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I have setup a simple scene with some hills (one big object) and dam with water. Dam consists of multiple objects, they are set up as fluid obstacles. Dam breaks (parts of dam are animated with keyframes) and water should start to flow through valley.

But, fluid baking stops on higher fluid resolutions (for example 300) somewhere in the middle of my animation when dam breaks.

What I have already tried:

  • applied scale and rotation on fluid objects
  • removed double vertices and recalculated normals on fluid objects
  • run blender from command line and also with -d switch (to see debug output), but haven't seen any errors, it just suddenly stops
  • manually cleared the fluid cache folder (deleted all the files)
  • set all fluid obstacles to Free Slip (as advised in Blender Cookie Fluid Simulation Tutorial, part 3)

I am using blender 2.69 64bit on Ubuntu 13.10.

Here you can download my scene (it is my first try with Blender, so it is very simple) - scena1_2.blend (30 MB - sorry for that size, some textures are included...)

betatester07
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  • From the sounds of it, it bakes fine at lower resolution? It's hard to say where the problem is without a Blend file. – Mike Pan Jan 16 '14 at 04:07
  • Your file bakes fine for me at 300 resolution using Blender 2.7 (it did fail with 2.69 though). – gandalf3 Mar 21 '14 at 00:22
  • Im just having the same problem on Blender v2.76. Using a Resolution of 200 with 1 Subdivision in the Fluid Boundary, makes the baking stop automatically without warning. On lower resolutions like 100 its baking without interruption. –  Oct 16 '15 at 23:59

2 Answers2

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There exists a workaround (at least it works 100% in my setup)!

I have enabled Export Animated Mesh option for all moving fluid obstacle objects and it works!

The only downside is that it enforces No Slip and is slower according to the documentation inside Blender.

betatester07
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There are two things that might be going on.

  • Your cache is baking a different range of frames than are on your timeline. Make sure that the frame range in the cache settings is what you want it to be, because it might not be the same as your timeline range.

  • Your baked physics aren't getting freed, properly, and it's continuing to re-use old simulation data without re-calculating it.

    • This, in turn, might be for a number of different reasons:

    • You might not know that you have to "free bake" (in the cache settings) in order to run the bake again.

    • You might be using "disk cache" or "external." External uses a particular set of physics cache files and won't change them, even if you free the bake. This is unlikely, tho, because IIRC, the baking buttons go away when you turn this on.

    • Blender is acting up. There is a known issue with Blender releasing caches properly with any of the simulators, including smoke and particles. There are a few work-arounds. The work-around that I consider easiest is to change some "significant" value after freeing the bake. This will usually fully free the baked files and allow you to re-compute the simulation. There are some values that will do this and some that won't. You can tell when the files are freed because the colored line at the bottom of the timeline will change. Sometimes you ALSO have to track all the way back to the beginning of the animation. The most fail-safe method is to find the folder named blendcache_[filename] and delete its contents.

Hope that helps!

Matt
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  • ad 1) it is not the problem, because when I set resolution for ex. to 80, it bakes whole animation – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 17:03
  • ...but when you go back to another resulution, it doesn't bake completely? – Matt Jan 16 '14 at 17:05
  • when I go to higher resolutions, like 300, it will stop baking somewhere in the middle – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 17:06
  • Huh... that's weird. That might actually be a bug. Have you checked the bug reports for something like this? – Matt Jan 16 '14 at 17:07
  • I haven't checked bugs especially, but I googled about that a lot and haven't found any big known bug... – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 17:13
  • And, I have also another similar scene and I haven't had any problems while baking with higher resolutions.. – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 17:20
  • I'd recommend looking at the output in the info window and console to see if maybe it's running into trouble creating the files, or something else. You might also run Blender from the command line, to see if it's printing out extra information that you're not seeing otherwise. – Matt Jan 16 '14 at 17:28
  • Yes, I have already tried it, I have also tried running from command line with -d switch (debug output) but there is nothing strange, it just suddenly stops... And now, I have also tried clearing the cache folder manually but it didn't help... – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 17:36
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    @betatester07 I have had this too.. Is it possible you are running out of memory? – gandalf3 Jan 16 '14 at 18:12
  • Those physics caches can be outrageously huge, sometimes. – Matt Jan 16 '14 at 18:13
  • @gandalf3 I don't think so. I have 64 bit Ubuntu, 64 bit Blender, 6GB of RAM. During baking, my System Monitor shows 2.2GB RAM usage... – betatester07 Jan 16 '14 at 18:17
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    @betatester07 I think it's a bug, you might want to try reporting it. For what it's worth, the same thing happens in this Blender Cookie tutorial. He managed to get it to work by "making the simulation easier". – gandalf3 Jan 17 '14 at 09:20
  • thanks, but it is still not working. I tried setting all moving obstacles to Free Slip, but still tha same problem. I also tried to reduce the number of my moving obtacle pieces to 60, but no luck.. – betatester07 Jan 21 '14 at 14:04
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    @betatester07 Have you reported this as a bug yet? If you aren't planning on it, do you mind if I use your blendfile to report it? – gandalf3 Jan 28 '14 at 08:41
  • no, I wanted to do some more testing first and i didn't have much time last days. but maybe it will be better to report it as soon as possible. so, feel free to use my blendfile to report it and let me know. – betatester07 Jan 28 '14 at 14:39