I started this in another section but got over 160 hits but no comments.
This idea is a must have and I cannot see why it could not be implemented, as the baking process saves file which could be accessed again at last rendered file in order to return to the scent o continue baking.
THIS WOUDL BENEFIT EVERY SIMLE USER WHO USES BLENDER
Blender Change Request I just found out that Blender cannot start baking fluid scene from a specific frame. I am hoping this would be an relatively simple update to blender (I do not mean easy or cheap).
If I have power outage and at fame 200 of a fluid bake I’d like to be able to reopen the blender scene and continue the bake from frame 200.
This will only work if there are accessible file from the partially bake scene so that Blender would recognize the last baked file.
Being able to recommence a bake scene due to power outage of other problem would be a huge benefit to Blender users.
I completely agree with you, fluid simulation is an important tool that needs to be updated. I think your ideas should be directed to the developer responsible for simulations in Blender.
i dont think caches work like that. it is not like rendering a series of stills, for animation, more like rendering a movie files, in that all the information in the file is needed for the file to work. it would need to create a cache file for each frame of the animation for it to work like you suggest. I’m sure it.s possible and you could certainly make a script that just created a cache for each frame and labled it apropriatly, but then how would blender read each file? you would need to include in the script instuctions for blender to read each individual file at each frame, which it seems to me that you would need to be re writing a large portion of the caching code. but i’m no coder so for all i know it could be done simply in a few minutes. i’ve seen stranger things done with just a few lines of code so you never know
Fluid cache files, as far as I know, only contain mesh data. They don’t contain velocity or mass or viscosity or influence of force fields or inertia from prior motions or anything like that; they’re just the result of the simulation on that frame. So none of the data necessary to do what you’re talking about is available with the current simulation system. This isn’t a feature request, it’s a re-code the whole simulator to work differently request.
Scott, have you ever read The Cathedral and the Bazaar? You seem to assume Blender is some kind of top-down monolith, but it’s not. The community purchased the rights to Blender’s source code years ago, and now it is developed by whoever has an itch and the knowledge to do so. It’s bottom up.
It may be the most necessary thing in the world (to some, I have personally never done much with fluid sim, and don’t expect to) but without a developer to code the necessary changes, it doesn’t matter how much it’s “needed” nor how little time it might take a coder who knew what he was doing.
K Horseman says the cache only contains mesh data, but it does not seem to me to require a complete re-coding of the simulator to save the cache data to a file, and have a little kludge added to scoop up and save the other settings he refers to, viscosity and force field settings and such. But here is the thing: even though it seems to me, as a former programmer, to be a simple task to save a cache to a file along with some additional values, I personally could not do it, because I don’t know the blender code, and I didn’t code in python nor any variety of C back in the days when I was coding stuff.
I’m pretty sure Blender Foundation maintains a list of feature requests, so, find the list, make sure your request gets included, and then, if you can’t do the programming and don’t want to hire someone to do the work for you, stop wasting our time with these endless rants about how much we need this simple obvious upgrade.
mano-wii suggests you direct your suggestion to the dev in charge of the fluid sim. As far as I know, at present, that would be NOMAN, from Homer’s classic the Odyssey.