I am trying to make a very large water Reservoir with water flowing into it from a small pipe will many columns/obstacles, I have scaled the project down significantly, but when I try to bake the fluid, it doesn't bake. It says its baking, but the fluid does not appear. Is there something else I can try?

Thanks!

Well very large fluid sims are slow and take tons of ram. In my experience, it sometimes takes 10 minutes (during which blender is frozen) before the first frame even starts. Also, check your ram usage with a task manager or something similar. You could start with a much lower resolution to start with to see if anything happens at all. Have you tried doing a very simple fluid sim to see if you can get it running at all?

Xalt

Thank you for your help! I do have plenty of RAM, what's weird is that when I bake the fluid, it seems to bake very quickly. However, usually you see the fluid moving while it's baking, but for this one it does not appear to be moving, and when I try to play it back, it shows nothing moving at all. It does work for smaller models though.

Have you also seen that with the fluid baking, that it does not appear to bake to the domain exactly, it is off a little bit, which for my purposes, I need it to be pretty exact. Any way to fix this?

mmm baking a large simulation very quickly sounds unlikely... Could you post a blend so I could take a look? How did you make the sim larger? Just by scaling the objects? There's also the "realworld-size" slider but you probably know that. In my experience the fluid sim can be quite buggy at times. Sticking to the defaults whenever possible seems to yield the most stable results. About the unaccurate baking, as far as I know that's something we need to live with

One weird bug is that sometimes it does not update the view from one frame to the other although everything was baked correctly. A workaround: go to the last frame of the sim +1 (default is 250 frames so that would mean go to frame 251). Select the domain and change "Disp Qual" to "Geometry" in the first column. Than change it back to "preview" or "final" as you prefer. This somehow seems to force Blender to update to the newly baked fluid files.

Have you tried the new sph particles (fluid particles) in Blender 2.54 yet? This is a different type of fluid simulation, making use of the particle system, so there's lots of options. I have just started to look into it so I might not be able to help you a lot but I think it's worth a try.

Hope this was of help.