Start Frame | startframe – Explicitly sets the Start frame of the Simulation. This can also be a negative number. Only available when Timeline (Start Frame) is disabled. Timeline | parmName - When enabled, the Simulation will run from the Timeline Start Frame. Stop Frame | stopframe – Explicitly sets the End frame of the Simulation. This can also be a negative number. Only available when Timeline (Stop Frame) is disabled. Timeline | parmName - When enabled, the Simulation will run to the end of the Timeline. Render On Each Sim Frame | rend_sim_frame – During simulation, after each new frame is simulated, this option will start a render with your currently assigned production renderer and with the render settings you have dialed in your Render Setup 3ds Max dialog. You need to have set a Render Output File in the 3ds Max Render Settings in advance. Phoenix will automatically append the frame number to the file name. You can use Render On Each Sim Frame when you leave a long simulation overnight, so you will have a ready rendered sequence when you come back to check on it, even if the entire simulation did not have time to finish. When doing test iterations on your simulation setup, you can also speed up the simulation by enabling Cacheless Simulation from the Output rollout. |
An alternative approach to Render On Each Sim Frame is to automatically start a sequence render after the entire simulation has finished by adding a 'max quick render' command under the OnSimulationEnd() callback of the Use Script option below. |
Use Script | script, use_script – Enables the use of MAXScript during the simulation. Click Edit... to open a window with some skeleton code and a short description of the available commands. For more information, please see the Phoenix MaxScript page. Threads Limit | maxthreads – Specifies an upper limit for the number of threads used for the simulation. When the value is set to 0, the maximum number of threads (cores) will be used. NUMA Nodes – If the simulation is executed over a NUMA machine, you can specify which nodes will be used. Phoenix is very sensitive to memory transfer and if all the nodes are used, performance might decrease due to low bandwidth between the different nodes. NUMA stands for Non-Uniform Memory Access. It can be used to restrict the threads used for simulation based on the physical CPUs available on the system (in a multiprocessor systems). In this way better memory access can be achieved when multiple simulations are run on the same machine. |
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