With Phoenix FD 4.20 we added support for V-Ray 5 and for 3ds Max 2021.
We also improved our Standalone and 3ds Max previews and added support for Particle Shader Fog mode rendering with V-Ray GPU, and we also added support for particle displacement for Fog mode. Particle Shaders can now be rendered in V-Ray CPU IPR as well.
We improved TexUVW for smoke simulations and implemented filling an emitter's volume with TexUVW and RGB.
Once more we did many changes under the hood so we can develop faster, and as usual we fixed many bugs.
NEW PHOENIX FD Support for V-Ray 5
NEW PHOENIX FD Support for 3ds Max 2021
NEW SOURCES Use surface texture maps or vertex color for Volume Brush and Volume Inject modes; Now you can fill volumes with RGB or TexUVW and melt them.
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Support for Particle Shaders in Fog mode in V-Ray Next GPU and V-Ray 5 GPU
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Support for Particle Shaders in V-Ray CPU IPR
NEW PREVIEW Velocity Streamline Preview ported to 3ds Max from the Standalone Preview
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW Particle Preview in the Standalone Preview
IMPROVED GRID SOLVER Allow the RGB channel to be transported with Fuel like it does with Smoke
IMPROVED SCENE BODY INTERACTION Do not interact with 3ds Max splines as fluid obstacles or emitters unless they are extruded
IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Support for displacement in Fog mode of the Particle Shader
IMPROVED RENDER CURVES Delete Color Gradient points with Backspace
IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Use fully transparent black background color when saving images
IMPROVED PREVIEW Option to disable the Particle Preview Color Scaling
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up and using less memory for blending frames having Grid Velocity or liquid particles (when using Time Bend controls)
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Render Fire without cache data just by offsetting the Fire Opacity curve above zero (Physically Based must be below 1.0)
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Save images in TIFF format
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Optimized the Velocity Streamlines Preview when the Auto Reduction is off
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Split the Log and Info windows
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Renamed the executable from 'standalone_previewer' to 'phoenix_previewer'
IMPROVED SCRIPTING New A_GetGridSize, $.getGridSize and $.getVersion MaxScript functions
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Renamed 'Frm. Blend' in the Input rollout to 'Grid Blend'
REMOVED PHOENIX FD Dropped support for V-Ray 3
REMOVED PHOENIX FD Dropped support for 3ds Max 2015
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Artifacts with texture mapped Volume Liquid Sources
FIXED FLIP SOLVER The WetMap particles were born with sizes equal to 1 scene unit, instead of 1 voxel
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Could not animate the Sticky Liquid option
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Motion Velocity Multiplier of animated objects had no effect if a Phoenix Simulator with Fillup for Ocean was linked to them
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Blocky artifacts around submerged geometry with disabled Clear Inside, when simulating with Fillup For Ocean
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Crash when deleting Active Body originals which had MassFX Rigid Body modifier applied
FIXED TEXUVW Incorrect TexUVW on the borders of smoke simulations
FIXED SOURCES The Emit Mode was loaded as Surface Force from saved scenes if any of its emitters were geometries, since Phoenix FD 4.0
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Border Fade did not affect fire in Own Opacity mode
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash when rendering a Simulator which is picked directly into a Particle Shader, since Phoenix FD 4.10
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Random crash during sequence render with Liquid simulator checkbox enabled in the Particle shader and Displacement turned on
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Canceling the 'Building Fog' pre-pass did not stop the rendering
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Ocean Mesh was not constructed properly when Stereo Camera was used with FoV larger than 180
FIXED MESHER Motion Blur rendered differently with and without modifiers applied to the Phoenix Mesh
FIXED CACHE I/O AUR files where the grid data was over 8GB were unreadable
FIXED CACHE I/O Incorrect positions of recently born particles when retiming a simulation with adaptive grid
FIXED PREVIEW The green Simulator grid box preview did not account for Resimulation Amp. Resolution
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The Viewport GPU Preview disappeared if the Simulator was flipped by using a negative scale
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW When Flip Up Axes was enabled the caches were rotating on every reload
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Could not type in manually in the Timeline Input box
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Crash when selecting out of range start or end for saving a sequence
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW GPU Preview was displaying brighter on the first render pass
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW If the preview window was resized, saving an image with *.bmp extension produced a skewed picture
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW The Slice Level slider was not working in negative direction if Z axis was chosen
FIXED VRSCENES Phoenix's Atmosphere Gamma Correction was ignored in V-Ray Standalone and was always 1.0
FIXED TOOLBAR Crash when creating a toolbar preset that uses discharge modifiers and then undoing
FIXED PARTICLE FLOW Cropped user interface for the PFlow Test operator, since Phoenix FD 3.99
FIXED INSTALLATION Crash when rendering with custom V-Ray for 3ds Max install with 'VRay=' instead of 'V-Ray main plug-ins=' in plugin.ini
FIXED SDK aurloader_s required missing vfree and vmalloc symbols