Phoniex - Water Sim calculated - now how to send to render?

[l.croxton]

Hey,

I've got a little bit of an issue which I am struggling to find the answer online.

In short -

I've got a water simulation rendered with Phoniex.

I want to render just frame 20 of this simulation.

I have tried sending it to backburner through the normal (submit to network) and it hasn't worked. I thought it would just have the simulation data saved and so it would act just like it does when I hit render on Max.

So my question is this.

How do I render a specific frame of my simulation on backburner as it gives me all the nice effects like motion blur etc that I want. Worst case I can back into a mesh and render but it will look nowhere near as nice. I've taken a look at albemic files but so far I've not managed to get it to work. I've tried the online guide to submit to BackBurner but it doesn't appear to work either.

Any help would be awesome.

Right now my fail safe is to simply render as open on max and then come back to the office later and start the other queued up renders.

Cheers!

[TomG]

At a guess, the simulation is not being sent over Backburner. The sim creates files that must be loaded, similar to having to load a texture. You'd have to make the location of the simulation files (.AUR) visible across the network on a shared location, or copy the simulation files over to the identical file path on the backburner machines. I don't believe it is possible (or desired) to send the .aur files at the time of rendering in the same way that textures can be sent at the time of rendering. Of course, the same version of Phoenix will need to be installed on all machines that will be taking part in rendering.

https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAX/Distributed+Rendering

BTW, you can also do the sim over backburner, https://docs.chaos.com/display/PHX4MAX/Phoenix+Backburner+Simulation

[l.croxton]

Thanks @TomG

I am actually rendering all locally, I just use Backburner as a way to que up all my work throughout the day to then render overnight. So I would have assumed (which is likely totally my ignorance to this) that it would just be like a "baked" version of the 3DS Max file, just re-opened up and rendered.

I'll certainly take another look at this and I certainly recognise the links to using a network of machines for the simulation... maybe that'll help me when I can convince myself that I need another machine!

Thanks again :)