I’m testing a Pflow/Frost setup to create condensation for an upcoming beer job. It’s working pretty well. Frost is certainly a great meshing system compared to what I have used before.
I messed around with Bobo’s suggested method for flattening out intersecting droplets but unfortunately it’s not accurate enough to deal with varying sizes of particle radii, so it’s not going to fly here. I can do this job in Vray though, and in that case the intersection of the Frost mesh and my glass is not a problem. In the future I would love to have a solution to clip out the geometry or flatten it somehow to a surface
My question here though: I’m creating some runs in the condensation with a separate Pflow and Frost. I tried to use a Krakatoa Collision event that used the latter Frost (for the runs) to delete particles from the Pflow for the main droplets. That way the run would clear a path through the condensation as it went. (reference image of what I have so far linked below) . The problem is that every time i select the Frost object for the Krakatoa Collision event it causes Max to to just hang indefinitely.
I’m still messing around with it - but thought I’d ask if this was any kind of known limitation so I don’t waste too much time.
Sounds like some circular dependency we are not catching correctly.
So you have a PFlow with main particles and Frost 1 to mesh them.
Then you have a second PFlow for the runs with Frost 2 to mesh it.
You want to use Krakatoa Collision in the first PFlow to collide against the Frost of the second PFlow.
This would make PFlow 1 dependent on the second Frost and the second PFlow.
If the two PFlows have a dependency internally (and they might, but I am not sure about all the internal organization of PFlow), it might be leading to PFlow updating itself forever.
The way we work around these things is typically using XMesh. It allows the one Frost to be baked to disk and then loaded as a collision object while breaking the dependency of the two PFlows. Would you be interested in test-driving XMesh for two weeks? The Loader is free so once you have a working cache for the one Frost, you can continue loading the data after the XMesh Saver license expires…
Thanks Bobo. I tried a few variations without success, but it may well be my poor Pflow abilities causing the issue
Thanks also for the offer to try Xmesh. I think for now I will stick with manually deleting the interfering particles. I’m only doing stills and I think Xmesh would be overkill for me. I’ll see how it goes anyway.
