I notice when I run sims my main hard disk fills up rapidly…the problem is that this is on my c drive which i don't have a great deal of space on.

how do I change it so that houdini uses another drive for temp files instead?

thanks.

Yes, it's a problem on small drives, such as SSD. Try this:

http://ask-leo.com/how_do_i_change_the_location_of_windows_temporary_files.html [ask-leo.com]

thankyou,i'll give try that.

Hey,i checked out your vimeo link,turns out i've seen your stuff before,and is what inspired me to give houdini a go.heh.

:wink:

Oh! Thank you! That's a good start for my Sunday!

haha great.

Unfornately my system is probably too limited to do the kinds of things your doing. :cry:

nubian-anubis
I notice when I run sims my main hard disk fills up rapidly…the problem is that this is on my c drive which i don't have a great deal of space on.

how do I change it so that houdini uses another drive for temp files instead?

thanks.

I'm not sure, but you could try to set HOUDINI_TEMP_DIR env. variable to something better for you.

well i changed a few things in the link that Soothsayer provided…now i'm getting lots of errors and some software now isn't working properly on my computer.

now i have no idea how to fix it..

:?

just great… :roll:

I'll try your idea SYmek when I fix the problems the other has caused (if i can)

You could also approach this from a different angle and ask:
*)Why are my sims producing so much data?
Probably because they are set to cache to memory whilst simming (uncheck the checkbox on the dopnet node)?
For heavy simulations you should consider turning this off and simply caching to disk. That way you can specify where the sim files go, apart from that, having more memory always helps.

*) From the sound of it, you are running out of physical memory. At that point virtual memory (swap files on disk) is being used. Not only is this slow, but it will also consume disk space as you noticed.

When simming fluids it might be a good idea to simply save the last 5 frames of the simulation as sim files and write out the fields to disk. You generally only need to write out a few fields such as density, velocity, rest, rest1, Cd,… for rendering. The other (burn, heat, temperature,fuel,…) can help but are not that crucial - depends on what you use in your shader.

*) When the simulation crashes you have those 5 frames as sim files so you can restart your sim. These sim files tend to be really heavy as they have all the data inside.

thanks peter,I am too unfamiliar with making simulations to ever think of those things.

I will now,though.thankyou very much.

I will keep these things in mind,now and in the future.

(learning allot here)