Jump to content

workflow for flip fluid sim/mesh/render


nicoladanese

Recommended Posts

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!

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

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. 

  • Like 1
Link to comment
Share on other sites

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!

fetch.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Paste as plain text instead

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...