Visualizing precached pyro sims

[Netvudu]

Hi, using H12 already.

Usually we can properly check the colors from a DOP Import SOP which points to the Pyro Dobject directly.

What´s the way to visualize properly those colors (and play with them) when your simulation has been already cached to geometry?

This becomes specially important to know, considering the new shader can reference our visualization parameters directly if we choose so...

[old school]

I am assuuming you have cached the volume primitives to disk via the Dop I/O SOP.

The default Pyro shelf tool creates two SOPs in the object fetching the fluid sim results. One fecthes many fields and the other just the visualization data.

Once the fields have been cahced, in H12 you can now recreate many of the visualization tools in DOPs.

First one is the often used Volume Visualization SOP. I will often copy the DOP Smoke Object DOP's Multi-Field Visualization settings to the Volume Visualization SOP to pick up where DOPs left off. The new Pyro shader can be pointed at any node that has all these parameters. That leaves pointing the Pyro setup-bindings to either any Smoke Object DOP or a Volume Visualization SOP.

That really tips your hand and is something I do pretty much all the time now.

You can use a combination of the Volume Slice and Volume Trail SOPs to re-create the velocity tails that are so critical to tweaking Fluid simualtions in SOPs now.

See the attached file for both setups along with a simple note clarifying the setup including the parm transfers in to the new Pyro shader in H12.

volume_visualization.zip

Edited March 3, 2012 by old school

[Netvudu]

whoa, perfect explanation and example Jeff. Thanks. It´s pretty darn simple...when you know how to, of course