FLUIDOS plugin for Carrara -- version 1.4 update

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  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:
    Alberto said:

    If fact, this slider exists. The actual rate is given by the Completion FluidS modifier; you can stretch and shrink as you wish. Only take into account the timing of the other animated objects.

    Already tried, doesn't help. Shortening the completion also shortens the fluid animation and half of the animation is stlil. Plus it doesn't match anymore with the other animated objects. For example, if I make someone pouring a glass of water and mistakenly spill some on the table, the moment when this happens will not match with the fluids if I modify the completion slider.

    Sorry, I didn't express myself clearly.

    Do not shorten the slider itself, set it 100 % at the frame it is supposed to be the finish time. E.g., set 48 FPS and 48 frames in Fluid domain properties.Then, set  the Completion slider to 100 % at the 24th frame; finally, render it at 24 fps frame rate to get one second of animation. Of course, you can use other rates.

    This is an example: Source48fps.car

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    So I have to make the simulation to have 600FPS for 600 frames?
    I'll try, thanks.

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    After a long, colossal calculation it gave me 600 empty files. It doesn't work... sad
    Probably it requires too much resources, even if it says the max size was 9Mb.

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:

    So I have to make the simulation to have 600FPS for 600 frames?
    I'll try, thanks.

    No, no. If you want to render 600 frames at 30 fps rate, you could set, for example, 60 FPS and 1200 frames in Fluidos and 30 fps in Carrara render. 

    That is:

    Number of frames in Fluidos simulation = (# frames in rendering) * (FPS in Fluidos) / (fps rate in render)

      where the FPS in Fluidos is the needed one to get the desired results in simulation (i.e, no gaps in the flow, etc.)

     

    Imago said:

    After a long, colossal calculation it gave me 600 empty files. It doesn't work... sad
    Probably it requires too much resources, even if it says the max size was 9Mb.

    I don't think it is a resources issue. If you get 600 empty files, the problem is much more probably in the scene arrangement. May I take a look at it?

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    I would like to send you the scene file, but it's about 3 gigs (!!!)

    I'll try again and let you know.

    Making some tests I found out that making the "expansion" value oscillate with the tweener the gaps gets filled and the stream is truly smooth! But the flow gets wider. It doesn't fit my needs but maybe someone else could use this info! laugh

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:

    I would like to send you the scene file, but it's about 3 gigs (!!!)

    I'll try again and let you know.

    Making some tests I found out that making the "expansion" value oscillate with the tweener the gaps gets filled and the stream is truly smooth! But the flow gets wider. It doesn't fit my needs but maybe someone else could use this info! laugh

    Only send me images of the scene, the hierarchy, the parameters of Fluid Domain, solids, liquids, sources and FluidS modifier.

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    No need, I found out the problem, I forgot to move away the sphere marker (from where the flow starts) and the fluids simply disappeared impacting the inner part of it! Dumb me! blushcheeky

    I also tried the parameter you suggested me, it worked, somehow, but it isn't fully synched with the animation. It follows it closely enough to not be noted too much, anyway.
    The worst are the simulation times, colossal! From about 2 minutes at 300 frames-30FPS to about 20 minutes with 600 frames-60FPS. crying

    I guess I'll simply modify every OBJ to look better when exporting to DAZ.

    Anyway, thanks for the help, the time, the patience and the plugin, Alberto! laugh

    Looking for new versions with more options! wink

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,145

    I would have thought that if you double the number of frames you would double the amount of calculation time - not ten times as much!

  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311
    edited January 2018

    Imago,. you shouldn;t need to change the length of your animation,.

    You should be able to set the simulation to 60fps,. but leave your animation at 24 , or whatever..

    I did some quick tests last night and was able to have V4 animated, reacting to the liquid hitting,.  the main isuse for me,. was the size and effect of the fluid,. and the distance from the figure.

    I think that this effect may be easier and better if it's broken up into a couple of shots.

    1, a shot of the source about to be squirted

    1a, a shot of the fluid in flight

    2, a shot of the impact and reaction (with a smaller grid size, and close up camera view) you should be able to get a reasonable liquid effect

    In my tests i found that increasing the sim frame rate was effective at creating a solid stream,. (variation of the velocity of flow can also help)

    it didn't take much longer to simulate. at 24, or 60, or 75 fps  and the animation (at 24fps) was still in sync with the flow.

    also,. if your'e working with animated figures,. try to keep them as simple as possible (naked),. ideally you want to use the memory and processing power of your system to calculate the simulation, rather than holding all the info about your figures morphs, clothing and hair.

