Guidelines for Reporting Bugs and Issues

This document will detail guidelines on how to report bugs and issues found within the FLIP Fluids addon. We only support versions of the addon that have been distributed on the Blender Market.

To get support for a bug or issue, a bug report must be filed to us either through the Blender Market messaging system or through the GitHub Issue Tracker.

Guidelines

The following guidelines will give you some tips for how to create a good bug report. A good bug report allows us to track down the issue quickly and effectively so that the issue can be understood and responded to in a timely manner. If your bug report does not adhere to the following guidelines, you may be asked to resubmit your bug report. If you have any questions on how to file your bug report, please do not hesitate to ask us on the Blender Market or through email at flip.fluids[at]gmail.com!

Make sure that it is really a bug

We can only offer support for bugs/issues for versions of the addon that have been distributed on the Blender Market. We cannot offer support for custom builds or alternative versions.

Check the Scene Troubleshooting document to make sure that it is not a scene issue and is infact an issue with the addon. If possible, check if the bug still exists in the latest version of the addon.

Avoid Duplicates

Check the FLIP Fluids issue tracker for bugs that have already been reported. Please check both open and closed bugs. You may use this filter to display all bugs that are open or closed.

Simplify

Try to simplify the process that triggers the bug so that it is reproducible in the least amount of steps. The .blend file should be as simple as possible. Simplicity allows us to get to the cause of the problem quickly and efficiently.

It is very important that the bug is reproducible. If the bug is not reproducible, there is little that we can do to test the issue.

Attach a .blend file

If your bug/issue is related to a scene, you must attach a .blend file. Describing the issue will not provide us enough information to work with in most cases. If reporting a bug through a Blender Market message, you may attach the .blend file directly to your message. If reporting a bug to the issue tracker, you will need to create .zip file of your scene in order to attach the file to the issue.

Scene File Guidelines

• Remove irrelevant data - If textures and objects not related to the simulation are not needed to reproduce the bug, please remove them. This will keep the file size down and will make it easier for us to navigate your scene.
• Set a relative cache directory - please set your cache directory to be relative to the .blend file (ex: //flip_fluid_cache).
• Provide a link to large scene files - if your .blend file is too large to be attached to the bug report, please provide a link to the file using an alternative hosting service such as Dropbox.

Be Complete

• Provide descriptive instructions for how to reproduce the issue or how to use your .blend file.
• Be descriptive of what the actual bug/issue is that you are experiencing. Describe what you expected to happen, and what actually happened.
• If you receive any error messages, please attach these to the bug report. Tip: you may retrieve the full error message by opening the Blender System Console (in Windows: Blender > Window > Toggle System Console).

When submitting a bug report, you must always provide the following information in your report:

• Blender Version:
• FLIP Fluids Version:
• Operating System:
• CPU:
• GFX:
• RAM:

example:

• Blender Version: Blender 2.79 (5d8ac9)
• FLIP Fluids Version: 1.0.4
• Operating System: Windows 10
• CPU: Intel i7-7700 @ 3.60GHz
• GFX: GTX 1080, 8GB
• RAM: 32GB

Note: the Blender version hash (5d8ac9) can be found in the upper-right corner of the splash screen when you start up Blender. The addon version can be found in the Blender addon preferences menu.