I'm having a problem that my simulations becomes very slow to view or preview in the viewport. even though they have been simulated.

Is it possible somehow to view a proxy or a less detailed version of a pyro simulation to make it faster? For example show ever n voxel cube or so. Often I just need to see roughly what is going on if I'm moving lights around and so.

I have a fast machine too. 2 Titan X cards and 28 CPU cores.
So far the only way I know is render a flip book to see what the animation looks like. but that doesn't help with moving things around in the scene.
Another thought would be to connect another simulation so its identical but has much less resolution.

Thoughts?
/Andreas

hello.
do you check open cl is on in advanced tab of pyrosolver node?
as far as i know fluid simulation can not be converted to a lower resolution because of calculations are different onto this two levels.
for example if you have nuclear explosion in low resolution and you want to be in a higher resolution, you may miss nuclear shape of your explosion!
with this description all you can do is use open cl and cache out sim.

Hi.
OpenCL doesnt really make any difference for me. Its almost exactly the same frame rate. Maybe I need to do some more settings?

I spent the evening experimenting and I have come up with a pretty good solution that is much better than what I had before.

1) Set the high resolution and go into the pyro_import node. Now press Save To Disk. This is the high res simulation.
2) Go back to the pyro node and greatly reduce your resolution. Simulate this.

3) Now you can toggle between high res and low res by going into the pyro_import and check the load_from_disk on/off.

If I decide to change something in the simulation I just press the Save to Disk again to create a new high res simulation.
I found this low res proxy is especially useful for moving around lights. A fairly high res simulation with 17 miljon voxels takes about 5 seconds to update each time I move a light making it very unpleasant to work with. The low res proxy is of course completely real time.

Any more thoughts are of course welcome
Andreas

You can adjust the maximum 3D texture size in the display options, down to something like 32x32x32 (Display Options, Textures).

twod
You can adjust the maximum 3D texture size in the display options, down to something like 32x32x32 (Display Options, Textures).

Hiya, that is a great tip. Its not as fast as the method I'm using but still way faster than normally in Houdini.

I updated my version a bit
- I save the simulation to disk, and then I use a volume Visualization to view it. Then this is marked to be used for render.
- Then I add a visualization node to the the normal simulation in pyro_import
This means I can quickly toggle between two different simulation resolutions.

If I like I can then decide what resolution do I want to be seen in viewport and rendered.
The visualizers also gives some extra control for the smoke which I appreciate.
/Andreas