With Phoenix FD 4.10 we focused on particles - Sources can now emit from any 3ds Max particle system, we sped up the particle preview and the Particle Shader and exposed its data for rendering by 3rd party render engines. We also did fixes and improvements to our new Active Bodies and Standalone Preview, as well as the usual round of other bugfixes and small improvements.
NEW PRT I/O Emit fluid from Phoenix PRTReader particles and Krakatoa PRTLoader particles in the Phoenix Sources
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW GPU Preview for fire in the Standalone Preview
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW Controls for the GPU Preview light direction
NEW SDK Now the Particle Shader exposes PhoenixVolumeShaderInterface and can be sampled in Fog mode using IPhoenixFDVolRendSampler
NEW SDK New IPhoenixFDParticleRendData interface for obtaining the particle rendering data of a Particle Shader in non-Fog modes
IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Sped up FLIP particle resimulation with 10%, up to 20% on some scenes
IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Do not offset the Foam particles vertically during simulation
IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES Pop-up menu with density presets in the right-click properties of bodies
IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Sped up the particle collection rendering pre-process up to 5 times
IMPROVED ISOSURFACE RENDERING Expose the Sampler option for Isosurface rendering in the Liquid Simulator
IMPROVED PREVIEW Sped up loading of new frames for the Particle Preview with 20%
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Store velocity of Drag particles in their particle data instead of in the Grid Velocity. Added an Output Drag Particle Velocity option to Sources
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Options to save a range of frames and a single frame
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Text box for the loaded cache file info
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW By default name the saved image files the same way as the input cache files
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Image saving to PNG files
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Don't warn about the interacting forces if the Simulator is in Include List interaction mode
REMOVED PARTICLE SHADER Removed the Particle Shader Liquid Tint and Liquid Turbidity options
REMOVED SOURCES The 'Can Pick Simulators' option is now On by default and hidden from Sources and can be accessed only through script using 'pick_ph'
FIXED FLIP SOLVER When using Variable Viscosity, some particles were not behaving properly
FIXED FLIP SOLVER FLIP particles resimulation produced NaN-values with Simulate Air Effects
FIXED GRID SOLVER Failing to load cache for resimulation displayed an error message, but did not stop the resimulation
FIXED SIMULATION GENERAL During the first restore frame, bodies in the simulation had incorrect velocities
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES All modifiers keys were erased at simulation startup when the object was set as Active Body
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Restoring an Active Body simulation broke the animation of the original objects
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Active Bodies were falling slower with more Steps per Frame
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Don't show per-node Phoenix properties on the Active Bodies center of mass helpers
FIXED VOLUME SHADER A Phoenix smoke volume inside a Mesh with Refraction Glossiness below 1.0 rendered blocky
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Random artifacts when rendering smoke using Volume Light Cache in Volumetric Geometry mode
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Count Multiplier above 1 did not preserve the positions and sizes of the created particles in animation
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Rendering a Particle Shader with Liquid Simulator selected used extra memory
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Particle Shader in Points Mode rendered incorrectly using a 360 V-Ray Spherical Camera
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash when attempting to render a Particle Shader with V-Ray GPU
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Zooming In and Out during V-Ray IPR was not working correctly while Particle Shader pre-passes acquired the focus
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER The Velocity Render Element of a Particle Shader in Points mode was not affected by the Motion Blur Multiplier
FIXED ISOSURFACE RENDERING Crash when rendering in Isosurface mode using V-Ray Volume Scatter material
FIXED TEXUVW Source UVW variation using inherited UVW from Geometry was not consistent during simulation
FIXED EXPRESSIONS Crash when changing the tiling or offset of a texture selected in an expression
FIXED MESHER Crash rendering two Simulators when one uses the other as a Cutter and also its material has Distance Texture pointing to the other one
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Some Ocean Mesh normals pointed downwards with V-Ray Spherical camera and FOV over 180 degrees
FIXED CACHE I/O Enabling RGB Input smoothing for a Mesh which was shaded using RGB from a Grid Texture had no effect until changing the frame
FIXED CACHE I/O Handled some out-of-memory in case of saving Grid RGB to cache files or when blending cache files
FIXED CACHE I/O Could not use General Purpose Time Bend Resimulation when the base caches were VDB instead of AUR
FIXED PRT I/O The Phoenix particle Size was incorrect when exported to the Scale channel of PRT files
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The GPU Preview disappeared if the camera went inside it
FIXED GPU PREVIEW Crash with caches which had transformations with negative or fractional offsets, since Phoenix FD 3.99
FIXED GPU PREVIEW Randomly appearing colored artifacts with the GPU Preview when using Detail Reduction, since Phoenix FD 4.0
FIXED GRID TEXTURE The Grid Texture could pick Phoenix Particle System nodes
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Crash when cancelling the first cache open dialog
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW If 'Enable GPU Preview' was turned on, the Standalone Preview didn't save files after pressing the "Save" button
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Sometimes the Standalone Voxel Preview drew in slices the first time a cache was loaded
FIXED CACHE CONVERTER Cache Converter did output empty VDB files, since Phoenix FD 3.99
FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Could not pick Particle Flow events in the Scene Interaction rollout - only the PF Source got added
FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Switching between two different Grid, Ocean or Particle Textures in the old Material Editor did not update some of their GUI elements