Active Bodies collision
Complete control over collisions between Active Bodies using the Bullet solver. Easily create effects such as colliding ice cubes in liquid, floating ocean debris or objects washed away in floods.
Color Absorption
A whole new level of volume rendering effects using Colored Absorption. Achieve more control over smoke shading—change the light’s color as it travels through smoke.
Massive Wave Force
Build highly realistic ocean simulations. Create real-world ocean waves, using the Massive Wave Force feature.
Extended motion blur support on V-Ray GPU
Leverage GPU power to add motion blur to splashes and bubble mode in the Particle Shader.
Faster rendering and simulations
Take advantage of various speed gains on simulation, rendering and previews.
Property Lister window
Quickly access and change the Phoenix properties of each object in your scene—all in one place.
Autodesk Maya 2022 support
Phoenix is now compatible with the latest Autodesk releases.
With Phoenix FD 4.40 we added support for Maya 2022.
We implemented mutual collisions between Active Bodies so now you can create complex rigid body dynamics with Phoenix. In order to aid scenes with many interacting objects, we added a new Property Lister window, allowing you quick access to the per-node properties of the scene nodes.
Simulations of large scale stormy oceans or tunnel waves are now possible with the new Massive Wave Force.
A new colored absorption option allows for more interesting volume rendering effects, and can also be mapped via a texture. We added support for motion blur of Bubbles and Splashes in V-Ray GPU (requires a latest V-Ray 5).
The Phoenix standalone previewer can now be fully controlled via the command line, allowing you to change options and save image sequences of cache files in all different preview modes.
In this version of Phoenix, we multithreaded all remaining parts of the simulation, and also sped up the simulation, previews and rendering significantly.
We improved our shelf presets, added more options to the cache converter tool, and as always, fixed many issues.
NEW PHOENIX Support for 3ds Max 2022 (GPU preview and velocity streamline preview are temporarily disabled)
NEW ACTIVE BODIES Mutual interaction between Active Bodies, using the Bullet Solver option
NEW SIMULATION GENERAL Phoenix Property Lister window for quickly editing many obstacles or Active Bodies in the scenе
NEW VOLUME SHADER Absorption color for volume rendering which can also be mapped by a texture
NEW VOLUME SHADER Render the Fully Visible Fire Opacity Mode together with the Use Probabilistic Shading option
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Render the Particle Shader in Bubbles/Splashes mode with motion blur on V-Ray GPU, requires a latest V-Ray nightly as well
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW Command line interface allowing to script image saving using different preview modes and options
NEW ASSET MANAGEMENT Support for Simulator cache files using the Transfer Missing Assets option in V-Ray's DR
NEW WAVE FORCE Massive Wave Force allowing to exactly replicate the Ocean waves, to affect any Phoenix channel, even without Fillup for Ocean, and use any Level Of Detail of the Ocean Texture
NEW MAYA INTEGRATION Option to start a render after each simulation frame is completed - 'Render On Each Sim Frame' in the Simulation rollout
NEW MAYA INTEGRATION Support for simulations using Z Up axis
NEW BUILD Build Phoenix for Maya 2019, 2020 and 2022 for V-Ray 5 on Centos 7 instead of Centos 6
IMPROVED SIMULATION GENERAL Sped up low res simulations (below 10 million voxels) with up to 15%
IMPROVED SIMULATION GENERAL Enabled Grid Velocity for all Simulators and presets by default
IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Emit pressure from Liquid Sources In Volume Inject mode without emitting liquid
IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Allow Birth Volumes to interact with the simulation even if they are hidden
IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Sped up FLIP simulations with up to 25%
IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES A new 'Collision Margin' parameter which you can lower in order to keep groups of bodies in contact
IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES Made it possible to select the Active Body's originals in the Maya viewport. They need to be manually hidden from rendering though
IMPROVED SOURCES Affect RGB and Viscosity using Discharge Modifiers
IMPROVED SOURCES Affect Motion Velocity of Sources emitting from geometries and particles, using Discharge Modifiers
IMPROVED SOURCES Sped up texture mapped emitters by improving their multithreading
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER The scattering strength is now equalized with 3ds Max and is correct
IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Sped up frame begin and frame end of the Particle Shader in Bubbles/Splashes/Cellular and Points Mode, especially with huge numbers of particles
IMPROVED MESHER Mesh surface from the Viscosity channel
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up particle compression when writing AUR files. Older Phoenix versions will not be able to read the new AUR files
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Read VDB particle channels named 'point_velocity', 'point_size' and 'point_age'
IMPROVED ABC I/O Support for the new VRayProxy in V-Ray 5 as an emitter, obstacle, or Active Body
IMPROVED OCEAN MESHER Ocean Mesh support for camera Overscan parameters
IMPROVED PRESETS Improved the Gasoline Explosion Shelf Quick Setup preset
IMPROVED PRESETS Improved the Burning Fuel Shelf Quick Setup preset
IMPROVED PREVIEW Option to disable preview cache load during simulation or when not rendering
IMPROVED PREVIEW Sped up viewport performance of many Simulator copies
IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Support for orthographic projection in the GPU Preview and image saving
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Options for specifying the resolution of the saved images
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Option for enabling orthographic projection
IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER -exportchannels option allowing you to write only specific channels to the output cache files
IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER -removegridch and -removeprt options allowing stripping of grid and particle channels from the cache files
IMPROVED SCRIPTING Keep the Script File path relative to the Maya project so it can be found when the scene is moved
IMPROVED SHELF Delete caches from the Phoenix Shelf without a selected Simulator, using left click (there already is a right click menu on the Shelf button as well)
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Added a new 'Credits and Copyrights' window, accessible via the 'Phoenix FD' menu
REMOVED PHOENIX Dropped support for Maya 2017
REMOVED USER INTERFACE Hidden the Particle TexUVW export option from the Output rollout
FIXED SIMULATION GENERAL Random Memory allocation error under Linux
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Emitting Foam/Splash from rigged geometry via a Source in Surface Force mode with Motion Velocity did not set the initial velocity of the particles
FIXED FLIP SOLVER The Foam Birth Volume did not prevent foam to be born by the Splash's Foam On Hit
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Lower Sticky Liquid multiplier values in scenes with overall low Sticky strength resulted in stronger Sticky interaction
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Foam and Splash particles could be born by a Source one voxel further outside the grid's positive sides
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Liquid Particles flew to infinity when animated Time Scale reached value of 0
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Using Foam Patterns caused some foam particles to get stuck at the liquid surface near geometries
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Liquid was creeping up the walls of Confine Geometry, and Liquid and Foam particles sometimes got shot away on collision with Confine Geometry
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES The Active Bodies Ground plane elasticity affected the elasticity of the collision objects as well
FIXED CACHELESS SIMULATIONS Sometimes more than 1 frame remained in RAM
FIXED CACHELESS SIMULATIONS The Grid RGB channel was not visible in Cacheless frames
FIXED SOURCES Turning off Phoenix Source's Motion Velocity checkbox did not disable the velocity effect in Surface Force mode
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Volumes were not affected by the V-Ray GI engine multipliers
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Setting the Self-Shadowing of the Fire lights to None fell back to the Ray-Traced mode using V-Ray, since Phoenix 3.13
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Rare random crash or memory leak when starting and stopping V-Ray GPU rendering
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Wrong sampling of smoke opacity maps by the Volume Shader when TexUVW was enabled
FIXED VOLUMETRIC ILLUMINATION Fire Lights were visible in surfaces with Reflection Glossiness below 1
FIXED RENDER ELEMENTS Crash when rendering several Particle Shaders which used different values for the Particle Age Render Element option
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER The Particle Shader "Fog" Mode was not rendering with V-Ray GPU 5 when Render as Geometry was enabled
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Disable Liquid Shadows was not working in Points mode with Volume Light Cache enabled, or Bubbles and Cellular mode, since Phoenix 4.10
FIXED V-RAY IPR Crash during IPR of a Particle Shader in Bubbles mode with Render as Geometry ON
FIXED TEXUVW Crash when simulating TexUVW interpolation with certain Time Scale values
FIXED CACHE I/O Crash when rendering VDB particles with V-Ray Next
FIXED CACHE I/O Crash when exporting the ID channel of a particle system with more than 536'870'911 particles. Older Phoenix versions will not be able to read the new AUR files
FIXED ABC I/O Fixed several random crashes when emitting from Alembic files loaded via V-Ray Proxy. A latest V-Ray 5 is also needed
FIXED ABC I/O Using certain Alembic files via V-Ray Proxy as emitters worked incorrectly
FIXED ABC I/O Vertex Velocity of geometry loaded via V-Ray Proxy was ignored by Phoenix Sources
FIXED BODY FORCE Body Force's Spread Speed could create huge velocities if the affected channel had negative values
FIXED WAVE FORCE Lowering the Rate of Change of the Ocean Texture reduced the effect of the Wave Force
FIXED GRID TEXTURE Crash during Maya Batch rendering with a Grid Texture reading the RGB channel, since Phoenix 4.30
FIXED PREVIEW Missing frames in the viewport right after simulation restore
FIXED PREVIEW Crash when previewing particles and simulating the same frame with less particles since Phoenix 4.30
FIXED PREVIEW Auto Reduction didn't raise the Detail Reduction correctly with many Simulators in the scene
FIXED PREVIEW Crash when turning on Velocity Streamlines preview while having Force preview turned on
FIXED GPU PREVIEW Crash when using the Legacy Viewport
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW: Saved images were always recorded with the default name and in the default path on Linux
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW: Save file dialogue was breaking when canceling it on Linux
FIXED NPARTICLES Crash when rendering nParticles system created by the Phoenix's Simulator particle groups with V-Ray 5
FIXED USER INTERFACE Stopping the simulation using Esc/Shift+Esc sometimes worked even when the Maya window was not focused
FIXED USER INTERFACE Aborting a Simulation where the Output cache path didn't exist was not working, since Phoenix 4.30
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION If a crash occurred during Maya Batch, the cache files were moved from the default path to a temporary folder
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION Modify -> Center Pivot did not work correctly for loaded caches which did not overlap the grid origin
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION Simulators with identical shape names under different transforms rendered identical even when using different caches
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION If a project was not set, cache paths did not load correctly from a scene saved with the project and with the paths pointing inside the project directory