4.00.00

Official release

Date – 21 November, 2019

New Voxel and Particle Tuners

Change each voxel and particle's properties during simulation, and use customizable conditions to delete particles.

thinkingParticles Integration

We’ve added Phoenix operators for thinkingParticles and you can now emit fluid via Phoenix sources from thinkingParticles geometries.

Active Bodies

Float your objects over pools or wash them away in floods with basic rigid body simulation for Phoenix liquids.

Tex UVW

Transport texture coordinates along fluids during simulation and use them for advanced render-time effects.

Standalone Cache Preview tool

Load AUR, VDB and F3D cache files, preview them and save image sequences.

Combined changelog since Phoenix FD 3:

NEW ACTIVE BODIES New rigid body solver node, interacting with the Liquid Simulator. No mutual interaction between rigid bodies yet

NEW TEXUVW New TexUVW channel for fire/smoke and liquid simulations, moving with the fluid and allowing for render-time texture mapping of surfaces and volume color and opacity, as well as for adding displaced detail moving with the fluid in all render modes

NEW VOXEL TUNER New Voxel Tuner node allowing to change any grid channel during simulation depending on conditions based on grid channel values, textures or distance to meshes

NEW PARTICLE TUNER New Particle Tuner node allowing to change any particle channel or delete particles during simulation depending on conditions based on particle channel values

NEW THINKINGPARTICLES Phoenix FD Birth, Sample and Force operators for thinkingParticles

NEW PREVIEW New Standalone Previewer tool for AUR, VDB and F3D cache files, much faster than the 3ds Max and Maya viewports and currently showing voxels and a new velocity streamline preview

NEW GRID SOLVER Simulate the RGB channel for Drag particles

NEW PRT I/O Register the PRT Reader path into the 3ds Max Asset Tracker for repathing, archiving, and asset transfer for distributed rendering with V-Ray Next

NEW SCRIPTING New <node>.getFrameInfo MAXScript function that retrieves the currently loaded frame info string

IMPROVED INSTALLATION Now Phoenix for V-Ray 3 and for V-Ray Next can load in 3ds Max and simulate without V-Ray installed, and can render with Scanline, Corona, Octane, etc. so Phoenix installers for Scanline are no longer needed

IMPROVED INSTALLATION Ship the Visual C++ redistributable with the Phoenix installer and install it silently in the end, if needed

IMPROVED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Ability to animate the Phoenix per-node properties

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Make the Foam Falling Speed vary depending on the bubble sizes

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Apply the Initial Vel. Rand. option not just to newborn Splash, but to splitting splash particles as well

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Optimized Birth Volumes

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Improve the CPU core usage of the Initial Fill Up phase in FLIP simulation

IMPROVED GRID SOLVER Represent all drag particles in the scene using the keyword "Drag" in the Clear Channels field and Affect fields of forces

IMPROVED SOURCES Emit from instanced thinkingParticles meshes when Prt Shape is set to Use Particle Shape

IMPROVED SOURCES Emit from thinkingParticles meshes which are different per each particle when Prt Shape is set to Use Particle Shape

IMPROVED PARTICLE TEXTURE Read Data Channels from thinkingParticles using the Particle Texture

IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Optimized rendering of tens or hundreds of Simulators in Volumetric render mode

IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Renamed 'Fade Out' to 'Border Fade' and changed it from voxels to world units

IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Speed up and improve CPU utilization for Optimizing Particle Congestion with large cache files

IMPROVED RENDER CURVES Copy-paste support for render gradients and curves

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up Grid RGB channel saving to compressed AUR cache files up to 8 times

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Save and load Grid Viscosity from VDBs created by Phoenix

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up loading of VDB caches by reading their min-max channel ranges from metadata instead of calculating them

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Added cache info to VDB caches describing which version of Phoenix FD was used during simulation

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Hidden script option to disable the preset popup when loading Field3D or OpenVDB caches - inDontOfferPresets

IMPROVED PRT I/O Sped up export of PRT files up to 5 times

IMPROVED PRT I/O Allowed use of # in the PRT Reader for specifying sequences just like cache paths in the Simulator work

IMPROVED PREVIEW Option to color the particle preview according not just to Speed, but to Age, Size and Viscosity as well

IMPROVED PREVIEW Better viewport performance with many particle systems in a single Simulator

IMPROVED PREVIEW Don't reset the preview Detail Reduction on loading a new cache sequence in 3ds Max

IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Option to save images from the classic GPU Preview at the render resolution

IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Multithreaded the data gathering pre-process of the GPU Preview

IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW GPU Preview for smoke in the Standalone Preview

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Added new toolbar icons for the Phoenix nodes

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Display the total number of particles in the Cache File Content list in the Simulation rollout

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Enabled Motion Velocity in Sources by default for new scenes

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Changed Mapper's Initializer option to off by default for new scenes

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Renamed "Use Light Cache" to "Volume Light Cache" so it's not confused with V-Ray's Light Cache

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Added new toolbar icons for the Phoenix nodes

IMPROVED SDK Renamed aura_ver.h to phoenix_ver.h, and aurinterface.h to phx_cache_interface.h

IMPROVED SDK Removed grid and particle channel defines from phx_cache_interface.h, and renamed GridChannels::ChU/V/W to ChRed/Green/Blue, and ParticleChannels::ChR to ChSize in phx_cache_interface.h

IMPROVED SDK Removed the frameTime2contentTime() member of PhoenixSimInterface. Now only PhoenixFrameDataInterface::frameTime2contentTime() should be used

REMOVED PHOENIX FD Dropped support for 3ds Max 2014

FIXED SCENE BODY INTERACTION Hang during simulation if interacting with geometries with zero-area triangles

