Official release

Date – 10 March, 2020

Download – Build 4.10.00


With Phoenix FD 4.10 we added support for Maya 2020. We also we sped up the particle preview and the Particle Shader. We did fixes and improvements to our new Active Bodies and Standalone Preview, as well as the usual round of other bugfixes and small improvements.



  Support for Maya 2020

  Count Multiplier for increasing the number of particles in the Particle Shader

  GPU Preview for fire in the Standalone Preview

  Controls for the GPU Preview light direction


  Sped up FLIP particle resimulation with 10%, up to 20% on some scenes

  Do not offset the Foam particles vertically during simulation

  Pop-up menu with density presets in the right-click properties of bodies

  Sped up the particle collection rendering pre-process up to 2 times

  Smoke Color 'Based On' support for grid channels when saving images from the GPU Preview

  Support for 'Use Own Opacity' when saving images from the GPU Preview

  Sped up loading of new frames for the Particle Preview with 20%

  Store velocity of Drag particles in their particle data instead of in the Grid Velocity. Added an Output Drag Particle Velocity option to Sources

  Options to save a range of frames and a single frame

  Text box for the loaded cache file info

  By default name the saved image files the same way as the input cache files

  Image saving to PNG files


  Dropped support for Maya 2016 and 2016 Extension 2 (2016.5)

  The 'Use the referenced scene name' option is now hidden from the Input rollout and can be accessed only through script using 'inPathReferenced'


  When using Variable Viscosity, some particles were not behaving properly

  FLIP particles resimulation produced NaN-values with Simulate Air Effects

  Failing to load cache for resimulation displayed an error message, but did not stop the resimulation

  During the first restore frame, bodies in the simulation had incorrect velocities

  Active Bodies were falling slower with more Steps per Frame

  Active Body simulation did not work with deformed geometry

  Active Bodies Ground Plane could not be hidden

  Active Bodies Clones were created hidden if the geometry was hidden

  A Phoenix smoke volume inside a Mesh with Refraction Glossiness below 1.0 rendered blocky

  Random artifacts when rendering smoke using Volume Light Cache in Volumetric Geometry mode

  Break Shadow Links did not affect the Simulator in Volumetric mode using V-Ray CPU

  Inconsistencies with Light Linking in Volumetric mode between renders with V-Ray for Maya and V-Ray Standalone if "Light Evaluation" was set to "Adaptive Lights" or "Uniform Probabilistic"

  Particle Shader in Points Mode with motion blur always rendered one point at the particle position, even if the interval center was shifted

  Particle Shader in Points Mode rendered incorrectly using a 360 V-Ray Spherical Camera

  The Reflection Cut-off option was not working

  The Velocity Render Element of a Particle Shader in Points mode was not affected by the Motion Blur Multiplier

  Crash when rendering in Isosurface mode using V-Ray Volume Scatter material

  The Particle Shader Particle Age render element was incorrect in Points Mode with Motion Blur

  Crash if rendering in Mesh mode with V-Ray and saving an image file which was locked and could not be overwritten

  Some Ocean Mesh normals pointed downwards with V-Ray Spherical camera and FOV over 180 degrees

  Deleting the foam texture node did not remove the connection to materials

  Handled some out-of-memory in case of saving Grid RGB to cache files or when blending cache files

  Could not use General Purpose Time Bend Resimulation when the base caches were VDB instead of AUR

  The GPU Preview disappeared if the camera went inside it

  Simulators away from camera overlapped with grids close to the camera

  Crash with caches which had transformations with negative or fractional offsets, since Phoenix FD 3.99

  Randomly appearing colored artifacts with the GPU Preview when using Detail Reduction, since Phoenix FD 4.0

  The Save Animation Preview function from instanced Simulators saved only the first instance instead of the selected Simulator

  Saving multiple simulators into one image with the 'Save GPU preview' functionality sometimes did not work

  Crash when cancelling the first cache open dialog

  If 'Enable GPU Preview' was turned on, the Standalone Preview didn't save files after pressing the "Save" button

  Sometimes the Standalone Voxel Preview drew in slices the first time a cache was loaded

  Cache Converter did output empty VDB files, since Phoenix FD 3.99

  Loading a rendering preset failed if any Smoke/Fire Color/Opacity textures are linked in the Simulator

  Loading a rendering preset containing render curves/gradients with less markers than the current ones did not delete the extra ones

  Crash when emitting from texture mapped Sources or using textures with Tuners with V-Ray Next under Linux, since Phoenix FD 3.99

  A referenced Simulator using default cache paths could not find its caches

  Providing a custom Global Preferences Default Cache Path caused an 'Invalid Path' warning in the Script Editor on Linux

  After changing a Simulator input, output or preview path, the Browse... dialog did not start from the new path until the node was re-selected

  A Simulator without a cache could be selected in the viewport only from the bottom left corner in Maya 2019