    If possible,. use a simplified stand in object (proxy) rather than a full figure,

    PS,. if you're scene files are 3GB,. you may be doing something like saving the scene internally,.(save Locally)  or you're using Genesis,. which carrara has issues with.

    Carrara saves the Models in the scene,. and that includes any loaded morphs,. so, since all genesis morphs get loaded, (whether they are used or not) that can make a very large file.

    Hope it helps

    Post edited by 3DAGE on
  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311

    pics of stuff

    starfish1.jpg
    1280 x 720 - 695K
    surf1.jpg
    1280 x 720 - 836K
    beachline_oct123.jpg
    1280 x 720 - 772K
  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    Yes, last part about Genesis, explains why I get colossal saves when using it... But even in scenes containing only the domain, the source e the visualizer, I get about 800mb of final size. Maybe it saves the whole set of generated fluids.

    About the simulation, it takes a lot of time just making the domain from 300 to 600 frames and the FPS from 30 to 60. I didn't did other changes!
    And I get those times in an empty scene with a very small domain. Dunno, maybe my drivers are bad!
    I'm doing more experiments, but basically I got what I need. The only "itch" is the flow's appearance.
     

  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311
    edited January 2018

    I'm getting scene files that are under 1mb for a simulation with some objects,.. the beach/rocks scene (above) is only 978kb. the one i'm working on right now uses a V4 figure and is just over 5mb

    the simulation data should be getting saved into your external folder, and it's only being saved to, and read from that folder into the .car scene,. so that shouldn't effect the saved scene size.

    Before you save a scene file,. Go to EDIT / Remove unused Masters / remove unused objects / shaders

    Carrara keeps any objects or shaders you load into the scene available (for Undo) so you need to clear those out before saving.

    also clear out your "MyDocuments/Daz3D/DAZTemp" folder,.... regularly,. to clean up after carrara.

    I'm not sure why you're doing 300 to 600 frames,. that's quite a long animation/simulation, but,.. i'm not sure exactly what effect you're going for... splashed with a bucket of liquid or drenched with a garden hose, or something else,. it's your animation.

    it's only the fluidos FPS you need to change, not the animation timing.  (i'm using 120fps for the sim of a 96 frame (4sec) scene)  you should leave your animation unaltered EG: 24 fps .

    If it's possible, try to reduce the animation length,. or split it into a couple of simulations ? ....jus to make things easier/faster.

     

    RE flow appearance,.  I've reduced the domain size in my scene with V4  to 20x20x20 inch, with the camera focused on the head/upper torso area, to get the impact of the flow, using the smaller cell size of 0.020

    That seems to work for liquid at that "figure" scale,. but it's slow to calculate,. the smaller the domain size,.. the smaller the cell size can be, the drawback is that you've only got a small area for the effect. which makes avoiding the collision of the fluid against the Domain walls , tricky.

    Adding in the Diffuse particles, help's to fill in some gaps in the main flow.

    on another note,. i've noticed a build up of system ram during the sim,. which remains after the sim is complete,. and the scene file has been saved and closed,. it only frees up that system ram after exiting carrara , maybe alberto can have a look at whether that's something that could be free'd up after the sim is completed

    Post edited by 3DAGE on
  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158
    edited January 2018

    I'm not changing the animation, only the domain parameters.

    If you tried to do some animation you surely know how much it costs retime 10 seconds ( 300 frames) of an animation.

    Anyway, I found the right method to have full stream without any issues, being stubborn beared some fruit! laugh

    It's the dumbest and more effective way, I still wonder why I didn't thought about it before!

    After setting everything in the scene, I simply have to make the source move  a bit on the emissioni direction, starting when the flow starts and stopping it when the flow stops.

    For example, at frame 30 the water starts pouring from the bottle, source on position Y 0. The flow direction is +Y, velocity 20.

    At frame 90 the water stops and the source moved to position Y 2 from  Y 0 along the 60 frames of simulation. Using the linear tweener the effect is perfect.

    I hope this can help other users.

    And I'll do what you suggested to make saves lighter, 3DAGE!  Thanks for the tip!

    Now something for Alberto, a little bug I think I found. When the source is placed next to a bone ( in chars structures) the plugin produces only files of exactly 227 bytes each and apparently empty. Moving it a bit away from the bone the source starts behaving normally, with right file sizes. I'm sure the flow could not impact with the mesh itself because I made a special morph that moves the polygons away, so I could have more space for the source ( the tip of the finger) and have it start from under the skin level.

