Phoenix wave splash against wall (huge scale)

[Jens]

Hi guys

I'm doing a very large scale project of an artificial island in a stormy sea. There will be several fly over animations and so far I'm doing okay with using a trial of phoenix fd and the ocean tex shader in corona. But I can't post on their forum regarding help since it's only a trial. Hence I post here hoping there's some experts who can give me a few pointers :) This is the first time I try Phoenix, so it's a bit overwhelming.

Basically when I get close to the island in the animation I want waves crashing against the concrete walls. Waves out here are huge and the walls around the island range from 20-30m high. Whole island is around 700m x 700m. So creating one big phoenix sim is not really possible (or is it?).

I finally found an okay setup after many trials (and crashes), but then the sim is "only" a 100x300x30m container. That's fine for 1/8th of the walls (island is octagon shape). So my thinking is, if it's possible to copy this sim container as an instance all around the island walls and have them maybe offset a little in frames so they blend?

Or how would you approach this so they blend okay together and also with the surrounding sea? I tried with "pure ocean" turned on and adaptive grid size, but there still seems to be an obvious "cut-off".

Bonus question: I'm doing the wave sim in a separate instance of max, is there any thing to be aware of in regards to xref'ing that into the main scene?

[georgi.zhekov]

Hey,

There should be no issue to make one large simulator around the island.

If you can't make it larger, probably the size sliders got maxed out. Just increase the cell size (or use the decrease resolution button) - this way you should be able to increase the grid size.

When doing such simulations scene scale is really important. Even if you scene is not built up to the real scale - you can change how the simulation behaves with the Scene scale option in the grid rollout of the simulator. You can find more about it here - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAX/Liquid+Grid

For the large waves you can take a look at this tutorial here -

As for the X-Refs there should be nothing special - it should work out of the box.

Cheers!

[Jens]

Thanks George

Scene units is in Meters and scene is build to scale. I have tried with a sim that covered the entire island, but got weird results. Water would still be generated inside the island volume and interaction was odd. Plus it takes a long time to sim (sadly my 3990x is not great for the sim, but more the render time.

I have tried to make a copy of the island geometry and made sure it was a solid object. Then added that to the include list. But that doesn’t do anything. Then the sim is not interacting with anything at all when I use the include/exclude list. And yes, I’m sure it was the include and not exclude list :)

I’m also getting so many crashes it’s crazy. Even without running the sim or rendering. As soon as a Phoenix sim is present in the scene, it doesn’t take long until Max’s UI bugs out (properties of objects and materials suddenly only show the “category tabs” but not the elements in each category. Be it the sim, an editable poly, material’s settings etc. See screenshot. First attachment shows the bug is "about to happen" as some of the dropdowns now won't do anything. If I then deselect the sim and select it again, it duplicates some of the categories (see attachment 2). Soon after a crash will happen.  (Max 2020, Vray 5 and Phoenix 4.0005 I think) the latest stable Phoenix releases makes it crash even without the sim.

I have watched the big wave tutorial many times and tried to install the nightly vray5 and Phoenix for max2021, it works okay, but also the occasional crash, problem here is I need to use a cloud farm to render the project and then I don’t think it will work with the nightlies right?

[Juraj]

Subscribing to thread. Every time I trialed Phoenix I realized I am dumb and it never worked how I wanted. Plus crashes, yes.

[Jens]

Subscribing to thread. Every time I trialed Phoenix I realized I am dumb and it never worked how I wanted. Plus crashes, yes.

haha yes, the tutorials mostly looks pretty straight forward, but when I try and copy them step by step, results are not the same at all and trying to find out the correlation between settings is crazy. At least when you are working with a deadline. Also the sample scenes on their site doesn't work out of the box when I try them out. Maybe it's a corona thing too...

[Juraj]

Straightforward tutorials indeed :- ). "That's the basics and now just make it pretty!"

[georgi.zhekov]

It should definitely not crash. Can you get us a scene that is crashing or if it is not scene specific what are the steps to crash it?

Phoenix 4.00 was released in almost 1 year and a half, since then we introduced a lot of fixes and improvements. The latest official version is 4.30. This should work with the render farms as well.
You can find what changed in each version here - https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAX/Version+Change+Logs

As for the strange liquid interaction - make sure that your geometry is clean (no overlapping faces, no single face geometry, no open edgec, etc), otherwise the simulation might not look good.
If you're using Include list - you will need to put everything in the list (sources, forces and all the geometry you need to interact with the sim).

