Ok will do when I have some downtime - many thanks again, for all your work on here!

Using 2024 -

If I create a bunch of cloned spheres, apply the rigid body tag to the cloner and press play, the spheres will drop, though very stiffly, as if using the old "Individual Elements" option set to "Off". However this setting is not there any more - why are the clones acting this way?

Secondly, even stranger, if I swap out the spheres for capsules, so now the cloner is cloning a load of capsule primitives, NOTHING happens at all. No dynamics, no falling objects.

Bug?

Hi Dr Sassi, thanks for the reply. I am not actually focusing on whether things run in real time - I dont expect heavy sims to do that. I am just comparing the preview in the viewport, running at 5 fps to when its time to cache the same sim, each frame takes an hour. I have used TurbulenceFD for over 10 years so I am fairly familiar with the sim/caching process, but I have never seen caching of sims take anywhere near this long, or cause this number of crashes. Am I to assume I should not be treating the Pyro system as a reliable one?

Additional - it seems Pyro caches several frames at the same time. If I refresh the explorer window, I can see the file sizes for the last 5 or 6 vdb files increasing with each refresh. Would this again suggest this is being done on the CPU entirely?

Running 2024. Pyro caching is extremely unreliable and also randomly laggy as hell.

This sim runs in the viewport at about 5 fps, yet takes anywhere between a couple of minutes to almost an hour (!) to cache frames. Is there a huge amount of data being cached that is not being processed for the viewport preview? This still wouldnt account for some frames ( see vdb files 198, 210, 215, 221 in the screengrab ) taking 30/40 mins sometimes.

For a sim that is less that 500 frames long, that runs in the viewport at a reasonable pace, this length of time for caching is far from practical. I would be more than happy to discover I am doing something wrong!

Here's the screengrab showing time taken for each frame:

Imgur

One assumption I am reaching is that the caching system does not use the GPU. Which is ridiculous, surely? I am running this on a 3090 and surely I should expect to see this GPU utilised for the caching process, not just the preview.