I have searched for this kind of thing here and it seems like there isn’t anything similar.
So, I have a very simple particle system with Fumefx Birth (0-77 frames, rate-2 million) and Fumefx Follow. I’ve made 4 partitions and everything looks okay. But if I look at the particle count in the PRT Loader, I see that at frame 71 the number stops at 22,720,000 particles and remains the same no matter how many frames I do. So, I want to ask, why it is like that? Why it stops at 22,720,000 particles? Maybe it is some kind of a limit?
I would be very happy if someone can answer.
Thank you.
Krakatoa doesn’t have any limits on the number of particles it can work with. Since you are using Particle Flow to generate your particles, I suspect that is where you should be looking to see why it stops generating more particles in your later frames. Perhaps your birth operator turns off then?
While there is a limit in PFlow which could cause particles to stop emitting, I am not sure you are hitting that.
Can you tell me what your Frame Rate is?
Here is a quote from another post I made on CGTalk that explains the potential problem:
I am not sure what exactly is going on in your flow (are particles being deleted in the process, how many particles are in ONE partition, etc.), but I would suggest going with a rate of 1 million and producing 8 partitions instead of 4. If that solves the issue, then you might be hitting the internal PFlow limit described above.
The FumeFX Birth is set to emit from 0 to 77 frames, because that’s what I simulated in FumFX. Actually, I tried to set the FFX Birth to emit for a higher amount of frames (I started experiencing this problem quite a while ago, when I was working with other simulations), but that still doesn’t work.
I am working with 25 fps. The particles don’t die. If I load only 1 partition, it says there are 5,680,000 particles at frame 71 and then it stops increasing. The upper limit in the particle source is set to 50 million.
Thank you Cruzifer! My playback range is set from 0 to 150 frames! I will definitely try to set it to 77 frames and redo partioning to see if it works!
i just wonder why your Graph gets red from frame 71 - actually, thats a sign that there is no prt info or particles… have you checked your prt file sizes and if they have full range? Maybe the loader just holds the last frame…
It gets red after 77. If you count the vertical lines which are every 10 frames, you will see that after 71 it flattens out for 7 frames, then after 77 it turns red. So that’s to be expected. The clamping isn’t expected. But one way or another, it is something related to FumeFX and PFlow, Krakatoa is just the messenger.
Well, never mind then. Maybe I will figure out a way to fix this. If not, it doesn’t matter very much, because I don’t really need more particleas so far. If you figure out how to correct this kind of thing, I would be really happy to know that.
Here is how debugging usually works:
When you don’t know why something is happening, you try to change the settings and look at the result.
Then you try to guess based on the “black box” principle what has happened inside the black box based on your inputs and the outputs you are getting.
So when I asked you to try 8 partitions with 1 million rate instead of 4 partitions with 2 million rate, I wanted to see how the changing input is changing the output.
If you would get the SAME issue from frame 71 to 77, then we would know the rate/pflow limitation isn’t the problem.
So please don’t run away as if we are done debugging, but try that out and tell us what you got!
I ran into this problem last year with fumefx birth as well. With high birth rates particles slowly stop birthing after 100 frames or so then peter off to 0. try a birth with a position object in roughly the same place as your fumefx emmiters as thats the only way I got around this problem.
Well, I made a similar scene from scratch and then tried to do the partitioning and it worked fine! Maybe there was something wrong with my settings before…
