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This simulation requires Phoenix 4.30 Official Release and V-Ray 5, Update 2 Official Release for Maya 2019 at least. You can download official Phoenix and V-Ray from https://download.chaos.com. 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.

To download project files:

Want to follow along but don’t have a license?:

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.

Go to Window → Settings and Preferences → Preferences.

On the Settings tab, set the Working Units to centimeter and the Time to 29.97 fps.

To follow along using the provided project files, make sure to point the current Maya project to the downloaded Phoenix project files directory.

This is required so the provided Alembic file, referenced inside the Maya scene, can be successfully found and loaded.

To do so, go to File → Set Project... → navigate to the Chaos_Phoenix_Rocket_Maya2019 folder → hit Set.

The height of the wine glass is about 250 cm instead of the usual 18 - 25 cm.

Slower movement of the large scale fluid allows for easier fine-tuning of the liquid motion with respect to the glass shards. It also provides more control over the shape of the simulation. 

The Distance tool can be used to easily check the size of an object.

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The Rigid Body simulation with the shattered wineglass is baked and cached in Alembic. To import Alembic cache in Maya, go to Pipeline Cache → Alembic Cache → Import Alembic.

The scene consists of the cached wineglass simulation, a VRay Dome Light, a Phoenix Simulator and an object used to initialize the liquid simulation.

For tips on creating geometry to be used as an initial fill placeholder, check the Using Initial Liquid Fill With Containers tutorial.

Add PhoenixFD Node Properties to the Shape node of your initial fill placeholder geometry by going to Attributes → Phoenix FD in the Attribute Editor.

This allows you to avoid the process of manually filling up the glass through a standard liquid source and simulating a large number of pre-roll frames.

Phoenix allows you to preview the forces in your scene which eliminates the process of constant tweaking and simulating. You can preview any Maya native force as well as all the forces that ship with Phoenix.

To see the effect of a force on your container, enable Forces from the Preview tab of your Simulator.

Add the force that you’d like to preview into the Force Preview set.

The desired explosive effect of the liquid is achieved through a standard Maya Air Field combined with Phoenix Turbulence. 

To create the Wind Force under Dynamics, go to Fields -> Air. The Air force will push the liquid in all directions.

Depending on the placement, the look of the simulation will vary dramatically. Experiment to find a desirable result. At this tutorial the position of the force is at the center of the glass. The exact position of the Air force in the scene is [ -58, 195, 0 ].

Set the Attenuation to 1.

Set the Direction to [ 1, 1, 1 ].

Set the Spread to 1. 

Animate the Magnitude parameter to emulate the impact when the glass shatters with the following keyframes:

Frame 0: set to 0;
Frame 1: set to 60;
Frame 4: set to 60;
Frame 5: set to 0.

To create the Phoenix Turbulence go to Phoenix FD → Create → Turbulence. 

Set the Strength to 200.0.

Set the Size to 150.0.

With the help of the Air force, the glass will push the liquid to burst and scatter. You can control the interaction strength between the glass and the liquid by adjusting the Motion Velocity Effect, located in the Phoenix FD Node Properties. Higher values will cause the simulation to act as if the liquid is moving at a higher velocity, creating a bigger and more dramatic burst. For this tutorial, we will set its value of 2.0.

You can control the strength of that effect under the Shape Node → Extra Phoenix FD Attributes of the geometry.

In the Output rollout, enable the Velocity channel in the Output Grid Channels section. This will allow the final mesh to include Motion Blur.

In this tutorial will be shown how to set a simple expression with Particle Tuner, which will help optimizing the simulation process. For this setup the Age channel in the Output Particle Channels section must be enabled.

The quality of the liquid’s mesh depends on the Dynamics and Liquid settings. In this setup, the Gravity is set to 0.8, the Steps Per Frame to 7, Surface Tension to 0.05.

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First, let's look at Steps Per Frame (SPF). 

Next is the Surface Tension Strength. This parameter plays an important role in small-scale liquid simulations because an accurate simulation of surface tension indicates the small scale to the audience. Lower Strength values will cause the liquid to easily break apart into individual liquid particles, while higher values will make it harder for the liquid surface to split and will hold the liquid particles together. 

To preview the liquid as a mesh, simply enable the Show Mesh option in the Preview rollout. When enabled, shows the implicit surface as a mesh. This mode overrides the Voxel Preview mode.

By default, Phoenix uses a grid-based method for creating the mesh rather than a particle-based one. As a result, the mesh may appear jagged in places. These artifacts can be reduced by adjusting the Smoothness parameter in the Rendering rollout.

The following examples show the simulation with different Smoothness values.

Phoenix also offers a particle-based method for creating the liquid mesh that can be enabled through the Use Liquid Particles option. The resulting mesh will become thinner depending on the specified Particle Size.

We will leave Use Liquid Particles disabled for our scene.

Wetting can be used to make liquids stick to the collision geometry in your scene. By default, all solid objects are affected but the option to disable the Wetting effect for a certain body can be found on the Phoenix FD Properties for that geometry. 

Enable Wetting. Set the Consumed Liquid to 0.1 and the Sticky Liquid to 0.

The Particle Tuner uses expression operators to directly affect the particles of the Phoenix Simulator. It goes through all particles in the simulation and changes the values of these that pass a certain condition.

While creating turbulent liquid simulations it could happen that a particle or two are moving way too fast. In combination with the Adaptive grid this could lead to an increased simulation time.

In this tutorial the Particle Tuner is added for deleting the particles that are far away from the glass and are only increasing the simulator's Adaptive Grid size.

The Particle Tuner expression tree is created as follows:

• If the distance to the "frag_mesh" mesh is Greater Than 110 and If the Age is Greater Than 0.200.

• Then Delete Particle.

To create a realistic red wine material:

Set the Diffuse Color to RGB [ 0, 0, 0 ].

Set the Reflect and Refract colors to RGB [ 255, 255, 255 ].

Set the Reflection Glossiness to 0.55.

Set the Fresnel IOR to 1.3.

Set the Reflection and Refraction Max depth to 8.

Set the Fog color to RGB [ 125, 23, 20 ].

Set the Fog Depth to 25.

The source of illumination in the scene is a single V-Ray Dome Light.

Press on the Cosmos icon in the V-Ray toolbar. In the HDRIs section  → Studio  → choose Studio 001. Press the green arrow to Import the HDR map. Chaos Cosmos generates a V-Ray Light in the scene with the HDR map plugged in the Texture slot.

The exact position of the V-Ray Light is XYZ: [4500, 0, 0].

Set the Multiplier to 1.

Make the Dome Light Invisible in the rendered image from the Options tab.

For this setup a VRayPhysicalCamera is used.

To add Physical Camera parameters, select the Maya camera used for rendering.

Under its Shape node in the Attribute editor go to Attributes -> V-Ray -> Physical Camera. 

The Film Gate is set to 36.0.

The Film Speed (ISO) is set to 100.

The F-Number is set to 2.0.

The Shutter Speed is set to 200.

The Exposure control correction is enabled.

The White Balance Color is set to RGB [ 255, 247, 237 ]. 

In this tutorial the exact position of the Camera is [ -425, 200, 750 ]

and of the Camera Aim is [ -16, 210, 65 ].

In the Bokeh effects section, set the blades to 7, the Blades rotation (in radians) to 0.300, and the center bias to 1.0. This will add some imperfect details to the lens.

A V-Ray Denoiser Render Element is added to the final image. The Denoiser takes an existing render and applies a denoising operation to it after the image is completely rendered in order to remove the noise in the image.

For this tutorial the Default settings of the element are used.