[georgi.zhekov]

Subscribing to thread. Every time I trialed Phoenix I realized I am dumb and it never worked how I wanted. Plus crashes, yes.

haha yes, the tutorials mostly looks pretty straight forward, but when I try and copy them step by step, results are not the same at all and trying to find out the correlation between settings is crazy. At least when you are working with a deadline. Also the sample scenes on their site doesn't work out of the box when I try them out. Maybe it's a corona thing too...

The example scenes on the docs were setup with V-Ray, but it should be possible to make them work with Corona as well. We'll try to make Corona versions for the files, but until then - ping us if you find anything you need help with.

As for the tutorials - if you feel some of the tutorials on our page are not explained well or produce vastly different result, let us know which one is it and we'll investigate.

Thanks!

[Jens]

Cheers Georgi

Please take a look at the 2min video clip I just did: https://we.tl/t-alavxee56z

This or some version of a that type of crash happens 8 out of 10 times to me and it's both with max 2020 with "old" phoenix and vray5 builds and in brand new installed max 2021 with the latest nightly vray and phoenix. So it's very frustrating and time consuming trying to set up a sim.

I open a brand new scene. Scene and system units in meters. Corona 6 as active render (exact same result with vray5 as active render btw)
Create phoenix sim.
Add oceantex (no changes to it) as displacement in sim.
hit play and it goes okay.

If I then just click around a little in the sim and try to sim again. Nothing happens and it will crash. minidump download link: https://we.tl/t-LjvfJXj4SN

(i used the windows gaming record thing, so sorry you can't see the material window or the crash. But it only records the main max window for some reason).

[georgi.zhekov]

Thanks a lot for the video!

Can you also tell me the exact Phoenix version and Build ID you're using - you can do that from the Top 3ds max PhoenixFD menu > About Phoenix

Also can you send over the Phoenix log, please grab the Phoenix log immediately after the crash. If you start 3ds Max again, it would be overwritten. You can find the log in C:\ChaosPhoenix

Thanks!

[Jens]

Sure: 4.30.00, Build ID: 20200912

log attached. (i had to reopen max to check version, but was easy to make it crash again haha). Here is the new .dmp file for that crash so it "matches" the phoenix log: https://we.tl/t-iL0nvwZS80

Thanks for the quick replies. Its much appreciated.

[georgi.zhekov]

Thanks a lot for the help, unfortunately we can't reproduce the crash on our side and the dump shows that the crash is somewhere outside the phoenix code.

It might be a hardware issue (a few of our users have reported crashes that turned out to be faulty RAM). If possible can you run a memory test on your machine so we can rule this out?

[Jens]

ah, what a shame. Ok, I'll give memtest a try and report back asap.

[Jens]

Thanks a lot for the help, unfortunately we can't reproduce the crash on our side and the dump shows that the crash is somewhere outside the phoenix code.

It might be a hardware issue (a few of our users have reported crashes that turned out to be faulty RAM). If possible can you run a memory test on your machine so we can rule this out?

I tried with the windows built in memtest this morning (you could have warned me it would take many hours haha), but I worked on a different computer meanwhile. Interesting enough, I installed latest stable vray5 on that (the one released yesterday), and phoenix. Also on max2020. Simulator on that computer runs much better (it's an intel xeon). Only thing is, that if I opened the material editor, max would crash. It would happen even on an empty scene. This is first time it happens on that PC like that, so I suspected it was vray or phoenix. I uninstalled vray and voila, no crash anymore and phoenix would still run great - I thought I had to have vray5 installed for phoenix to work?

Anyway, last time I checked the memtest on the other computer it had reached 98% with no error found, so I switched back to my other PC (using same monitor). When I switched back later, the memtest screen was just black. I gave it a couple of hours, but still just black screen. So I rebooted it and tried to find the memtest log. I can only see a log of me starting the memtest, but no log of the result? Should I use a different method or does this in itself indicate mem failure on the last 2% of the test? (see screenshot)

[georgi.zhekov]

Can't say for sure what happened. It might be due to the the faulty memory or it might be Windows. You can check a few tips on the testing from the thread in our Phoenix facebook group here - https://www.facebook.com/groups/233735903483447/permalink/1565999250257099

As for V-Ray - you don't need it in order to simulate with Phoenix. Phoenix would still be able to simulate, load, save and preview caches, and it would render with the Scanline Renderer or Corona.

I hope this helps!