Table of Contents

Beta release

Date – Dec. 7, 2016

 

New Features

PhoenixFD 

  • Implemented Phoenix FD Toolbar for Maya with quick simulation Start/Stop controls and quick creation of nodes
  • Added various Quick Setup presets to the Phoenix FD Toolbar for automatic creation of Simulators and Sources around an emitter
  • Support for Maya 2017
  • New Simulation licenses to be run without GUI in Backburner/Deadline/MayaBatch mode
  • Online Licensing support

Simulation

  • FLIP Liquid solver
  • New vorticity confinement algorithm that adds high detail and improves the rolling of smoke and fire
  • PCG conservation that improves the behavior of smoke and fire
  • Follow Path force
  • Body Attraction and Morphing forces
  • Wave Force that transfers the effect of the PhoenixFDOceanTex onto the simulation
  • Initial Liquid fill up option for objects
  • Re-timing by Time Bend resimulation for fire/smoke
  • Direct re-timing and re-meshing of FLIP liquids
  • Dedicated Mist particles
  • Controls for burning fuel depletion and smoke production
  • Per object wetting
  • Scene scale multiplier per simulator
  • Grid Confine Geometry for Fire/Smoke

Rendering

  • Render option to control the strength of volumetric shadows
  • Added shadow strength and point size options to the point shader
  • Added a separate control for the step of shadow rays
  • Replaced the default Maya ramps and color gradients with unified Phoenix controls
  • Ability to pop out and enlarge curves and color gradients
  • Support for matte objects
  • Enabled pure Volumetric rendering for V-Ray RT
  • Particle Age render element
  • Cap mesh render mode
  • Respect the maxRenderThreads setting in V-Ray during rendering
  • Particle-based mesh smoothing

Preview

  • Implement viewport selection for the Phoenix objects in Maya 2016.5+

I/O

  • Export simulations to OpenVDB
  • Allowed passing custom names for imported OpenVDB/Field3D channels
  • Implemented 32bit export of the RGB channel to aur caches

PhoenixFDParticleTex

  • Implemented Particle Texture, to be used as a mask for wetting

 

Modified Features

PhoenixFD

  • Tooltips in the attribute editor
  • Separate sources for Liquids and Fire/Smoke

  • Auto create Particle Shaders when Foam or Splashes are enabled for simulation

  • Phoenix Preferences option to open the log file location

Simulation

  • Up-res and add detail to a sim without changing the shape using the Resimulation
  • Allow resimulation with both Wavelet and RGB simultaneously
  • Ability to decrease resolution with resimulation
  • Direct cascade connection between Liquid simulators
  • Push the foam with moving geometry
  • Foam surface lock control
  • Allow the Source Noise to affect Brush and Inject modes
  • Phoenix Preferences option to turn on/off the use of a V-Ray license for sampling textures during simulation
  • Support for VRayVertexColors texture
  • Do not allow more than one source to be connected to the same emitter object

Rendering

  • Optimized fire/smoke rendering in Volumetric mode
  • Optimized the Linear and Spherical samplers
  • Probabilistic volumetric rendering mode for Fire/Smoke and particles
  • Foam Shader light cache speedup option
  • Optimized the Foam Shader's Point mode
  • Added a new Fire Opacity Mode in which the fire has its own opacity curve
  • Cutter support in Mesh mode rendering
  • Cutter support for VRayMesh and Alembic files via VRayProxy
  • Support for motion blurred render Cutter and Glass geometry
  • Motion blur clipping by the Cutter geometry for non-Mesh modes
  • Allowed gradual transition between the default Black Body Fire model and an artistic model using the Physically Based option
  • Display the channel data range in the curve and color gradient render controls
  • Limited the volumetric render curves between 0 and 1
  • Gradient controls now display the colors with gamma correction
  • Using grid-based self-shadowing, create less lights for the scene than for the grid
  • Added velocity based fade out for the ocean displacement
  • Ability to create ocean from imported Houdini OpenVDB caches
  • Smoothing option for the input cache that can be used to remove grid artifacts
  • Improved and optimized the motion blur for volumetrics
  • Improved motion blur using UVW coordinates from a Phoenix simulation
  • The Fire emissive lights produce specular lighting
  • Show warning in Maya DR if the input caches are not shared on the network
  • Phoenix Preferences option to turn on/off the RT support
  • Support for instancer in geometry mode
  • Simulation is paused during rendering