    Post edited by Imago on
  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,987
    3DAGE said:

    pics of stuff

    terrific 'stuff' 3dage ! love the feeling of mist as well

     

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:

    Now something for Alberto, a little bug I think I found. When the source is placed next to a bone ( in chars structures) the plugin produces only files of exactly 227 bytes each and apparently empty. Moving it a bit away from the bone the source starts behaving normally, with right file sizes. I'm sure the flow could not impact with the mesh itself because I made a special morph that moves the polygons away, so I could have more space for the source ( the tip of the finger) and have it start from under the skin level.

    Let me see a image of your 3DView and of the hierarchy, please.

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    edited February 2018
    PhilW said:

    I would have thought that if you double the number of frames you would double the amount of calculation time - not ten times as much!

    Certainly, most of the time is as you said, Phil. But sometimes, this strange behavior could happen. This, I think, could be the cause:

    During a simulation, when a fluid source is active without a sink, the fluid cells are progressively increasing in the domain. The more fluid cells, the slower the engine (fluid cells are the grid cells actually filled with fluid instead of solid or empty)
    On the other hand, the results of simulation are not the same with two distinct FPS (due to internals of the GridFluidSim3D simulation engine: the larger FPS values, the more realistic results).
    So high FPS and sources without sinks in the same simulation could accumulate much more fluid cells than low FPS, so the calculation times could be dramatically different.

    Post edited by Alberto on
  • JuselJusel Posts: 12

    Can´t load fluidsim.dll - problem

    I get this message using windows 10. On the some machine using windows 7 (on different partition) it is working.
    I tried to install it in standard location (path) and on a second drive, some results.
    Any ideas?

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158
    edited February 2018
    Alberto said:
    Imago said:

    Now something for Alberto, a little bug I think I found. When the source is placed next to a bone ( in chars structures) the plugin produces only files of exactly 227 bytes each and apparently empty. Moving it a bit away from the bone the source starts behaving normally, with right file sizes. I'm sure the flow could not impact with the mesh itself because I made a special morph that moves the polygons away, so I could have more space for the source ( the tip of the finger) and have it start from under the skin level.

    Let me see a image of your 3DView and of the hierarchy, please.

    Here you go.
    Position1 generates the 227kb files, Position2 works properly. The hand has the special morph I told you about, it simply moves the finger tip back making more room for the emitter. When I disable that morph, the flow starts from under the skin, with a nicer and cleaner effect.

    That "Dominio" is the domain. I like to change names to things I use! cheeky
    As you can see, the difference is so sligthly that the values in Motion tab doesn't change, but it is enough to solve the problem.

     

    Position1.jpg
    1339 x 1080 - 352K
    Position2.jpg
    1339 x 1080 - 362K
    Post edited by Imago on
  • 3DAGE3DAGE Posts: 3,311
    edited February 2018

    I'm glad you got a solution for the flow imago :)

    If you tried to do some animation you surely know how much it costs retime 10 seconds ( 300 frames) of an animation.

    I do know :)  ,.. there are some easier ways

    In Carrara,. you can select a bunch of keyframes,(drag rect).. hold CTRL while you drag the one of the end/start keyframes to stretch out or squash the length of your animation.

    Carrara will stretch or squash the keyframes evenly to keep the same relative timing.

    Note: ALT drag will create a copy of the selected keyframes, which can be handy for repetitive bit's of animation.

    If you're dealing with figure animation, where there can be sub-branches which may be hidden,. it's easier to make an NLA clip of your animation,. then you can retime that nla clip in the NLA tab ,. you can adjust the speed of playback, loop or reverse the clip.

    In the Graph editor, if you drag around a bunch of keys,. there's a dashed rectangle selection area, which you can click and drag/push to stretch out the selection or squash to change the values or timing.

    Using nla clips can be easier to work with,.. and you can always reload the keyframe data from the NLA clip, back into the sequencer, to continue animating/editing, then ,. when you're happy,. make that final animation into a new NLA clip,. and save it to you're browser (my clips) for use in other scenes.

     hope it helps :)

     

    Thanks headwax :)  

    beach in1.jpg
    1280 x 720 - 715K
    Post edited by 3DAGE on
  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    @ 3DAGE

    Thanks for the tips, but I do my animations in DAZ Studio. Actually, once created the fluids in Carrara I export them as OBJ, import on DAZ and render with it. Carrara is good for many things, but I find DAZ Studio way more easy for animations.

    @ Jusel

    Check if you installed the DLL in the right place... It sounds dumb but it happen very often! cheeky

  • PhilWPhilW Posts: 5,145

     

    Imago said:

    @ 3DCarrara is good for many things, but I find DAZ Studio way more easy for animations.

