In this tab, you can control what fields the solver will output and provide various settings to control the resolution and compression.
The output type lets you choose to output a tree view of the simulation for debugging or the volume VDBs for rendering.
Performance lets you choose if you want to output the current frames simulation while the next frame is simulating in parallel or if the output should happen after the simulation. Parallel will significantly increase the solver performance.
<aside> 💡 Simulating in parallel can cause issues if you do not clamp your caches sources. If there isn't a frame cached for the frame after the last frame of your sim it may result in an error. Try adding a time shift node before you source and set the clamp range to the range of your caches.
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Extra field specific option. Velocity stage lets you pick when to output velocity. You can choose to output velocity post-advection or the corrected version after the pressure solve step.
You can choose what specific fields get output. Choosing fewer fields will improve the speed of the simulation. Typically only output density when trying to dial in settings, then re-enable the rest when it’s time to cache out the final sim.
This is also the place you would enable some features like color and rest.
You can choose to output at a lower resolution. Sometimes you may not need a full resolution temperature or velocity field for rendering. The filter will determine how to downsample a lower resolution grid. Index will skip voxels and write out values at intervals, average will average out a group of voxels to assign to a lower resolution grid.
The Mask Field will mask all other fields by the chosen field.
<aside> 💡 If you need to do particle advection with your velocity grid it is advised to disable the mask field option.
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Deactivate Empty Voxels will not output any voxel that has a value below the simulation threshold value.
16 Bit Write To Disk will compress the volume when it is written out to a file. This will help save on disk space usage without losing much quality if anything. This also tells the GPU to copy from device to host as 16-bit float values.