Preview

  • Automatic preview detail reduction
  • Automatic channel ranges for the viewport grid preview
  • Changed the viewport representation of the Phoenix objects to wireframe icons
  • Viewport particle, voxel and GPU preview now works with all Maya viewport modes
  • Show the RGB channel in the GPU preview
  • Improved the velocity voxel preview
  • Preview particles colored by the velocity
  • Create low res viewport mesh preview in ocean mode
  • Channel data interval information in the cache info
  • Cache info describing which version of PhoenixFD was used during simulation
  • Display a status text in the viewport while a simulation is running

I/O

  • Included the number format and file extension in input and output paths
  • *.aur caches use a four-digit zero-padded number for proper file sorting
  • Loading of Thinkbox Stoke OpenVDB/Field3D cache files
  • Updated the OpenVDB library to version 3.0
  • Support for nameless OpenVDB channels
  • UTF-8 cache paths support for Windows and Linux
  • The cache path must be exported to vrscene always with UNIX type slashes
  • Add a new keyword in Phoenix FD for Maya I/O path that points to the current workspace(project) directory
  • No to all, Move All and Copy All buttons with the move cache dialog

Turbulence

  • Added a scalar Speed channel

Grid Texture

  • Added a scalar Speed channel

Ocean Texture

  • Added the meter scale as an attribute to the Ocean texture

Source

  • Added an Add Selected Objects button

AuraSDK

  • Samples to read and visualize a cache file

Deprecated Features

PhoenixFD

  • Dropped support for Windows XP
  • Sample scenes are no longer shipped with the installation, and are instead available on the docs site

Simulation

  • The Slow Moving advection method

Rendering

  • Dropped the legacy Fire emissive light placing modes


Bug Fixes

PhoenixFD

  • Missing build type (adv, edu, nfr, demo) in the start menu folder
  • Undoing a deleted PhoenixFD Simulator node crashes Maya
  • Moving/Copying the cache on scene rename doesn't work for the resimulation cache
  • No error messages are shown in out-of-memory situations
  • Phoenix installation stops VRL service

Simulation

  • The Patterns Strength parameter throws foam particles high in the air
  • Wrong texture mapping of source discharge and channels with volume brush and inject
  • Rotating simulator with adaptive grid produces wrong forces
  • Foam and splash can be born through jammed walls or frozen obstacles
  • Crash when the cell size is set to zero
  • Crash with simulation of large wrapped grids
  • Different behavior between the positive and the negative open walls of the simulator
  • Diagonal spike artifacts with Multi-Pass advection at low speed or high SPF
  • Burning depletes Fuel faster proportionally to the Steps per frame
  • Leaks from geometry container when the wall is less than two cells wide
  • The grid fit camera algorithm sometimes allows the simulator to shrink too much
  • The adaptive grid expands through walls entirely blocked by frozen objects
  • Adaptive grid can super-expand to unreasonable size in case of a short burst of high velocity
  • When an adaptive limit is reached, the grid refuses to expand at all instead of expanding up to the limit
  • Crash when adaptive grid memory allocation fails
  • Adaptive grid can't expand over 2.1 billion voxels
  • Adaptive grid with jammed walls creates velocity at the walls in fire/smoke mode
  • Occasional jittering with wavelet turbulence and adaptive grid
  • Wrong bounding box with adaptive grid and No Smaller than Initial Grid off
  • Crash when simulating with Wavelet and Forward Transfer
  • Crash with grid-only resimulation including drag particles with timeout
  • The cascade connection produces gaps when the source is moving
  • The custom gravity vector should be set in world space, not in node space
  • VRayDistanceTex does not update with moving geometry
  • Fix Discharge Modifiers using the emitter normal
  • Enabling Burning while simulating crashes Maya
  • Crash when using animated particle instancer as source
  • Texture animation during simulation is lagging one frame behind
  • Wrong simulation with Maya Mesh render mode
  • Wrong body transformation with parent constraint in batch mode
  • Starting resimulation from a frame when the grid has already adapted causes wrong grid position

Rendering

  • Fixed various issues where the Ocean Surface does not fit the rendering or preview
  • Can't build ocean when the Invert Volume option is on
  • Wrong normals on the ocean stitching strip at certain camera angles
  • Meshing artifacts at the sim border when the ocean level is higher than the simulator
  • Broken ocean displacement when the camera is oriented exactly vertically
  • Wrong ocean meshing at low camera height
  • Ocean mesh is not visible on some frames
  • In Mesh render mode, the surface displacement works as if there is an ocean
  • Imported ocean caches from Houdini can mesh with holes at the bottom
  • The foam displacement does not match the liquid displacement
  • Foam Shader ignored the Invert Cutter option
  • Local and distributed foam render buckets differ with Foam Shader size variation
  • Fixed multiple issues where random colored bubbles would appear during distributed rendering
  • Bubble mode with displacement produces white areas on the foam
  • Foam Shader pressure variation causes flickering in animation
  • Foam sliding on inclined geometry is hidden by it during the rendering
  • Foam Shader caustics do not work if GI visibility is off
  • The point shader produces different opacity when the image resolution is changed
  • The point shader produces very different renders in ortho
  • Container in Volumetric Geometry mode is not shaded in Multi Matte Element
  • Volumetric Heat Haze rendering mode does not render correctly
  • Frame blending does not work properly with adaptive grid
  • Loop playback of an adaptive grid cuts out portions of the grid
  • Inverted render Cutter cuts all the emissive lights outside it, instead of inside it
  • Wrong shading if emissive/diffuse/transparency source is set to texture without actually providing one
  • Crash when rendering in mesh mode a simulator that was used as a cascade source for a fire/smoke simulator
  • Different buckets in distributed rendering mode with light cache
  • The lighting render elements do not include the grid self-illumination with LC off
  • Black grid self-illumination with disabled scattering and very thick smoke
  • No grid self-illumination in geometry mode without light cache
  • The emissive lights construction is not thread safe
  • Crash with emissive lights enabled and V-Ray's Hidden Lights option disabled
  • Crash when loading a cache while V-Ray RT is running
  • Motion blur remains the same length when varying the FPS in V-Ray RT
  • Rendering with motion blur and duration=0 will preprocess forever
  • Volumetric mode ignores the V-Ray object properties motion blur override samples
  • Simulator does not render with motion blur, velocity channel, play speed set to 0 and wind from movement option turned on
  • Bucket artifacts with a moving grid using Phoenix Light Cache together with motion blur
  • Artifacts on the wall of the simulator when rendering liquids in Isosurface mode
  • Noise on flat iso-surfaces created from textures
  • Fog correction produces improper blending with semi-transparent geometry
  • Reflected geometry misses Fire lighting in some buckets
  • Wrong rendering with V-Ray 3, geometry mode and other geometry inside the simulator
  • Animation renders garbage after the cache sequence ends
  • The emissive lights are created even when rendering liquids
  • Crash if rendering with enabled displacement without a map
  • Two simulators in a vrscene sharing a cache with offset animation render the same frame
  • Bucket artifacts with a moving grid using Phoenix Light Cache together with motion blur
  • V-Ray RT won't render smoke shaded by Smoke channel
  • Reset to Defaults resets only the curves/gradients and does not change the other options
  • Emissive lights are calculated in Maya and V-Ray RT even when the Fire channel does not exist

Preview

  • The preview of OpenVDB caches doesn't always update when changing frames
  • The cell preview stops drawing after V-Ray RT is used
  • Crash on enabling mesh preview with a non-existant surface channel
  • Cell preview does not update when changing Load Nearest if Missing
  • The mesh preview does not have normals in Viewport 2.0
  • Fire multiplier changes are not updated in the GPU preview
  • The GPU preview is saved with wrong name when # is present in the name
  • Rewinding meshed smoke simulation crashes Maya
  • Phoenix FD fails to initialize OpenGL 2.0 if Maya was started with a file to open
  • Blended frames are missing channel info and show only smoke in the Maya preview

I/O

  • Wrong winding of the faces of a meshed Field3D cache
  • OpenVDB levelset caches render with inverted normals and winding
  • Can't blend between imported OpenVDB or Field3D files
  • The container jitters or has incorrect position with OpenVDB caches from FumeFX
  • The Speed channel is not working when rendering a Field3D/OpenVDB cache
  • Imported OpenVDB files have wrong orientation in V-Ray RT
  • Field3D files from FumeFX using boundless sim or wavelet are not scaled correctly
  • Field3D caches over 4GB cannot be loaded
  • Aur cache files over 2GB cannot be loaded
  • Too many simulated particles break the export compressor and cause a crash on read
  • Can't load negative frame numbers
  • $(simoutput) is not working as input for instanced Simulator node
  • Using name of a second simulator as input for the main Sim node is not working

Turbulence

  • Turbulence with size and strength 0 still affects simulation

Grid Texture

  • The the velocity and temperature channels are not read properly
  • Crash at the moment a PhoenixFDGridTex is assigned as an input to a composite map

Force Field

  • Field doesn't work in batch mode

Particle Group

  • Render time only and Use Simulator's cache do not work with motion blur