With Chaos Phoenix 5.10, now that smoke already had Absorption color and Phase Function for realistic scattering, we ported these controls to the Fog mode of the Particle Shader, so particles such as Mist can have much more interesting shading.
We upgraded our preview of forces that would act on the simulation with a new Force Streamline preview.
Both the Force Streamlines and the Velocity Streamlines can now be converted to native Maya curves and rendered.
The Standalone Simulator now supports animated parameters and transforms of the Simulator and geometries, and also now it can do Resimulation and Time-Bend Resimulation.
As always, we fixed many bugs and also sped up the simulation and rendering - this time some scenes render 30% faster than previous versions.
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Absorption Color control for the Fog mode of the Particle Shader with V-Ray CPU
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Phase Function control for the Fog mode when using Ray-Traced Scattering with V-Ray CPU
NEW STANDALONE SIMULATOR Support for Time-Bend Resimulation for retiming simulations
NEW STANDALONE SIMULATOR Support for animated transforms of geometries and the Simulator
NEW STANDALONE SIMULATOR Support for animated options of the Simulator and Sources
NEW PREVIEW Force streamline preview showing how forces would affect the simulation; can work without loaded caches
NEW PREVIEW Button for converting the currently shown streamline preview (either velocity streamlines or force streamlines) into native Maya curves
NEW SUBMITTING SIMULATIONS Option for submitting Phoenix Standalone simulations through Deadline
IMPROVED STANDALONE SIMULATOR Support for the Custom Start and Stop frame for resimulation
IMPROVED STANDALONE SIMULATOR Pass the Preferences verbosity to the Standalone Simulator when launching it from Maya
IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES Added aerodynamic drag which prevents very light Active Bodies from flying off into outer space
IMPROVED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Turn Wetting of the Simulator Jammed walls On and Off using its Wetting node property
IMPROVED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER New 'Splash Split' option to control the rate at which a splash particle splits into smaller ones as it flies, creating a trail
IMPROVED SOURCES Reduced memory usage when emitting from hundreds of thousands particles
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Sped up rendering of grid volumes with up to 25% when Fully Visible Fire or Volume Light Cache was used
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Sped up rendering of grid volumes with up to 10% when the RGB channel was used
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Changed the default of the Scatter Depth option to 0, meaning infinite, to equalize it with 3ds Max
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER New 'Volume Motion Blur' option allowing to choose between Ray-traced and Grid-based methods - the Grid-based method creates more visible streaks for fast moving fluids
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Render the fire of volumes in the V-Ray 5 and V-Ray 6 beautyLPE
IMPROVED OCEAN MESHER Made the borders of the Cap Mesh look exactly like the borders of the container in Ocean Mesh mode
IMPROVED OCEAN MESHER The width of the smooth transition zone between the simulated waves inside the simulator and the displaced waves outside can now be controlled via the new 'Ocean Border Fade %' option
IMPROVED MESHER New option to control the smoothing of mesh normals: Always, Never, When Displacement is Off
IMPROVED PREVIEW Slice Preview Width option
IMPROVED PATH FOLLOW Path Follow now supports multiple splines in its set
IMPROVED PRESETS Used the Phase Function option for the Clouds quick setup toolbar preset
IMPROVED PRESETS Start the animations of the Quick Setup toolbar presets from the current timeline start frame
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Recognize by default the "velocity(x)", "velocity(y)" and "velocity(z)" grid channels and the "particles_velocity" from VDBs from Blender
IMPROVED CACHE CONVERTER Dragging and dropping caches over cache_converter.exe under Windows would convert AUR to VDB and VDB to AUR without the need to use the command line
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Added a help button to the Resimulation rollout
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Zero all Grid Channel Smoothing option defaults in order to get the strongest smoothing
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Renamed the Particle Shader 'Flatten At Ocean Borders' to 'Use Ocean Border Fade' to make it clear it is connected to that particular Simulator option
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE More friendly user interface for the Shrink to View camera in the Adaptive Grid Limits
