workflow for flip fluid sim/mesh/render

[nicoladanese]

Hey!

I'm wondering what could be the best workflow for working with flip fluid, from sim to render. I mean, I have the usual setup for flip fluid with autoDopNetwork, particle_fluid and particle_interior.

In my very simple workflow I made 2 steps:

1- I wrote to disk my flip sim using the "import_particle" Dop I/O node under the particle_fluid node. This way I have my sim cached out, then

2- I wrote to disk the "particlefluidsurface" mesh using the "surface_cache" node, still under particle_fluid node, then

3- I render

What do you think? Any suggestion? I'm wondering if there's a way of doing all of these steps in one go so I can launch the process overnight and find my sim cached and my render done the morning after

cheers!

 

[jamesr]

That's the standard workflow using the shelf tools, which should be just fine. 

If you want to go straight from sim --> rendered frames overnight, you can set up a dependency of fetch nodes inside a ropnet. A "Fetch" ROP simply looks for a "ROP Output Driver" to render. If you have multiple fetch nodes piped into a "merge" ROP, it will render them in order left to right. I would suggest:

1. Make 2 Fetch ROPs and 1 Mantra ROP, and a Merge. Name them something useful (ie: "fetch_flip_particles", "fetch_surface", etc)
2. In the first Fetch, click the dropdown and navigate to the filecache node that write the flip particles. Inside that, there's an Output Driver called "render". Select that one.
3. In the second Fetch, do the same, but for the flip surface cache. 
4. Configure your desired mantra render settings in the Mantra ROP
5. From left to right, wire the nodes particles, surface, render. Order counts!
6. On the merge node, hit the Render flag button on the right. Important! There's an option that says "Frame by Frame". You will want to change this to "node by node", so that each node is dependent upon the one to the left of it to finish before it can start. 
7. Grab a beer, have a nap, and return in a few hours to comp your frames!

You can do this with any cache that depends on another to be finished in order to produce desired results. I hope this helps. 

[nicoladanese]

Hey James

thanks for your help! I'll give it a go asap and let you know!

awww...step 7 is definitely my goal for this!

Edited September 11, 2017 by nicoladanese

[nicoladanese]

Hey I have 2 questions...

first, is this setup correct (see attached image) ?

second, I don't get one thing: in this way we cache the particles to disk and we do the same for the mesh, but we're not telling to those nodes to actually read the cache from disk. I mean, after I manually write a cache on one of these nodes I check the "load from disk" checkbox to enable the "reading" of the cache. How this setup is supposed to deal with this?Am I missing something?

cheers!

[jamesr]

That looks correct. You can leave "load from disk on" even if there's nothing on disk. It will error at first bc there's nothing there, then it will write and load from that location. 

[nicoladanese]

great thanks! now time for step 7 "Grab a beer, have a nap" 

[nicoladanese]

btw, I'm looking into gridmarkets for cloud sim/renders...do you know if this setup will work on gridmarkets too? I'm looking into their tutorials and they use a slightly different approach, using the "batch" instead of the "merge" , here's a link

http://www.gridmarkets.com/submission

[jamesr]

Yup! They've got some example scene files you can download, too.

[nicoladanese]

great! thanks again!