Hi, this is Ryan here, a developer of the FLIP Fluids addon! Starting this Monday, I’ll be writing you a weekly update of what has been going in in the past week of development.
Thanks to the enormous amount of support from the Blender Community, the FLIP Fluids project has been able to continue full-time development for the past 20 months! As the project grows and becomes more complex, a brief weekly update will be helpful to communicate to you what we have been working on, provide links/references to changes in the addon, and let you know about new documentation topics and learning resources. By digitizing and organizing scribbles from my log book, this will also help me keep track of the many tasks that come up during a typical work week.
This week, I began following a Phoenix FD course in large scale liquid and whitewater simulation effects. The purpose of taking this course is to help me better understand how the Phoenix FD simulator and get ideas for what useful feature we could add to our FLIP Fluids addon. Currently 26% complete!
Successfully compiled the Alembic library for Windows
I had made a few attempts in the past to compile this library for Windows, but was always unsuccessful, but an attempt this week was successful. In the past I had tried the MSVC 2017 and 2019 compilers. This time, using MSVC 2015 ended up be straightforward.
The purpose for testing Alembic compiling/distribution is that we may need to implement our own Blender Alembic exporter in the future in order to attach motion blur data to our fluid meshes for rendering. This testing is in preparation for a Blender feature that is in progress that allows motion blur rendering for an Alembic cache: https://developer.blender.org/D2388.
It was brought to my attention that the latest version of FLIP Fluids (1.0.7) has a compatibility issue with the OctaneRender for Blender 2.81 that would cause the render server to crash.
When I updated the render scripts for Blender 2.81, I made a mistake when setting an Octane option.
The problem is that the Octane mesh type for the fluid_surface object is being set incorrectly within the scripts. The fluid surface is being set to mesh type that is not allowed to change shape between frames.
This has been fixed for the next FLIP Fluids version. A workaround to this issue for now is to set the fluid_surface Octane Mesh Type to Reshapable Proxy.
This mesh type tells Octane that the fluid surface changes shape between frames and should prevent the errors.
More Development Notes:
Bug Fix: Issue #483 – Fixed issue where the fluid_surface object could become unrecoverable if deleted within the viewport.
New Documentation Topics:
The importance of scale– Setting an appropriate scale for the physics helps ensure realistic fluid motion.
Weekly Development Notes #1
Covering the week of December 9th – 13th, 2019.
Hi, this is Ryan here, a developer of the FLIP Fluids addon! Starting this Monday, I’ll be writing you a weekly update of what has been going in in the past week of development.
Thanks to the enormous amount of support from the Blender Community, the FLIP Fluids project has been able to continue full-time development for the past 20 months! As the project grows and becomes more complex, a brief weekly update will be helpful to communicate to you what we have been working on, provide links/references to changes in the addon, and let you know about new documentation topics and learning resources. By digitizing and organizing scribbles from my log book, this will also help me keep track of the many tasks that come up during a typical work week.
RedefineFX: Phoenix FD Advanced Water FX Course
This week, I began following a Phoenix FD course in large scale liquid and whitewater simulation effects. The purpose of taking this course is to help me better understand how the Phoenix FD simulator and get ideas for what useful feature we could add to our FLIP Fluids addon. Currently 26% complete!
Successfully compiled the Alembic library for Windows
I had made a few attempts in the past to compile this library for Windows, but was always unsuccessful, but an attempt this week was successful. In the past I had tried the MSVC 2017 and 2019 compilers. This time, using MSVC 2015 ended up be straightforward.
The purpose for testing Alembic compiling/distribution is that we may need to implement our own Blender Alembic exporter in the future in order to attach motion blur data to our fluid meshes for rendering. This testing is in preparation for a Blender feature that is in progress that allows motion blur rendering for an Alembic cache: https://developer.blender.org/D2388.
More details can be found in our documentation topic: Motion Blur Support.
Bug Fix: Incorrect mesh type for Octane Render
It was brought to my attention that the latest version of FLIP Fluids (1.0.7) has a compatibility issue with the OctaneRender for Blender 2.81 that would cause the render server to crash.
When I updated the render scripts for Blender 2.81, I made a mistake when setting an Octane option.
The problem is that the Octane mesh type for the fluid_surface object is being set incorrectly within the scripts. The fluid surface is being set to mesh type that is not allowed to change shape between frames.
This has been fixed for the next FLIP Fluids version. A workaround to this issue for now is to set the fluid_surface Octane Mesh Type to Reshapable Proxy.
This mesh type tells Octane that the fluid surface changes shape between frames and should prevent the errors.
More Development Notes: