Table of Contents

Beta release

Date – 17 September, 2019

Download  Build 3.99 BETA


 

 

New Voxel and Particle Tuners

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

 


 

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.

 


 

Complete changelog:

 

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

NEW PHOENIX FD 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 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 node allowing to change any particle channel or delete particles during simulation depending on conditions based on particle channel values

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

 

IMPROVED INSTALLATION Now Phoenix FD can load in Maya and simulate without V-Ray installed

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Optimized Birth Volumes

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

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 MAYA INTEGRATION Name the Linux '.so' libraries in the plug-ins directory '.phxso' so they don't appear in the Plug-in Manager window

IMPROVED MAYA INTEGRATION Do not load caches while the timeline changes during sequence vrscene export or render

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 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 SDK Renamed aura_ver.h to phoenix_ver.h

IMPROVED SDK Removed grid and particle channel defines from aurinterface.h

 

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

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

FIXED MESHER Phoenix 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 PREVIEW Particle Preview was not cleared when hiding the Simulator

FIXED CACHE I/O Exported FLIP VDBs from Phoenix for Maya contained random values for the Smoke channel if it was enabled in Output

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 PREVIEW Jittering Preview with Detail reduction and Adaptive grid

FIXED GPU PREVIEW Images saved from the GPU Preview in Simple Smoke mode had different smoke opacity than the viewport

FIXED GRID TEXTURE Mel error when rescaling a Grid Texture channel if the Grid Texture was not selected in the attribute editor

FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Vertical Offset of the Ocean Texture did offset the displaced ocean horizontally

FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Bucket artifacts when rendering an Ocean Texture used as a color map for a material

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

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

FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION If the Simulation license dropped during Maya batch simulation, Phoenix did not try to re-acquire it and canceled the simulation

FIXED SUBMITTING SIMULATIONS Overriding the cache output directory with the Backburner submitter in Maya was not working