Hey, I found a bug when applying a Followfield to particles. If you select both the FumeFX grid and your particles while creating your Followfield, the fieldDataVelocity from the FumeFX grid doesn't get connected to the inputforce in the Followfield. You can of course connect this manually in the Connection Editor, and it works fine.

- I found this bug when I upgraded to Maya 2015. It worked fine in Maya 2013.

Is VDB export possible? Future release?

I have collected a few minor bugs in the FumeFX GPU Preview window

- Often times, it won't display multiple lights in the preview. It will only show the first one created, forcing you to do a testrender to see how the second light interact with the sim.

- The preview doesn't update when you change shading parameters. You have to restart the preview window every time you make an adjustment.

Ps. Where is the option to change the volume shader in order to use the channel data?

Thank you for a great product.

Hello there, for my first post I bear less than stellar news as my first personal project with FumeFx has insofar been a complete flop due to a repeatable bug.

Following this tutorial to a T http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/creat ... -cms-21151 (including all of the settings) I begin to run a simulation but after only 3 or 4 frames the simulation freezes and my CPU usage drops to 50% and stays there. I soon discovered however that if I continue to use my computer as the simulation runs that it will continue running. Be it surfing the web or painting in Photoshop but the moment I stop and do not touch my computer for a few minutes then the simulation will freeze. Playing videogames does nothing unfortunately.

The reason I know the simulation has stopped and merely not stopped responding is that a single frame takes 2 and a half to 3 and a half minutes to simulate and deposit the data into the default folder, an hour without anything being deposited is pretty damming. By using my computer continuously I have managed to simulate 39 frames averaging the aforementioned times but I had to answer the door and the simulations stopped and I had to start over from thirty, speaking of which.

How to I set FumeFX to resume over increments of one frame and not 10, or to be disingenuous for the sake of emphasis, is there anyway I can I brute force this behaviour, even at the cost of stability because at this point it is not really saying much?

Lastly, I cannot have the preview window open for more than a few minutes or Max will crash and take my simulation with it.

My specs are: Windows 7 Professional 64BIT - Latest updates installed
I7 3930K @ 4.2GHZ -Non Hyperthreaded - (the cpu never goes above 65-70 degrees C with no other system instabilities)
64GB of RAM @ 1600MHZ
256 gig SSD OS Drive with 150 Gigs left
1TB Work/Cache HDdrive with 650 Gigs left
2 Titan Blacks - Non SLI - Stock Clocks - Driver Version 340.52

This bug is repeatable regardless of the scene I am working on and very unwieldy to work around, I am sincerely sorry for sounding so biting :$ but I have spent the last week trying to solve this issue on my own without the foggiest hint of success and thus turn to the DEVS and community for their assistance as I genuinely want to use this software to its fullest potential.

EDIT: I cannot believe it but I just noticed that in the 5 or so scenes I have attempted to run the simulation with, a tiny bit of geometry was sticking out of each container, huh. I will try running another simulation and let you guys know the results but in the meantime my bed calls me with sweet, sweet lullabies.

EDIT: One thing I forgot to mention is that I have tried playing around with the snapshot options to no avail as well in case that was supposed to fix the 10 frame increments of resuming simulations.

EDIT: Even after ensuring that no geometry intersected the borders on the container my simulation did not make it past frame 6.

EDIT: Found the source of the problem and fixed it and this is how: The problem is caused by mixing RAM kits. Even though I bought identical 32GB packs there were subtle differences between them that caused my system to not post a few years ago. On the GSkill forums I was told to up the voltage from 1.5V to 1.65V which solved all of my issues. Due to a hard-drive failure I had to reset my BIOS and never bothered to change the RAM voltage until now. Doing so fixed the issues, I assume it was because the program when exceeding the capacity of an 8GB DIMM Stick bled over into another from a different kit, encountering subtle differences in each stick's architecture, timing, and voltage and thus could not maintain stability. Neat!

I figured this all out after encountering an ancient thread from another website where someone experiencing the same issue was told it was a problem associated with populating all of his Motherboards DIMM slots and the OP's inference that it had to do with using 2 different brands.

P.S. Still cannot use the preview window without crashing Max.

EDIT: Preview window started working out of the blue, no explanation and absolutely no issues ATM.

Hi,

Not sure if this has been asked already but is there any chance the Aburn pflow operator can be included with FumeFX at some point? That allowed you to pick the event you wanted to simulate instead of selecting the whole particle system.

If not then is there a work around to this at all?

Thanks

Does the Color parameter in the FFX Effector recognize a gradient or just solid color? I would like to map voxel temperature onto fire color, using the Color Master Effector, but it seems like only the "top" color value in the gradient is outputted (i.e. the color on the right end of the gradient), not the entire gradient. My assumption was that the input value (e.g 0.0 - 100.0) would be mapped to a position along the gradient (eg. 0-100%). Is this correct?
Thanks.

Is there a preferred workflow when working with Vue/3ds Max and Afterburn? I've tried setting up a scene with a PF source and adding AB. It renders the effect when there is no Vue scene loaded. If I load a Vue scene in Max, it either hangs on creating light cache (and the effect is visible) or the effect does not render at all (using vray).

Thanks for any advice.

Hi, I'm looking for an alternative to the MatteShadow material found in 3ds max.

I found the "Use Background" material in maya mental ray, and it works perfectly with geometry, but when I use FumeFX to cast shadows, the shadows doesn't appear on the surface. It's casting shadows perfectly onto any other shader, just not the "Use Background".

Is there anyway that I can get a surface/Shader in maya, that will only render the shadows from FumeFX cast onto it? That would be a big help, when dealing with comp.

Thank you

Hello,

fume crashes in the following case:

Create a particle system (not nparticle) keyframe the emission from any value to zero. Then create a particle source and set the fume container to Maximum simulation steps of 2 and the particle cache to oversample of 2.

Now if you start the simulation fume crashes as soon as the particles disappear.

I submitted the scene file as well.

I did not check yet if it also happens when you cache the particles with oversample of 2. Usually i just cached them with oversample of 1 and changed the value after they were cached. Nevertheless it would not really be an option, since it should work like this too.

Maya 2015 x64 with Fume 3.5.5.

Cheers
Radoslaw

Hi guys, i feel so stupid at the moment,

i was doing this dont know how many times, and lately i started getting errors:
Warning: ignoring smoke channel, it does not exist on disk! Turn off the sampling switch for Smoke //

scene is really simple,
- nParticles emitting some particles, then used fume particles source to simulate smoke (velocity is exported).

After sim is done i made a fume particle emitter and hit Play, then in fume particles i turned on Sample Density, and hit Play and the error came

// Warning: Your fume Grid does not have requested data! //

Then i made a particle follow field, and turned on Sample Density and got this error:

Warning: ignoring smoke channel, it does not exist on disk! Turn off the sampling switch for Smoke //

so i know i did this procedure 100x but dont know what went wrong, i have even watched again Allan McKay's tutorial to make sure i do everything right.

-the build is the latest one 3.5.5, could try go few ver back and check if that thing happen in some previous versions.

cheers

p.s.

small update, i just turned Off Density and turned On Velocity sample and so far no errors...