     

    I have done animation in both and find Carrara way easier than DS. Horses for courses I suppose.

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 9,987
    3DAGE said:

    I'm glad you got a solution for the flow imago :)

    If you tried to do some animation you surely know how much it costs retime 10 seconds ( 300 frames) of an animation.

    I do know :)  ,.. there are some easier ways

    In Carrara,. you can select a bunch of keyframes,(drag rect).. hold CTRL while you drag the one of the end/start keyframes to stretch out or squash the length of your animation.

    Carrara will stretch or squash the keyframes evenly to keep the same relative timing.

    Note: ALT drag will create a copy of the selected keyframes, which can be handy for repetitive bit's of animation.

    If you're dealing with figure animation, where there can be sub-branches which may be hidden,. it's easier to make an NLA clip of your animation,. then you can retime that nla clip in the NLA tab ,. you can adjust the speed of playback, loop or reverse the clip.

    In the Graph editor, if you drag around a bunch of keys,. there's a dashed rectangle selection area, which you can click and drag/push to stretch out the selection or squash to change the values or timing.

    Using nla clips can be easier to work with,.. and you can always reload the keyframe data from the NLA clip, back into the sequencer, to continue animating/editing, then ,. when you're happy,. make that final animation into a new NLA clip,. and save it to you're browser (my clips) for use in other scenes.

     hope it helps :)

    Thanks headwax :)  

    pleasure - that's another beauty too

     

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436

    Ryan Guy is creating a plugin for Blender https://github.com/rlguy/Blender-FLIP-Fluids-Beta (The simulator engine of Fluidos is based on a Guy's simulator)

     

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    Viscosity! Sticky fluids! surprise
    Looks nice... But I guess I will never use it, since it's very hard obtain a fully functional export-import between Carrara/DAZ Studio and Blender. And because my brain can't face the nightmare of sliders and options within Blender! cheeky

    Anyway, if it's possible in Blender, I guess it's possible in Carrara too! (Rolls his eyes after shortly gazing Albertodevil)

     

  • I found an odd glitch

    my animations stop rendering in Octane, I can force it to continue pressing next frame but then unless I batch rename the image sequence virtualdub only loads to last stop

    it is an Octane issue not a FLUIDOS one as Carrara render works fine

    I just have to watch the blighter and keep clicking and rename the results

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158
    th3Digit said:

    I found an odd glitch

    my animations stop rendering in Octane, I can force it to continue pressing next frame but then unless I batch rename the image sequence virtualdub only loads to last stop

    it is an Octane issue not a FLUIDOS one as Carrara render works fine

    I just have to watch the blighter and keep clicking and rename the results

    Not very In-Topic, but your post made me remember about another strange behaviour with the plugin, 100% checked and can be easily recreated.
    When I put Genesis1 inside the domain and then I parent to it "PH Space Hair", putting it inside the char's hierarchy (Genesis->Hair), and then you try to save the scene there are two possibilities:
    1) Error on save. The file isn't saved at all, the temporary save file is deleted.
    2) It saves a corrupted .CAR file, impossible to load again. It gives the MCToken.cpp error even if the files isn't compressed. No chance to recover it by unzip trick.
    The issue stops happening if I move the hair from inside the char hierarchy, still leaving it inside the domain. Also it doesn't happen if I leave the hair parented inside the char and moving the char outside the domain. In the moment I put the char inside the domain again, the issue returns, until I move the hair outside the char's hierarchy.
    This happens with any other kind of setup and Domain/Source settings.

    I haven't tried other hair prop yet, as soon I have some spare time I'll do some more tests.

    Not a big deal since is easily solvable, but I wanted to make all aware of it. wink

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:

    Viscosity! Sticky fluids! surprise
    Looks nice... But I guess I will never use it, since it's very hard obtain a fully functional export-import between Carrara/DAZ Studio and Blender. And because my brain can't face the nightmare of sliders and options within Blender! cheeky

    Anyway, if it's possible in Blender, I guess it's possible in Carrara too! (Rolls his eyes after shortly gazing Albertodevil)

     

     

    Like this? https://youtu.be/4rEufokAGnA

    image

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158

    Yes, something like it... And I read "not released yet"... It's an update? laugh

  • AlbertoAlberto Posts: 1,436
    Imago said:

    Yes, something like it... And I read "not released yet"... It's an update? laugh

    Yes, it's an update, but it isn't ready yet.

  • ImagoImago Posts: 5,158
    Alberto said:

    Yes, it's an update, but it isn't ready yet.

    Yay! I love updates! Can't wait to see what you made this time! laugh

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