using geometry with the Cache op you will consume far more memory than just displaying ticks or dots, especially instanced animated geometry.

The best you can do is bump the cache up to your safe limit (default is only 100 meg) Check your scene in task manager to see the upper limit of ram usage with the scene only then set you particle cache accordingly, if you are on a 32 bit system using 32 bit max you are going to be limited to around 2.5 gigs total, use more and you will most likely crash max. So if your scene is consuming something like 1 gig, set your cache op to something like 1.25 gig or 1250000. A lot less of an issue with xp64/max64.

LOL, max just crashed on me :S

You could use Box3’s disk cache it should certainly help although since you are drawing from disk it will be slower than the standard cache.

#3

With Box#3 Cache you can cache particle motion only, and leave shape geometry out of the cache - this way loading will be very fast. Also, with Box#3 you can define Shape Instance operator to be history-independent to speed up PFlow calculations.

Thanks,
Oleg B.

#4

As said before
http://www.oferz.com/maxscripts.php#PFlowBaker
Get the latest version. I worked with Offer to do just what you want, as long as you don’t have millions of objects it should work great. What Offer has done is make his script not only bake the Particle motion but also bake in boned instances!

Personally I used it for a shot with loads of instanced Boned animated bugs using that we test it together it takes a while but its well worth it! He also added a curve function to edit some of the baked animation! The man is a genius!! heh heh

Check it out mate

Good luck.

Stevie

#5

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