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Show a message at render start if Phoenix is incompatible with the currently installed V-Ray
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE When the Smoke Opacity Based On option is set to Smoke, grey out the Simple Smoke Opacity option
IMPROVED LOGGING Printing to the Phoenix log not only the current simulation frame, but also the total number of frames and the percentage completed
REMOVED PARTICLE SHADER Hid the 'Particle Mode' option from the Particle Shader's user interface
FIXED STANDALONE SIMULATOR The simscene export, simulation and preview did not support directories with non-ASCII characters
FIXED FIRE/SMOKE SOLVER Artifacts when using PCG conservation and a Plain Force in some scenes, since Phoenix 5.00
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Active Bodies with Original Animation Influence of 1 didn't follow the original geometry precisely
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Emission reaction force was not zeroed if the Source had its emission animated to 0
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Axis Lock with locked translation still allowed the body to rotate around the world origin
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Thruster attached to an Active Body pushed in the wrong direction when the body rotated
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER The sizes of the foam bubbles did not affect their Foam Volume interactions, since Phoenix 5.00
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Liquid simulation in Fillup For Ocean mode with Adaptive Grid and Extra Margin kept expanding every frame even if not needed
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Viscosity was applied asymmetrically on thin flowing liquid
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Random crash during simulation of Foam and Splashes on macOS
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Load & Start of a moving container with Fillup for Ocean created extra particles and wrong velocities
FIXED ADAPTIVE GRID Moving Fire/Smoke Simulator with Adaptive Grid using the Speed channel expanded constantly
FIXED TUNERS Crash when Gravity Force was excluded from the simulation, but was used in a Tuner
FIXED RENDERING Animation of the Fire Multiplier, Fire Opacity Multiplier, Physically Based, Volume Light Cache Speedup and Surface Level options was ignored during rendering
FIXED VOLUMETRIC ILLUMINATION Crash during V-Ray Light cache generation when Fire Lights were illuminating and OSL material
FIXED RENDER ELEMENTS Particle Shader in 'Render as Geometry' mode did not render in the V-Ray Velocity Render element, since Phoenix 5.01
FIXED RENDER ELEMENTS Hang when rendering with motion blur a Liquid Simulator with Displacement and a Voxel Shader using the Simulator as a Render Cutter, using a V-Ray Crypotomatte render element
FIXED RENDER ELEMENTS The V-Ray Render Elements might render black with freshly started Maya and Volume Light Cache enabled
FIXED OCEAN MESHER The Ocean Mesh looked warped/wrong if Hypershade window with Material Viewer was opened when loading a scene
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Horizon artifacts when rendering Ocean Meshes with VRayDome Camera
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The GPU Preview was not updating when a Smoke Opacity texture was added, removed or its options were being changed
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The GPU preview kept using lights that were turned off
FIXED PREVIEW Crash with the slice preview enabled and trying to enable the force preview
FIXED PREVIEW The smoothed mesh normals did not show in the viewport mesh preview
FIXED PREVIEW The Streamline Velocity preview did not exclude the inertial velocity of a moving container like the old Velocity preview does
FIXED PREVIEW The Color Scaling of the particle preview did not exclude the inertial velocity of a moving container, so it was always white
FIXED PREVIEW Voxel Velocity and Streamline Velocity previews showed much less data than they should have with Auto Range and a moving simulator
FIXED PATH FOLLOW Path Follow stopped working if at least one of its Sub Segments was completely outside of the grid
FIXED CACHE I/O Fixed AUR lossless compression crashing when writing very large cache files, containing a grid channel larger than 8GB
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Saving images from the Standalone Preview in GUI mode increased the Detail Reduction if Auto Reduction was On
FIXED USER INTERFACE Changing the Source Emit Mode to Volume Brush/Inject converted not only the Non-Solid objects in the Source set, but also converted their parent shapes, if any
FIXED USER INTERFACE The Default Cache Directory option in the Preferences dialog did not allow for non-ASCII characters in the path
FIXED USER INTERFACE Browsing for a resimulation output cache did not automatically append frame format and file extension