First posting to Smoke forum

[rob.oneill]

Hi All,

This is my first posting since becoming a Smoke customer. Its great to be part of the community.

My first question is are there any other Smoke users like myself on the new 5K iMac?

Experiences?

cheers

Rob

[BKM]

I have done some testing on my maxed out 5K iMac. 
So far so good. No issues with CFX, Action, lens Flares and other GPU lighting tools. 

Interface is massive. Renders fast... compared to my old HP9400. 

[rob.oneill]

Thanks Brian,

That's encouraging. Mine is also maxed out. I'm having a few issues with Smoke - weird graphics tile corruption happening while doing 3D text and FBX and a prompt from OSX saying there is a fault with graphics. Anyway a call is in with local support. Love the machine and the big UI. 

[Anonymous]

Hi Rob, 

A little late to the party, but welcome ;^)

I also am using the latest and greatest from apple. (iMac 5k)

And while working on 4k I kept wondering why flame assist would not show the 4k at 100% in the viewer. And it turns out my imac was running at 3200x1800. This is the largest basic setup. So googled it to find that if you hold the alt key and press the scaled button in preferences, you get the 5k option. See attached.

Couldn't resist, so I pressed it and started flame assist with a 4k image and see attached. I don't think I will be working like this, as the menus are very small.

I wonder if there is a way to make the smoke menus a sensible size while at 5k resolution?

Cheers,

Mark

BTW, the only problem so far, is HWAA causing crashes on particle systems. Not on 3D shape rendering with motion blur though.

[Anonymous]

something wrong with the attachment. still not working. Must be not important...

[Steve_Curley]

What are you trying to attach? There's 2 attachments on your previous post - if a third is not showing up it's probably because it's an unrecognised filetype. Zip it first then it should attach.

[Anonymous]

The original post was a jpeg as per the screen capture. But it didn't seem to post properly.

[rob.oneill]

Hi Mark,

I'll try that. The screen res menu in System Prefs is a bit dumbed down and hard to know what it actually is. I'm trying Smoke running at various options to see if there is a difference...improvement.

Particles in Flame Assist?

[Anonymous]

Particles are in Flare ;^)

[jeffrey.ramirez]

Hi Rob,

How's your graphics issue? Is it a hardware issue or some misconfiguration?

cheers,

Jeff

[Anonymous]

In trying to break the system, I have been going through all nodes in flare to see if they work. It seems that I found something that repeatedly crashes the system. It is the atomize on a 3D text and then add a deform node. No HWAA.

As you can see from the screen grab, it causes some kind of memory leak, which I think is an apple OS problem. Even so, I have had some pretty good size BFX in flare without problem. 

[Anonymous]

To clarify my setup, see the screen shots.

The memory problem seems to occur only when Round Dot is selected. Also I have subdivide selected in the geometry. As if this is not enough, in the Deform mesh, I select a few points, use position z to deform and then use the axis position to move the deform across the geometry. At this point if you have the activity monitor open, you will see application memory jump up towards the max (32GB) and the swap and virtual memory become active.

[Anonymous]

You can see the application memory has shot up in this screen shot.

[rob.oneill]

I am seeing similar behaviour in mine. HWAA definitely needs to be off to render shadows. Render times go through the roof but at least it works. After working for a couple of hours there is a tipping point where the memory vanishes and swapping behaviour cripples Smoke. I had a 4k frame in the setup and once changing it to a 2k version, surprisingly, the interactivity improved. Support TV'd in and set the memory keyword to 16000 so lets see if that helps. So far so good today but I suspect something is amiss when 4k images are present.
Thanks for the responses.

Rob
Sent from my iPhone

[Anonymous]

Hi Rob,

After quite a number of graphic problem detected errors, using Houdini, and memory issues using Flare I took it to apple and surprisingly, they replaced the motherboard. And now trying my previous setup, it isn't crashing. Well, hasn't crashed so far. 

So that is Adsk 1 : Apple 0.

Will keep testing the "new" imac 5k and keep my fingers crossed.