meshing huge amount of flip particle

[jackyu00]

Hi all,

I am having problem meshing huge amount of particle.

I have a scene with a boat cruising along the river with long trail, the container size is 50m x 60m, particle separation is 0.025
I got about 40 millions flip particle, which were distributed and simulated with 4 machines.
When I used "particle fluid surface" node to mesh the surface, my machine ran out of 128G memory.
Is there any better way to deal with such huge amount of particle? Or I should simply install more memory

Pc Spec : dual Xeon E5-2630v3 with 128G ram on Windows7

Any suggestion will be very much appreciated, thanks!

Jack

Edited August 1, 2016 by jackyu00

[rbowden]

What is your particle separation set to on the particle fluid surface? Is it the same as your sim particle separation?

[jackyu00]

Yes, I set the same value of sim particle separation, 0.025

[rbowden]

I am not looking at your file but, my guess would be that you could cut down the time alot by cutting down the amount you have to mesh. You are probably meshing the sides and the bottom of your particles (giving you a box mesh) which, you probably don't need in your situation. Are you meshing particles out of the camera? If so, you can camera cull those points also to save on memory.

[jackyu00]

Hi Ryan, thanks for your suggestion.

I have use "fluid compress" node to cull off most of the particle by depth, the original particle (with side and bottom) is about 200 million.

The layout is still work in progress, once I get the camera, I think I can remove more particle by camera frustum.

Maybe I should consider increasing my particle separation, because some of the shot is away from camera.

[bunker]

the particlefluidsurface SOP has a "Regions" tab so you can mesh your FLIP sim in several chunks and merge them afterwards

 

Edited August 2, 2016 by bunker
added image

[jackyu00]

Thanks bunker,

Did you mean "bounding box" culling in the region tab? I sliced particle with 5 regions, and the first image show the gap between 2 regions after meshing individually. I am not sure how I can merge them without any problem while rendering. How would you recommend to blend these two meshes?

Btw, I also try to mesh the whole water surface in Linux system with a huge swap, 500G, and succeeded, as shown in the second image.

 

Edited August 2, 2016 by jackyu00

[bunker]

Yes I meant the Bounding box. To join the slices, add some padding on each slice, remove the Adaptivity on the VDB to polygon conversion, then you can use a few clip SOPs, and a fuse SOP to join the slices. You can also try a different approach using VDBs only, if you export each slice as VDB, you can merge them all with a VDB combine, then mesh it with the "convert VDB" SOP .

[jackyu00]

It sounds like a good idea to combine different VDBs, I will give it a try, thanks.