Phoenix 4.10 offers a new feature called TexUVW that allows fluids to transport UVW information along with the moving fluid. Before that, mapping the fluid's color or opacity for rendering had the texture maps fixed in one place as the fluid flows through them. In this tutorial, we are going to use this new grid data for controlling the rendering opacity of smoke.
Although Phoenix already provides a Cigarette Smoke Quick Preset, it uses a particle-based method that requires a large number of particles small enough to produce smooth thin smoke. This could require a lot of memory and could be quite slow to simulate if you need to render it in high resolution. In this tutorial, we show you an alternative method. First, we simulate regular smoke (non-particle based) and then use a Noise texture to modulate the opacity of the smoke. In the end, we can have convincing thin, wispy, cigarette-type smoke results.
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This simulation requires Phoenix 4.10Nightly Build from 11 March 2020 and V-Ray Next Official Releaseat the for3ds Max 2016 at least. If you notice a major difference between the results shown here and the behavior of your setup, please reach us using the Support Form.
The Download button below provides you with an archive containing the start and end scenes.
Scale is crucial for the behavior of any simulation. The real-world size of the Simulator in units is important for the simulation dynamics. Large-scale simulations appear to move more slowly, while mid-to-small scale simulations have lots of vigorous movement. When you create your Simulator, you must check the Grid rollout where the real-world extents of the Simulator are shown. If the size of the Simulator in the scene cannot be changed, you can cheat the solver into working as if the scale is larger or smaller by changing the Scene Scale option in the Grid rollout.
The Phoenix solver is not affected by how you choose to view the Display Unit Scale - it is just a matter of convenience.
The thin smoke effect we're creating is about 1 meter in height so we choose to view the units as Centimeters.
Go to Customize → Units Setup and set Display Unit Scale to Metric Centimeters.
Also, set the System Units such that 1 Unit equals 1 Centimeter.
