Hi.
First of all, I would like to congratulate you on this great piece of software. It has many useful features and is very well integrated into 3ds max.
I have only one problem so far. I am doing a project for which I need to export max particles to realflow for meshing. Being that I have 20 characters that I need to export pf particles for, I wanted to speed up the pipeline I have set up to accomplish this by doing the bin particle export on the farm via deadline as opposed to doing it locally with realflow particle export. I have been able to accomplish this, but when I mesh the particles, the meshing process takes forever, as opposed to couple of seconds when I mesh the realflow particle exporter particles. I don’t know that much about bin files and stuff, but have somehow got the feeling that some data is written differently in krakatoa bin files and realflow particle explorer.
Do you have any suggestions on how to overcome this problem. Maybe I’m doing something wrong.
Here is what I think about this, I could be wrong.
Krakatoa exports the particles according to the format specification of RealFlow (RealFlow would refuse to load them if we would be doing anything wrong), BUT we cannot populate all channels that RealFlow usually generates from SPH simulations. For example, Neighbor Particles Count, Mass etc. do not have any valid data within PFlow so we simply write some default values. If RealFlow depends on any of these channels (except for position and velocity) to define the meshing, for example a particular size channel, it might have troubles meshing efficiently.
The other thing to keep in mind is that meshing in RealFlow assumes SPH particles where the distances between the particles are typically rather constant except for stray droplets that might have detached. Meshing stray particles that are not close enough to define a consistent surface is generally slower in all particle meshing solutions I know (including our inhouse one). On the other side of the spectrum, most meshing solutions can have severe problems with a large amount of particles have been concentrated at the same location with distances a lot less than the typical SPH simulation. Most solutions (Max Blobmesh, Glu3D PWrapper) slow down to a crawl in such cases. This is one case where our inhouse mesher excels and is many orders of magnitude faster compared to those, but I have not tested it against RealFlow so I cannot tell if that is the problem. (Our mesher can handle several million particles in reasonable times as long as they don’t detach too much as single droplets).
In other words, the distribution of your particles in PFlow might have a very strong influence on the speed of meshing.
If you could somehow export the same particles without Krakatoa using the RealFlow tools and mesh the result and you can compare the speed, you would know whether it is the particle distribution or the actual content of the BIN file channels that is causing the slowdown.
You could also send us a file to take a look at if you feel it would be a good idea…
Maybe I wasn’t clear enough about the problem. I did export the particles with the realflow max plug-in, and those bins mesh fairly quickly, but when I mesh the bins from the krakatoa partition, it is very slow. Maybe slow isn’t the word, because the progress bar doesn’t even show up for a couple of minutes. I load the krakatoa exported bins in the same realflow scene that meshes bins exported with realflow tools for max, just retarget the binloader sequence, so all the settings radii and everything for the mesh is identical.
Also, I’m using 60.000 particles with position object (lock on emitter, animated shape, subframe sampling, surface distribution), so there are no stray particles.
I can send you a bin from the sequence outputted with realflow tools, and one done with krakatoa, so you can analyze those and see if you can see where the difference between those is. If that is too much of a bother, you can tell me where I can view in detail the contents of bin file (in human readable form of course and I can try to find where is the difference. This project will have to be done with manual particle export because of the deadline, there is no time for experiments. But I am very curious about why this is happening, and there is a chance we will need similar functionality on another project, so it would be great if we could use the full potential of our render farm, and cut our work day from 18 hours to 14
That would be great, there must be some difference between the files if RealFlow is behaving differently.
It is possible that the RealFlow plugin uses better defaults for those channels that cannot be populated directly from Max.
Since we have our own fluid software, we have never really used the BIN export of Krakatoa for anything, so it is possible that it is not optimal.
Thanks in advance for your help!
and I can try to find where is the difference. This project will have to be done with manual particle export because of the deadline, there is no time for experiments. But I am very curious about why this is happening, and there is a chance we will need similar functionality on another project, so it would be great if we could use the full potential of our render farm, and cut our work day from 18 hours to 14