With Phoenix FD 4.10 we added support for Maya 2020. We also we sped up the particle preview and the Particle Shader. We 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 PHOENIX FD Support for Maya 2020
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Count Multiplier for increasing the number of particles in the Particle Shader
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW GPU Preview for fire in the Standalone Preview
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW Controls for the GPU Preview light direction
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 2 times
IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Smoke Color 'Based On' support for grid channels when saving images from the GPU Preview
IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Support for 'Use Own Opacity' when saving images from the GPU Preview
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
REMOVED PHOENIX FD Dropped support for Maya 2016 and 2016 Extension 2 (2016.5)
REMOVED MAYA INTEGRATION The 'Use the referenced scene name' option is now hidden from the Input rollout and can be accessed only through script using 'inPathReferenced'
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 Active Bodies were falling slower with more Steps per Frame
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Active Body simulation did not work with deformed geometry
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Active Bodies Ground Plane could not be hidden
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Active Bodies Clones were created hidden if the geometry was hidden
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 VOLUME SHADER Break Shadow Links did not affect the Simulator in Volumetric mode using V-Ray CPU
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Inconsistencies with Light Linking in Volumetric mode between renders with V-Ray for Maya and V-Ray Standalone if "Light Evaluation" was set to "Adaptive Lights" or "Uniform Probabilistic"
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Particle Shader in Points Mode with motion blur always rendered one point at the particle position, even if the interval center was shifted
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Particle Shader in Points Mode rendered incorrectly using a 360 V-Ray Spherical Camera
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER The Reflection Cut-off option was not working
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 RENDER ELEMENTS The Particle Shader Particle Age render element was incorrect in Points Mode with Motion Blur
FIXED MESHER Crash if rendering in Mesh mode with V-Ray and saving an image file which was locked and could not be overwritten
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Some Ocean Mesh normals pointed downwards with V-Ray Spherical camera and FOV over 180 degrees
FIXED FOAM TEXTURE Deleting the foam texture node did not remove the connection to materials
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 GPU PREVIEW The GPU Preview disappeared if the camera went inside it
FIXED GPU PREVIEW Simulators away from camera overlapped with grids close to the camera
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 GPU PREVIEW The Save Animation Preview function from instanced Simulators saved only the first instance instead of the selected Simulator
FIXED GPU PREVIEW Saving multiple simulators into one image with the 'Save GPU preview' functionality sometimes did not work
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 PRESETS Loading a rendering preset failed if any Smoke/Fire Color/Opacity textures are linked in the Simulator
FIXED PRESETS Loading a rendering preset containing render curves/gradients with less markers than the current ones did not delete the extra ones
FIXED MAYA INTERGRATION Crash when emitting from texture mapped Sources or using textures with Tuners with V-Ray Next under Linux, since Phoenix FD 3.99
FIXED MAYA INTERGRATION A referenced Simulator using default cache paths could not find its caches
FIXED MAYA INTERGRATION Providing a custom Global Preferences Default Cache Path caused an 'Invalid Path' warning in the Script Editor on Linux
FIXED MAYA INTERGRATION After changing a Simulator input, output or preview path, the Browse... dialog did not start from the new path until the node was re-selected
FIXED MAYA INTERGRATION A Simulator without a cache could be selected in the viewport only from the bottom left corner in Maya 2019