Official release

Date – 23 September, 2020

Download – Build 4.30.00


With Phoenix FD 4.30 we added force tuning to Voxel and Particle Tuners. This allows forces to affect particles or voxels with certain channels, inside or outside geometries, or according to textures, effectively allowing you to mask forces and gain precise control over how, when and where forces affect the simulation.

We sped up our particle preview and added the ability to preview the Rendering Displacement of the particles in the viewport.

Rendering of fire/smoke with the Use Probabilistic Shading option is now much faster with V-Ray 5. Both fire/smoke simulations, as well as large FLIP liquid simulations are also sped up.

We did some more changes to simulations, allowing for more control and quicker iterations, and we also improved our Standalone Preview and Cache Converter tools, so be sure to check them out!



NEW PARTICLE TUNER Choose forces to affect the particles when the Tuner condition passes. This allows forces to affect particles with certain channels, inside or outside geometries or according to textures

NEW VOXEL TUNER Choose forces to affect the voxels when the Tuner condition passes, same as the Particle Tuner

NEW PREVIEW Displace the particle preview in the viewport when Rendering Displacement is enabled

NEW CACHE I/O Cacheless Simulation option for speeding up large simulations. It keeps in memory only the last simulated frame and GPU Preview images or per-frame renders can be saved


IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Now Liquid particles can stick to WetMaps without the need for the Liquid to have viscosity. The strength of the sticky effect now depends only on the Sticky Liquid value and the WetMap viscosity

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Delete Liquid particles when a Source's Inject Power is negative

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Change the Motion Velocity, Viscosity or RGB of existing Liquid particles with a Source in Volume Brush mode with disabled Emit Liquid

IMPROVED FLIP SOLVER Reduced the peak memory usage of the FLIP liquid simulations

IMPROVED GRID SOLVER Sped up the Multi-Pass Transport method with up to 20%

IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Sped up rendering of volumes when Use Probabilistic Shading is enabled

IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Color Map for the Particle Shader using V-Ray 5 GPU

IMPROVED PREVIEW Multithreaded gathering of Particle Preview data

IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Show multiple Simulators in the classic GPU Preview, instead of only the selected one

IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up grid channel compression when saving AUR from the simulation or cache_converter tool

IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW New layout where all panels can be docked, reordered or detached from the main window

IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Added information about the currently loaded path and the date of the cache's last modification

IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER Convert all caches in a folder without specifying frame range

IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER Convert VDB to AUR caches

IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER Added a -storageQuality optional argument, useful when writing AUR caches

IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER Stop the conversion and show a meaningful error message if the Cache Converter can't find its openvdbio.dll

IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Stop the simulation with the ESC key or SHIFT + ESC combination


FIXED FLIP SOLVER Newborn Splash particles kept splitting and creating more Splashes underwater

FIXED FLIP SOLVER WetMap's viscosity was ignored by the Sticky Liquids effect when interacting with variable viscosity Liquid particles

FIXED FLIP SOLVER Sticky Liquid's strength did not scale Linearly

FIXED FLIP SOLVER Foam's Half Life deleted different amount of particles when simulating on different number of threads

FIXED FLIP SOLVER Liquid particles got deleted on contact with animated obstacles having only rotation

FIXED FLIP SOLVER A fast moving simulator with Fillup For Ocean had particles created outside the grid, which are then not deleted

FIXED GRID SOLVER Crash on Load & Start with Drag particles with RGB

FIXED SOURCES Different amount of Source Particles (Drag/Foam/Splash) was born each new simulation or on different number of simulation threads

FIXED SOURCES Sources were emitting up to 50% slower in very high resolution scenes, since Phoenix FD 4.20

FIXED VOLUME SHADER Crash when rendering AUR files over 2.1 billion voxels with Linear Sampler

FIXED V-RAY IPR Random crash in IPR when changing any properties of a Particle Shader

FIXED MESHER Setting Motion Blur Multiplier for Mesh modes did not affect the inertial velocity of a moving container

FIXED OCEAN MESHER Crash after previewing the ocean mesh in the viewport, deleting the caches, and enabling Pure Ocean

FIXED OCEAN MESHER Underwater Goggles did not render correctly with Motion Blur

FIXED OCEAN MESHER Ocean Mesh mode with any 3ds Max modifiers did not render on V-Ray GPU

FIXED PREVIEW Multithreaded gathering of Particle Preview data

FIXED CACHE I/O Size of particles simulated to OpenVDB were in voxels instead of units

FIXED CACHE I/O Restoring from VDB causes missing FLIP particles, wrong Initial Fillup, and wrong results with rotating simulators

FIXED CACHE I/O Could not save AUR caches where a single grid channel was over 3.05 GB. AUR files saved after the fix can not be opened with older Phoenix versions

FIXED CACHE I/O Could not read huge particle systems from AUR cache files (with hundreds of millions of particles). New AUR files will not be readable by older Phoenix versions.

FIXED CACHE I/O Rare crash while blending frames including particles with velocity data

FIXED CACHE I/O Rarely caches were loaded with missing horizontal voxel slices, which affected the previews, and rendering of fire/smoke and meshes

FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Phoenix Textures could not be created in the Material Editor or the 3ds Max Map Browser when Arnold was set as current renderer

FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW After pressing Cancel in the Browse dialog window, the saving path was erased

FIXED VRSCENES 3D texture maps with Object XYZ mapping rendered with wrong scale with V-Ray Standalone on CPU

FIXED USER INTERFACE Animating any Phoenix curves or color gradients (in Discharge Modifiers, Volumetric Settings and Particle Texture) did not update them when scrolling the timeline

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