This section covers Chaos Phoenix textures.
Overview
Phoenix provides several textures for use in simulations and rendering, which can be created from the Material Editor in 3ds Max.
UI Path: ||Material Editor window|| > Material/Map Browser > Maps > PhoenixFD
Grid Texture
The Grid Texture reads from the simulation’s Grid Channels to generate a procedural texture, which can then be used to shade the simulation wherever colors are needed.
The Grid Texture can be used with the volume shader to color or modulate the opacity of Fire and Smoke, using any of the supported Grid Channels (Smoke, Speed, RGB, etc.).
It can also be plugged into the texture slots of a material, and used to shade the meshes of simulated liquids that were exported with an RGB Grid Channel. In addition, it can be used as a blending mask, where the grid texture can read the RGB color of a simulator, which can then be used as a blending factor between two different materials.
Water Textures
Water textures are used with water effects to make them look more realistic.
- Ocean Texture - A realistic, non-cyclic procedural texture for representing an ocean surface.
- Foam Texture - Used with the Ocean Texture to create the effect of foam on cresting waves.
Particle Texture
The Particle Texture can be used to read particles and color their positions.
When used to read WetMap particles, the Particle Texture can help to emulate wet surfaces. This is because it can act as a mask to blend between two materials, for example, a wet material and a dry surface material. As a result, geometry covered by WetMap particles can appear wet, and the rest of the geometry can appear dry.
The Particle Texture can also shade a Particle’s color based on its Age or Speed, so that you can change the Particle’s color over time, based on the behavior of those Particle Channels.
The Particle Texture can even be used as a Surface Channel texture to turn the particles into a 3D mesh, which creates additional flexibility for shading particles to achieve more advanced effects.