Simulations Preview Tool

Simulations Preview Tool

The Simulations Preview Tool is being improved, but please be aware that there are limitations to its current capabilities.
It is NOT
  1. A tool for designing lighting - it is intentionally limited to a direct light which can have its angle adjusted
  2. A tool for achieving render parity since:
    1. The lighting is limited
    2. The look of the final output lacks materials or anything but point based colors
    3. Geometry cannot be emissive
  3. A look dev tool - the lack of volumes, materials, and lights prevents it from being used to give art direction for anything aside from the simulations and caches themselves

How to Use

Please ensure you are using Envoy v4.6.8+ and Render Submit and Cloud Cache HDAs v4.4.0+

The “Simulation Preview” checkbox in the Cloud Cache HDA should be selected when submitting a simulation job


Once the job is completed, please navigate to the FILES section in Envoy. You can view a single cache by selecting the “Preview” button next to the sequence pattern, or select multiple sequences and click the “Preview” button in the upper right.

Multiple caches will be loaded and overlaid with each other with the ability to turn them on and off.
If the option to create Simulation Previews wasn't checked in the Cloud Cache HDA then you will be prompted to have them created and a job will be initiated to prepare the files, which may take some time, so we highly recommend not deactivating the checkbox on submission.   The preview will also only be available for 3 days if there are no jobs for the project.
You will need to enable pop-ups in your browser - please see the instructions for Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Edge or your browser of choice
Once the SIM Preview tool has loaded you will see a browser warning that the site may be unsafe, but please ignore and hit Continue.  We are working on a fix to enable HTTPS access to prevent this warning,  Note that the tool only be available for 30 minutes and will then automatically shutdown.
Once the tool has loaded press the Play button to start the tool.
Cache files greater that 500Mb/frame may take some minutes to load while to tool starts, so please be patient.

What is Supported

  1. Polygonal geometry - polysoup, packed primitives and standard polygonal geometry
  2. Point clouds - the blur feature in the interface is useful for viewing point clouds as a fake volumetric
  3. Open curves/lines
  4. Point colors
  5. Point normals
  6. Cache layers - multiple caches can be loaded in and toggled at will in the interface to allow for a full, multilayer, complex shot to be seen at one time

What is not (Yet) Supported/Preserved

  1. UVs
  2. Volumes - Houdini volumes, VDBs & VDB SDFs
  3. Bezier-type curves/surfaces
  4. NURBS-type curves/surfaces
  5. Crowd agents
  6. Alembics
  7. Metaballs
  8. Primitive spheres, circles, hexadrons, tubes


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