Problem baking dynamics (R14)

Problem baking dynamics (R14)

by Jared Flynn

on Jan 9, 2013 at 3:53:45 am

Hey there folks,

I've got a fairly processor-heavy dynamics simulation (lots of soft bodies, with aerodynamics, fired from particle emitters, deforming each other & interacting with colliders in the environment). I've output several hardware previews and I'm really happy with the results, so now I want to bake the simulation so I can do some final material tweaks and render settings tests without re-running the sim every time.

Problem is, when I bake the simulation (either via the Project Settings or the Dynamics Tag), C4D thinks good and hard about the simulation, caches some 200-400MB of data, even disables the dynamics tags in my project, but it's still not baked! If I scrub to some frame in the middle of my project, the results are all wrong, and if I step back a frame, all the dynamic objects just disappear-- presumably back to their starting positions.

In much simpler scenes (I just did a test with a soft body sphere bouncing on a flat plane) caching works as expected. I'm completely stumped!

Some details:
Cinema 4D R14.034
Windows 7 Pro x64 SP1
2x Intel Xeon E5-2670 @ 2.6GHz
64GB RAM
nVidia Quadro 4000

I'm not sure what else I could do to force Cinema to bake the project... I hope someone out there has some ideas! If necessary I can post a scene file.

Thanks so much in advance,

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer
http://be.net/jkinetic

Re: Problem baking dynamics (R14)

by Jared Flynn

on Jan 9, 2013 at 5:36:14 am

SOLVED!

An update on this issue-- on further prodding of my project and several simpler test-projects, I learned that EMITTERS can also be baked, SEPARATELY from dynamics and mograph. First I applied "Bake Particles" tags (I'm not entirely sure where it lives in the menus; I found it using Commander (Shift-C) in R14) to each Emitter in my scene, and once those caches were finished building themselves, I baked the scene's dynamics via Project Settings > Dynamics > Cache > Bake.

The baking process took longer than in my previous attempts (maybe 25-50% longer) but the end result is exactly what I was after.

At first I thought it was a problem with the complexity of my scene (it's a massively dense scene with lots of soft body collisions), but what was actually happening was some kind of conflict between the Emitters' particles (which were not dynamic-- just being used to clone objects onto) and the cloned geometry I was spawning with them. Each time I stepped back a frame, the clones would re-align to wherever the particles were, rather than obeying their baked positions. Weird stuff, but at least it's fixed!

I hope this small detail, which swallowed the better part of my evening, turns around and helps someone else out down the line. Thanks for checking this thread!

Rock on,

Jared Flynn
Motion Graphics Designer
http://be.net/jkinetic

Re: Problem baking dynamics (R14)

by John Dover

on Oct 28, 2014 at 10:38:38 pm

You sir just saved me from a TON of work, I've been roaming around forums for quite some time and your method worked flawlessly. Also I didn't have to buy some plugin or other. Thank you!

Re: Problem baking dynamics (R14)

by Jared Flynn

on Oct 29, 2014 at 11:30:42 am

So glad to hear it, John! It's funny; I was just facing this exact problem AGAIN a couple days ago, having completely forgotten that I'd found a way around it before, so in effect you've turned around and helped me as well. :)

Cheers,
JF

Jared Flynn
Motion Designer

Supermicro SuperWorkstation 7047A-T
Dual 8-core Xeon E5-2670 @ 2.6GHz
64GB DDR3-1600 ECC/REG RAM
PNY nVidia Quadro 4000
Windows 7 Pro 64bit SP1