Hello,
I am working on a rather heavy dop simulation. I added a fileDop in my AutoDopNetwork and rendered out the sequence to .sim files. My question is now how do I go about reading that .sim information back in and then apply a shader and then render it out? I originally tried to render the dop sim straight from Mantra but it kept freezing at frame 1 so I thought I should go about it the .sim files way.
Any help would be very greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

If you put down another File DOP and set it to Read mode, you can just display that operator and then use Dop Import SOPs set to get the objects out of your simulation into Geo objects to shade and render.

In the attached file I created some cubes falling on the ground using the shelf, but then written them out and created a couple new geo containers that use Dop Imports to read the objects back out.

Hi Chelsea

Awesome thats great. Though now my problem is trying to write out the sim info. Keeps jamming 1/2 way through with that annoying memory allocation error. How should I go about getting around this? I am doing a a field of grass with wires in dops and it has to be rather heavy due to the density of the grass.

BTW- is this Graham Thompson? Its chelsea here from vfs.

Of course it's me!

Some ideas would be to break the simulation up into chunks and sim them individually, wedge some lower resolution sims and combine them together to form a higher res one, or perhaps just simulate a low res sim and them use those as guide hair for fur.

you lost me. How would I break them up into chunks and then put them back together?

Are you turning *cache simulation* off as you write it out to disk. This is at the top level of the autoDopNetwork and is also usually defaulted to a pretty low cache amount as well ( I think 500 mbs)

This is only used if you want to preview your sim in realtime w/o writing it ti disk and I usually keep it off, and always do if I am writing out a sim. to disk.

The wedgeRop technique is where you sim low res (like a smaller amount of particles or large step size) jitter and read them back in and combine them into a large sim. - this works great for particles, spf and sdf fluids but not sure if it would work in your situation.

There is a very good tutorial on the wedge rop on the SFX web site.

s