ICE particle caching via the Cloud?

[thomashogben]

Hi,

I have been googling for a service that provides cloud based running of a ICE simulation/xsi scene that will write the cache files for a simulation.

Does this service exist or is it even practical? As reading back from a very dense particle cloud cache would still be an intensive workload, but could be sent straight to the render farm I believe...?

I am working on a scene which has a particle count of around 10,000 visible and again 10,000ish invisible control particles and I would like to up my visible particles to around 100,000 (or higher if possible) but locally on my machine (HP z400) this is not achievable.

Any advice welcome..

[Helli]

What do you mean with cloud based caching ?

Like severyl machienes calculate 1 frame ?
If so, then no something like this isn't avaible imho. And ICE doesn't have distributed simulation calculation like realflow has.

So in the end I would say you are stuck caching everything on 1 machiene.

[thomashogben]

Thank you for the reply.

I feared this may be the case, and my university tutor thought the same..

I will continue to look at building efficiency in my scene instead.

[dwigfor]

I will continue to look at building efficiency in my scene instead.

For adding additional particles, I'm not sure if it'd be of help, but have you ever used PostSim stack. I never had until following Andy's blog - http://andy.moonbase.net/archives/844Rest on site is great - http://andy.moonbase.net/

10000 doesn't seem that much. Are you using repeat nodes?

[Tekano]

Hi,
I am working on a scene which has a particle count of around 10,000 visible and again 10,000ish invisible control particles and I would like to up my visible particles to around 100,000 (or higher if possible) but locally on my machine (HP z400) this is not achievable.

Any advice welcome..

I am not sure what you are doing wrong but the most particles I've ever rendererd in Softimage was 46 million. Of course the only renderer back then that could cope in a reasonable amount of time was / is Exocortex Fury. it was rendering each frame at 1min 30 seconds with motion blur. I had cached a pointcloud of 6.5 million particles at a time and duplicated and offset this in space 7 times. 46 million.

some tips:

I think the trick is not to display them all at once with the graphics card (unless you are screen capturing) not sure what the percentage limit reduction for display was as I was rendering the end result with Fury anyways.

Also display as points..? if you are displaying particles as automatic or spheres or anything other than points then I could understand the 100k limit you have.

use a renderer that can cope with large amounts..? do not think HQV would cope with 46 million

the spec of the workstation at the time (3 years ago) was pretty good and it had a quaddro 4000 card in I believe.

of course, here is a pic or it didnt happen

many_part5icles.jpg

[thomashogben]

Thanks for your advice, I will look into Andys blog.. looks interesting already.

And that 46 million particle scene looks staggering! I will look further at that also.

I think the issue I am having is that I am using a image projection (HDR to give wide dynamic range) to inform the speed, scale and colour of the emitted particles.

My goal is to create a artistic representation of what light would look like moving through space. Visualizing what it would be like to shoot slow motion with a camera at trillion frames per second and observe the light moving through space. (its for my uni project more info here: http://thomashogbenvfx.tumblr.com/ )

Here is a pic of my main Ice tree:



I am also using to invisible clouds to control the movement of the cloud above:


This moves the cloud towards the modeled environment.


And this assists the general movement.

And here is a rough test using the 10,000 particles.

[Tekano]

right, from seeing your playblast I see you have spheres and each one has a strand trail generated. perhaps you are blobbing them as well.. you will not be able to display that many in the viewport but still could render a heck of a lot more than 10,000 with mental ray or vray or arnold etc you are better off using an instance object though rather than blobbing each particle along strands. there are also optimisation settings you could do to the strand length amount of points as well as the resolution of the spheres / blobs.

also need to set >Particle Display>Display % to a much lower number, that way you will be able to work with a lot higher amounts of particles.


and finally, from quick once over your trees, am wary of the spawn particles. its very easy to oversaturate or mess up and generate two many spawns of a spawn ad infinitum.. etc. it may be that which is causing a fail at 10k and some judicial pruning of the logic involved may fix the situation. ie kill unnecessary particles early and often

[thomashogben]

Ahh i see.. I thought using the preset shapes, sphere or blob would be more efficient. Still have a awful lot to learn..

Will drop out the spawning, its not adding anything to the look i'm going for and I also wasnt aware of the particle display controls, will have a explore with that today.. thank you for your help Tekano. Very helpful indeed!

[Tekano]

my pleasure, and finally you can still use spheres / blob shapes to render but only display points in the viewport. this would be your best bet for optimization whilst continuing with what you have got. this is how I work, but do take a look at particle shape / blob resolution it could shave hours off the render time for not much difference visually.