Thanks for taking a look at our 56th development update for the FLIP Fluids liquid simulation addon for Blender! There was not an update last week as I was mostly away from development during Monday – Wednesday. The last two weeks of development mainly involved catching up on fixing reported bugs. We also released a new video and had a chance to test Blender 3.0 Alpha!
New Video: Solving Common Issues
Dennis and I gathered common issues that are faced when using our FLIP Fluids addon. These are the most frequent issues that come up during help requests, and in this video Dennis helps explain and solve the issues as well as add some helpful tips (I even learned a few things about Blender from the video!).
How to find the FLIP Fluids Helper menu (Documentation)
Why is my inflow not generating liquid? (Documentation)
How to turn an Inflow object on and off (Documentation)
Blender 3.0 Alpha and Cycles-X Compatibility
We usually don’t start testing new Blender versions this early (Blender 2.93 still has 3 weeks until release!), but we’ve heard from some of you that you’re real excited about the new Cycles-X branch. As a celebration for the 10th anniversary of the Cycles renderer, the Blender developers are adding some nice optimizations and preparing Cycles for the future. You can read more about Cycles-X here and can download the branch here.
We had a chance to start testing Blender 3.0 as well as the Cycles-X branch this week. At the moment, there are no known issues when using these versions of Blender with the FLIP Fluids addon version 1.0.9b or the latest experimental version. You may encounter some error messages in the system console when FLIP Fluids 1.0.9b, but these will be harmless and are not displayed in the Blender UI.
Compatibility may break and issues may arise as development of Blender 3.0 continues. Issues can be reported and tracked in this GitHub thread.
Performance Testing
During some brief testing on a high geometry simulation, Cycles-X definitely decreases render time. In this test on a GTX 1070, Blender 2.93 Beta and Blender 3.0 Alpha performed nearly the same at 1m30s. Cycles X reduced the render time down to 1m06s, but also used more memory. We’ll need to do more testing on larger scenes to see how the memory usage scales.
We’ll also need to test how Cycles-X performs with a large amount of instancing which is used to render whitewater particles.
Experimental Version 9.0.9.20
Want to try out the latest fixes and improvements? They can be tested in our Experimental Builds Package in the latest version!
Release Notes v9.0.9.20 (05-MAY-2021)
This version mostly adds fixes for reported issues.
Blender 3.0 Compatibility: Blender 3.0 is in early development and is set to release on August 25, 2021. At the moment, there are no known issues when using Blender 3.0 with the FLIP Fluids addon version 1.0.9b or the latest experimental version. The Blender 3.0 Cycles-X branch also seems to work after some brief testing.
Issues related to Blender 3.0 compatibility can be reported and tracked in this thread: issue #535
Added ‘Remove Mesh Near Domain’ feature support for the preview mesh.
Added an option to the FLIP Fluids Preferences menu to hide the experimental build warning displayed in the physics panel.
Bug Fix: Simulation will no longer stop if a frame statistics temporary file is found to be in use and unable to be deleted (issue #529).
Bug Fix: Issue where surface and whitewater materials would be removed when changing between scenes.
This involved many changes for how the addon sets up the viewport and render. Please let us know about any odd behavior in how the simulation is displayed.
Bug Fix: Issue where command line operators may not work if spaces are contained in the Blender executable path, specifically when located in C:/Program Files/.
Weekly Development Notes #56 – Solving Issues Video, Blender 3.0, and Cycles-X Testing
Covering the week of April 19th – 30th, 2021.
Thanks for taking a look at our 56th development update for the FLIP Fluids liquid simulation addon for Blender! There was not an update last week as I was mostly away from development during Monday – Wednesday. The last two weeks of development mainly involved catching up on fixing reported bugs. We also released a new video and had a chance to test Blender 3.0 Alpha!
New Video: Solving Common Issues
Dennis and I gathered common issues that are faced when using our FLIP Fluids addon. These are the most frequent issues that come up during help requests, and in this video Dennis helps explain and solve the issues as well as add some helpful tips (I even learned a few things about Blender from the video!).
Blender 3.0 Alpha and Cycles-X Compatibility
We usually don’t start testing new Blender versions this early (Blender 2.93 still has 3 weeks until release!), but we’ve heard from some of you that you’re real excited about the new Cycles-X branch. As a celebration for the 10th anniversary of the Cycles renderer, the Blender developers are adding some nice optimizations and preparing Cycles for the future. You can read more about Cycles-X here and can download the branch here.
We had a chance to start testing Blender 3.0 as well as the Cycles-X branch this week. At the moment, there are no known issues when using these versions of Blender with the FLIP Fluids addon version 1.0.9b or the latest experimental version. You may encounter some error messages in the system console when FLIP Fluids 1.0.9b, but these will be harmless and are not displayed in the Blender UI.
Compatibility may break and issues may arise as development of Blender 3.0 continues. Issues can be reported and tracked in this GitHub thread.
Performance Testing
During some brief testing on a high geometry simulation, Cycles-X definitely decreases render time. In this test on a GTX 1070, Blender 2.93 Beta and Blender 3.0 Alpha performed nearly the same at 1m30s. Cycles X reduced the render time down to 1m06s, but also used more memory. We’ll need to do more testing on larger scenes to see how the memory usage scales.
We’ll also need to test how Cycles-X performs with a large amount of instancing which is used to render whitewater particles.
Experimental Version 9.0.9.20
Want to try out the latest fixes and improvements? They can be tested in our Experimental Builds Package in the latest version!
Release Notes v9.0.9.20 (05-MAY-2021)