multiple fume grid rendering

[ss891317]

when render more than 2 fume grids then I have some frames drop and cast shadow flickering in render farm.
sometimes it looks fine but most of rendering has same problem. Any idea ?

[Rif]

Ram .. Check your Ram usage on the farm ..

When using multiple grids , both of the IM maps are going to be Added 1 on top of the other during render time.. If the farm is missing ram space , it might drop some .. that would be the first thing to check i would say ..

[dahlinger]

on the topic of multiple fume grids in a scene:

Because I am new to FumeFX, I don't mind embarrassing myself if the answer is obvious

How do you turn off a single fumeFX object from rendering? Say I have a scene with several fumeFX sims, each is rendered separately to be composited individually later. Sure I can go to the render tab and turn off fire and smoke, but even if the fumeFX object is hidden, it still calculates the rendering of all fumeFX sims in the scene. I thought that it would act like afterburn, where you can turn it off in the environment dialog, or if it is hidden, then it would not render. Is there no simple, "OFF" checkbox or method?

Thanks for any help!

Bill

[Rif]

Each Grid is a max Object ..

Witch means that it has All the Standard Max Object properties..
If you Right click on a grid , and you Select Not Renderable , Or , not Visible to camera , etc... you will get the Normal max Expected Behaviors..

Make sence ?

[dahlinger]

Thanks Rif, that's very helpful to know. It makes sense ...except if you hide an object, it doesn't render.

Thanks!
Bill

Each Grid is a max Object ..

Witch means that it has All the Standard Max Object properties..
If you Right click on a grid , and you Select Not Renderable , Or , not Visible to camera , etc... you will get the Normal max Expected Behaviors..

Make sence ?

[bdemetz]

"when render more than 2 fume grids then I have some frames ....cast shadow flickering in render farm.
sometimes it looks fine but most of rendering has same problem. Any idea ?"

We are having this problem in a major way and it's killing our preplanned method of rendering several blasts together. It's almost as if the order of shadows is random from frame to frame. We are NOT running out of ram. Is there a solution or workaround?

[sitnisati]

Brian,

Does this happen if you render locally ?
Do you loose self-shadows as well ?
Are you sure you do not run out of memory ?

If you resim with double grid spacing (a lot less memory consumption), does it
render okay ?

Thank you.

Kresimir

[bdemetz]

Due to time constraints, we ended up rendering all the explosions individually. In this case, they ended up blending together ok. Actually it took exponentially less time (i.e. 1 blast took less than 1/3 the time that 3 would have together), though it would have been nice to have blasts shadow each other.

re: Does this happen if you render locally ?
a: i'll need to test that - deadlines, deadlines ; /

Do you loose self-shadows as well ?
a: looks like it

Are you sure you do not run out of memory ?
a: i'd like to say yes but if it's hovering around 6gb out of the 8gb our farm machines have, it could be trying to spike up and run out - not sure.

If you resim with double grid spacing (a lot less memory consumption), does it
render okay ?
a: havent' been able to try this either.

Since i have no other tests results to offer, perhaps i can just ask - if there is enough memory available, is this something that is supposed to render fine with no popping issues?

Thx again Kresimir

[sitnisati]

Hi Brian,

If FumeFX was rendered in viewport, it means that data is loaded in memory.
Now, if you do not get any shadow from a FumeFX with IM enabled, it means that IM was not build and
this will happen if you left out of memory. With lots of memory allocation, it can get fragmented.
Even if still have 20% free memory, maybe there is a big chunk that cannot fit into any empty slot (so to speak).
For next update, I will try to log somehow if user end up with low memory on IM.

Regards,

Kresimir

[bdemetz]

Thanks Kresimir for the information. That is probably what was happening. We ended up rendering our explosions separarely and then rendered rgb masks of adjacent blasts without shadows for comp to blend between them - worked great. The only thing we didn't have of course was shadowing between blasts which for these shots was ok looking.