Meshing Questions

[thebigmontagestudios]

Hi guys. I am working on a pretty decent sized Hybrido sim scene with bubbles, waterline, and splash involved. The grid fluid is roughly 6m particles and meshed out to about 1.5m faces. There are about 20million particles in the scene though between waterline and bubbles mostly as there is a ship coming from under the water with exaggerated effect. Should I be using a hybrido mesh on these or a particle mesh for such a large amount?

Question 2 is, my grid fluid mesh looks okay but it's missing a little organic feel to it. I have displacement on it but it almost looks too thick when i render it using Renderman. What mesh settings would you suggest I tweak to make it a bit more organic without blowing it out into too many faces that Maya won't be able to handle it?

Question 3 is, are the displacement maps generated into .exr files from Realflow just scalar displacements or would they be considered vector displacements? Some of the render settings in RMS confuse the heck out of me and i'm trying to get it all to look it's best. Should I also be using alpha is luminance or not?

[thebigmontagestudios]

the particle mesh resulted in one frame taking about 15 minutes on my 12 core mac pro and generated 27+ million faces. Yikes! How should i handle this?

[gus]

Hi Mark,

Apologies for the late replies.

Q1: Hybrido mesher can be use to mesh any type of particles but it is more suitable for the core of the sim, rather that than the secondary elements.
For waterline and bubbles you are probably better off with RK Mesher, even at those high particle counts.
Underneath the mesher types are using pretty much the same RK Mesher technology, it is just the filters that are different to suit one or another type of scenarios.

Q2: Tricky to say without seeing your scene settings. If possible,could you send it over? Our team will have a look and suggest the best meshing settings.

Q3: RF exports vector displacement maps. I am not very familiar with using it on RMS, but will get an answer from our tech team on that. Please bear with me a bit more.

Once again, sincere apologies for the slowness on our replies. We are seriously looking at improving our forum systems so this won´t happen again. For immediate answers I'd recommend you to write to our tech support, where Luis Miguel and the rest of the team are always replying at lightning speed

Best,

g-)

[thebigmontagestudios]

Isn't Maya gonna get crushed though trying to bring in that many particles into a scene? In many cases, i don't even really want to mesh out those particles so much. Rendering them as particles gives a nice effect i'm just not sure how much a scene can realistically handle

[gus]

Isn't Maya gonna get crushed though trying to bring in that many particles into a scene? In many cases, i don't even really want to mesh out those particles so much.

With RFRK it shouldn´t since it doesn´t really load the whole thing but create a point representation in the viewport.

g-)

[Hector]

the particle mesh resulted in one frame taking about 15 minutes on my 12 core mac pro and generated 27+ million faces. Yikes! How should i handle this?

Hello,

The best way to handle these kind of meshes is using procedurals (dynamicload) through RFRK, the mesh remains in memory once is computed and then passed to the renderer and you dont have to worry about to load it in a viewport, saving to disk, etc...

Also, make sure that you need a mesh with this resolution. I think that you are using a very small polygon size, if you are not very close to the fluid try with polygon size = radius, and then you decrease it little by little to achieve the resolution of the mesh that you are looking for. You can use the bounded mode in both, RealFlow and RFRK, for very quick test just rendering a small portion of the whole fluid.

And for the particles, the same, you can use RFRK to render them as particles

[thebigmontagestudios]

i'm trying to fiddle with it using RFRK and bringing it in. I am using Maya 2015 and rendering with Renderman RMS 19 on Yosemite.
Can you give me a walkthrough of what to use in the RFRK shelf to best do this? Thank you

[Hector]

Hello,

Use rfrk hybrido node (second left) for the meshing and rfrk particler (the fourth) to render the particles. When you click on the shelf button, it will you asked about where are the sequence to load and it will show you just the 10% of them in the viewport. Then you can add more sequences and set up the parameters. They are the same as in RealFlow.

I recommend you to use the bounded mode to setup the meshing parameters and the export/lazy computer for shading test.

Regards