With Phoenix FD 4.30 we added support for V-Ray 5 for Maya.
We also 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.
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 PHOENIX FD Support for V-Ray 5
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 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 the Wetmap sticky effect depends on the Sticky Liquid option and the WetMap Viscosity - the Liquid Viscosity does not affect it directly anymore
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 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 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 MESHER Viewport preview and render in Mesh mode using a texture as a Surface Channel
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 MAYA INTEGRATION Implement the Ocean and Grid Textures as native Maya textures, allowing them to be rendered with renderers other than V-Ray
IMPROVED MAYA INTEGRATION More verbosity for Maya Batch simulations
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Stop the simulation with the ESC key or SHIFT + ESC combination under Windows
IMPROVED SCRIPTING New phxfdBatchRestoreStop() MEL function taking both a start and a stop frame (the existing phxfdBatchRestore() does not have a stop frame)
REMOVED PHOENIX FD Dropped support for V-Ray 3
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 Slow simulation and low CPU utilization in FLIP liquid simulation scenes with large number of complex geometries
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 Source mapped with Camera Perspective Projection produced incorrect results
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 VOLUME SHADER Volume rendering did not scale well with many threads and randomly took longer
FIXED V-RAY IPR Random crash in IPR when changing any properties of a Particle Shader
FIXED TEXUVW Maya froze when starting a simulation without TexUVW, if the Simulator had a Maya Mesh with a linked TexUVW UV set and Cached Playback was enabled
FIXED TEXUVW Flipped TexUVW triangles in Maya Mesh mode
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Crash after previewing the ocean mesh in the viewport, deleting the caches, and enabling Pure Ocean
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Artifacts in the viewport with ocean displacement
FIXED OCEAN TEXTURE Crash when changing strength of V-Ray Displacement using a Phoenix Ocean Texture right after scene open
FIXED GRID TEXTURE The Grid Texture did not render correctly when reading one of the Rendering Channels from a Simulator in Mesh Mode
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 MAYA INTEGRATION Maya Mesh UV-sets and Color-sets were getting cleared when Cached Playback was enabled
FIXED PREVIEW Particle preview displacement was not updated when changing displacement settings
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW After pressing Cancel in the Browse dialog window, the saving path was erased
FIXED SCRIPTING The phxfdSaveCache() function could save only AUR caches without particles and only during simulation
FIXED USER INTERFACE Pressing Start on the Phoenix Shelf with many Simulators in the scene, one of which was paused, showed the simulator selection dialogue