Optimizing Smoke SIMs

[art3mis]

As I venture deeper into smoke &pyro one issue I am facing are the extremely LONG sim times and inefficient playback times of my cached sims.

I am using a voxel density of .01 and show 216 million density and collision voxels.
I've enabled ‘Use OpenCL’ on my Pyro solver.

Even after caching a 204 frame simulation which takes several hours with a 12 core Threadripper and dual Titan Volta GPUs I can only play back the simulation in the Geometry Viewer at about 1 fps.

This workflow simply makes it impossible to proceed and iterate.

I need the .01 voxel density otherwise the resulting smoke sims appear too ‘jagged’.

Attached are screen grabs of my Pyrosolver and caching SOPs info details.

Are there any tips or workarounds that people use to optimize smoke & pyro workflows? Are 216 million voxels simply too many?

[ibondar]

All depends on what do you want to do with your velocity field later. General ways is:

1. Split velocity and density into different caches.

2. Save velocity with volume compress as 16bit float.

3 . Convert your volumes to vdb.

4. Clamp your velocity with vdb clip using density as mask.

[Midphase]

You might consider an UpRez technique like this:

 

 

[art3mis]

Thanks guys! Great info. I know that by simply reducing the voxel count you also change the dynamics of the simulation so will explore these options.

Edited October 23, 2019 by art3mis