FIXED GRID SOLVER Random hang when stopping a fire/smoke simulation affected by a force and starting it again

FIXED GRID SOLVER Some voxels lose velocity and freeze using Massive Vorticity

FIXED FLIP SOLVER Exporting Viscosity channel affected the simulation even when the Viscosity was set to 0

FIXED FLIP SOLVER Some FLIP particles could have a slightly negative Age when born from Surface Force sources

FIXED FLIP SOLVER The FLIP simulation took increasingly longer time and was quick again after restore

FIXED SOURCES Creating Discharge Modifiers or changing their curves did not support undo/redo

FIXED VOLUME SHADER Crash with caches over 2.1 billion voxels with Phoenix Light Cache, since Phoenix FD 3.12

FIXED VOLUME SHADER Wrong render of a frame different than the current timeline frame with enabled GPU Preview

FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash on render stop with Particle Shader and Liquid simulator using the same geometry as render Cutter and Motion Blur enabled

FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash during distributed rendering with Particle Shader using Backburner, since Phoenix FD 3.14

FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Reflections of excluded area lights still showed up on a Particle Shader's Bubbles/Splashes

FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash when rendering many overlapped particles, since Phoenix FD 3.14

FIXED RENDER ELEMENTS Memory leak with render elements enabled in Volumetric mode

FIXED MESHER The Simulator's Velocity Render Element was not rendered in some frames in any of the Mesh modes with Render Cutter

FIXED MESHER Black triangles near the container border with motion blur in Mesh Mode

FIXED MESHER Crash with high Ocean Subdivs and Mesh Smoothing with enabled Use Liquid Particles

FIXED MESHER Mesh mode with a 2D scalar Displacement map rendered with artifacts

FIXED OCEAN MESHER Enabling the Underwater Goggles option had no effect since Phoenix FD 3.12

FIXED OCEAN MESHER Orthographic viewport did not render Ocean Mesh correctly with Phoenix for Scanline

FIXED CACHE I/O Simulating the Fire/Smoke Temperature channel to VDB incorrectly showed the minimum data range as 0, instead of 300

FIXED CACHE I/O Drag particles exported to VDB could not render with motion blur even with exported grid velocity

FIXED CACHE I/O Differences in velocity length between AUR and VDB caches of the same simulation exported from Phoenix

FIXED PRT I/O The Export PRT Particles dialog exported the entire simulation cache range instead of the Timeline range when the Timeline checkbox is enabled

FIXED PREVIEW Jittering Preview with Detail reduction and Adaptive grid

FIXED PREVIEW Voxels and velocities in the voxel preview of a rotated simulator were not billboarded towards the camera

FIXED PREVIEW Simulations with particles sometimes show the frames from the previous run in the viewport

FIXED BODY FORCE Crash when simulating using a Body Force node without an object, since Phoenix FD 3.13

FIXED PATH FOLLOW Modifier-Based Space Warps over a Spline caused the Path Follow force to work incorrectly

FIXED MAPPER Mapper's Initializer option was not working with Liquid simulators

FIXED GRID TEXTURE Using a Grid Texture without a Simulator as displacement rendered slower than using a Grid Texture with a Simulator

FIXED GRID TEXTURE Grid Texture applied to thinkingParticles did not get updated correctly when rendering a sequence

FIXED PARTICLE TEXTURE Crash when selecting a thinkingParticles system with the Particle Texture

FIXED PARTICLE TEXTURE Crash when simulating using a Mapper with a Particle Texture, while the same Particle Texture was also used in a material

FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Fixed differences between 3ds Max and Maya's Phoenix oceans

FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Displaced Cap Mesh using Ocean Texture was offset from the Simulator box if using offset for the Ocean Texture

FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Opening a scene containing Phoenix Ocean Texture connected a VRayDisplacementMod prompted for adjusting the settings of the texture

FIXED FOAM TEXTURE Wrong Mapping of the Foam Texture when the Ocean texture used tiling other than 1.0 in World XYZ with 'Use the original non-displaced vertices'

FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Crash when simulating with Cascade Simulator enabled but no Simulator chosen

FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Adding an X-Ref Scene or X-Ref Object broke the Output path of existing Simulators in the current scene if it contained a macro

FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION The message asking for creating a Particle Shader popped up again after disabling Foam/Splash and enabling them again

FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Merging a Simulator from a scene with different scale changed its grid resolution

FIXED USER INTERFACE Simulation remaining time was wrong after pausing or restoring

FIXED VRSCENES Empty grids filled with density using the opacity curve rendered with different density between 3ds Max and exporting to VRscene

Complete changelog since Phoenix FD 3.99.00 Beta:

IMPROVED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Ability to animate the Phoenix per-node properties

IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES Set the original objects' visibility of the Active Bodies to Bounding Box

IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES Do not inherit the positions of Active Body originals in the hierarchy, so animated Active Bodies won't move faster than the originals

IMPROVED GRID SOLVER Represent all drag particles in the scene using the keyword "Drag" in the Clear Channels field and Affect fields of forces

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Make the Foam Falling Speed vary depending on the bubble sizes

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Improve the CPU core usage of the Initial Fill Up phase in FLIP simulation

IMPROVED TEX UVW Emit TexUVW from emitters with mapped textures, and emit changing TexUVW values over time from Sources

IMPROVED PARTICLE TUNER Now the Particle Tuner can affect the particle scalar speed and the separate X/Y/Z components of the particle velocity, as well as the R/G/B components of the particle RGB

IMPROVED PARTICLE TUNER Value expression items can now read the particle scalar Speed channel, as well as the Velocity along X, Y and Z

IMPROVED VOXEL TUNER Now the Voxel Tuner can affect the separate X/Y/Z components of the voxel velocity, as well as the R/G/B components of the voxel RGB