Bifrost performance problems

[techvd]

Bifrost simulations seem to be running extremely slow to me. But since I don't have anything to compare I'm hoping for some comparisons from the community.

I opened the standard bifrost sample waterfall.ma and set the timeline to 250 frames. Then I ran the simulation. It took 21 minutes to complete this simulation, which feels way too slow compared to what I've seen in videos.

I understand simulation performance is extremely dependent on system configuration. Mine is not super high-end but it's still a decent supermicro workstation with dual xeon e5-2630 v3 with 64GB RAM and a GTX 980 video card.

If anyone can run the same test and report their times along with system configuration that'd be great help.

[3dMastermind]

Hi, although I didn't wait for the cache to generate completely.

That seems to be the case with me too, actually, it may have been more time for me.

Most of the sample scenes take a long time to cache because they are final render scenes.

If you want these to cache faster, remove some zeros from the

Bifrost Liquid shape>Particle Display>Max Prticle Display count

[syracoj]

hey techvd,

which version of Maya are you on?

Also, what was the MVS (master voxel size) for the sim? Or did you just leave it default to how the waterfall scene imported in with (.6)?

Also, did you set your max ram usage in the Bifrost > Bifrost Options?

One thing to note though.

The waterfall scene is physically huge. Look at the size of the ground plane in comparison to it. 

Each ground plane unit (if your settings are default) is equal to 1 cm. But Bifrost doesnt see it as a single cm. It sees it as a meter. 

So its big. Combine the scale of the emitters along with the default MVS of that scene (.6), along with a long duration of 250 and it will take a bit of time to calculate. Furthermore, the simulation and caching will get slower as more particles/voxels are emitted into the scene.

If it was slow to user cache (disk caching) go to frame one, and turn off BG Processing and Scratch Cache in the bifrost options before firing off a User Cache.

If it was slow to just play through the sim, turn off BG Processing but leave Scratch Cache on (Scratch Cache goes to memory first before disk if I remember correctly)

I believe (could be wrong about this) you can also force the Scratch Cache to bypass memory and go straight to disk. This perhaps could be achieved by setting the Maximum RAM usage to something like .1mbs. It will SC at .1 then offload the rest to the disk once the .1 is filled up. (lower values may work I think). 

BG Processing is good to have for smaller scale sims where the update is quicker and you need to quickly iterate through attribute changes/adjustments.

If you want to see what the sim looks like then you can turn off SC AND BG Processing, assure that play every frame / Free is on and Continuous play is off in the timeline settings and just do a playblast (The first frame will have to have been SC'ed before turning SC off. Also, make sure Runup is turned off). If you just want to see what a complex sim looks like this is sometimes your best bet. Doing this bypasses the disk write and read that occurs when actually SC'ing and/or User Caching.

As I have been editing this the waterfall scene has been caching to disk. Its currently at frame 206. Started it about 12 minutes ago. It seems like its caching 1 frame every five honest seconds. I am on Maya 2016.

[techvd]

Thanks for all the replies. It seems like the size of the geometry is the biggest factor in performance. By setting up a scene with much smaller geometry I'm getting much better performance. I will try more experiements now. Btw, I am using Maya 2016.