Passing geometry into a popnet at a specific frame

[Jmg07]

Hi,

I'm using a rbdmaterialfracture on a cube. I've made the glue constraint pretty low so that just running the sim causes the cube to fall apart. I'm happy with the output at frame 100.

I'd like to pass this fractured cube - at frame 100 - to a popnet for a further sim. So when the surface is scattered with points, this occurs on the fractured cube at frame 100.

But at the moment the geometry that is passed into the popnet is just a cube before it is fractured. 

How can I pass in the broken cube from frame 100?

Thx

[ryew]

Either use a switch with $F == 100 as the true condition to wire the pieces in at that frame, or put that same expression in the Pop Source-> Birth tab's "Impulse Activation" parameter

(Ideally you are caching your sim out to disk so you can shift the start of the pop sim to frame 1 and not wait 100 frames every time)

Edited August 28, 2022 by ryew

[Jmg07]

@ryew thank you. On a similar point, I have a vellum sim and a rbd sim in separate networks. I am happy with how the vellum sim looks at frame 30 and the rbd sim at frame 100.

But when I want render out a test frame, in the Render Viewer when I set the timeline to frame 30 - I understandably get both sims at their respective frame 30 - when I want the rbd at frame 100.

Will using a file cache and caching out the rbd sim at frame 100 be the way to go? 

Thanks

 

[ryew]

Sure - if you use a file cache, you can just attach a Time Shift SOP afterwards and set the frame number to whatever you want for the output (ex: go to frame 1 and then set a Time Shift SOP attached to your Vellum Sim file cache to 30 and a Time Shift SOP attached to your RBD sim's file cache to 100 and viola! you're good to go.  This is generally the way to work - once you've got a sim result you like, just cache it out and work/adjust from there - no need to resimulate over and over unless you're refining your sim.

Edited August 28, 2022 by ryew