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Overview
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The Input rollout determines the path of the input files for rendering and preview as well as the playback effects. Note that some playback settings require a fractional input frame, in which case the frame is blended between the previous and the next one.
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To set up rendering and simulation cache paths manually, see Chaning the Default Phoenix Paths in the Tips and Tricks page. |
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UI Path: ||Select PhoenixFDSim|| > Attribute Editor > Input rollout |
Parameters
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Cached Frames – Shows information about the cached frame range.
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$(same_as_output) – Uses the output path as input. The resimulation output path will get used if the Resimulate option is enabled in the Resimulation rollout. $(same_as_resimoutput) – Uses the resimulation output path as input. $(work_path) – $(data_dir)/$(scene)_Phoenix_frames/$(nodename)_####.aur If you are transferring your scene and assets between Windows and Linux, prefixing your path with the $(workspace) or $env(<variable_name>) macros can make it possible to use the same scene without any manual modifications to the cache path. Pound signs can be used to specify the cache frame number with at least as many digits as the pound signs. If the number of frame digits is less than the number of pound signs, the number is padded with zeroes to the left. For example:
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The default rendering settings are tuned to Phoenix FD simulations, and they might not work well for imported 3rd party cache files.
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You can suppress showing of the dialogues offering presets using the inDontOfferPresets attribute of the Simulator. Setting inDontOfferPresets to 1, as shown in the image below, will disable the presets pop-up window displayed when a VDB or Field3D cache files are loaded.
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Clicking the "..." button will open a menu with the following options:
Browse – Opens a dialog for choosing one of several cache file types. Phoenix can import *.f3d, *.vdb and *.prt files from other fluid simulator software products. See How to import and render simulations from FumeFX, Houdini and Maya for more information. Supported file formats are:
Reset to Default - Resets the Preview and Render Path to the default value of $(same_as_output). Help - Opens the Help page for the Input rollout of the Phoenix FD Simulator. |
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This section contains playback options you can use for retiming a simulation after it has already finished. Using these, you can speed up, slow down or animate the motion of the simulated sequence. When retiming an existing simulation from this section without re-simulating, additional RAM might be used, and loading a new timeline frame may take longer when the frame must be obtained by creating a new one between two adjacent cache files. We will refer to the process of creating an intermediate frame from two caches as Blending. Some of the settings in this section might require specific grid or particle channels to be saved to the cache files during simulation from the Output rollout.
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In order to blend FLIP particles (e.g. Foam, Splash, etc.), enable the export of the Particle ID channel from the Output roll-out rollout of the simulatorSimulator. To blend Drag particles, enable the export of the Particle ID channel from the Particles section of the Phoenix FD Source used to add them into the Simulationsimulation. |
Playback Mode | inMode – Chooses between different options for animation control:
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Interpolation – Simple linear interpolation suitable for slow simulations. This is the fastest method but it does not capture movement well and may produce flickering.
Velocity – Velocity-based interpolation. Produces better results, but works more slowly. Captures well the movement of the fronts of the plumes, but does not work well for smoke moving backwards, and also may produce flickering. It requires an exported grid velocity channel from the Output rollout.
Precise Tracing - Improved Velocity based interpolation for Fire and Smoke simulations. Captures plume movement very well and can handle very low Play Speeds. Requires an exported grid Velocity channel, as well as Advection Origin channel from the Output rollout.
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Grid Frame Blending is better suited for simulations without much variety in velocity. For more chaotic fire/smoke simulations, it is better to run a Resimulation using Time Bend controls. Time Bend Resimulation will calculate a better intermediate result for each frame and store it in new cache files that can later be loaded faster, as opposed to Frame Blending which re-launches every time the timeline frame changes. However, for very slow moving simulation the Precise Tracing method produces better-looking results than Time Bend Resimulation. For more information, see How to slow down a simulation, animate the time-scale, etc. |
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Flip Up Axis | inFlipYZ – When enabled, flips the Y and Z axis of the cache's transformation. This is useful when the cache was created with a different up axis (for example, in 3ds Max).
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Example: Timeline Origin
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Example: Cache Origin and Play Speed
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Example: Looping a Simulation
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Example: Play Speed
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Grid Channel Smoothing
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Grid Smoothing is performed after the cache file is loaded for the current frame, so for large grids it could cause significant lag after changing frames. To prevent this from occurring, switch it off during the design process and re-enable it again before rendering. |
The controls in this section allow you to smooth the grid channels loaded from cache files for preview and rendering. You can use this to prevent grid artifacts on meshed grid channels such as the Liquid surface, Smoke or Temperature, to remove unwanted noise in these channels, or to get smooth motion blur by smoothing the Velocity grid channel.
Threshold | inSmoothTemp[0], inSmoothSmoke[0], inSmoothUVW[0], inSmoothFuel[0], inSmoothVel[0] – If this value is 0, the entire grid will be smoothed evenly. The higher the threshold is raised, the less voxels will be affected and only the sharpest gradients will be smoothed. The highest value you could use here depends on the range of the values of the smoothed channel - for Smoke and Liquid it's usually in the [0,1] range, while for Velocity it could go as high as several hundred and for Temperature it could be over a thousand. If you set this value too high, no voxels will be smoothed at all.
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Smoke - 2
Temperature - 1
Fuel - 10
Velocity.x - 4
Velocity.y - 5
Velocity.z - 6
Red - 7
Green - 8
Blue - 9
Viscosity - 22
Wavelet Energy - 14
Wavelet.u - 19
Wavelet.v - 20
Wavelet.w - 21
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