What can I do with Phoenix?

Phoenix FD is a fluid dynamics simulator intended to create a wide range of effects including smoke, flames, liquids, and explosions. It is used for visual effects, architectural and product visualizations, creation of game assets, etc. You can check the Example Scenes page for a quick glance of the possibilities.

Ready presets

Phoenix FD comes with a handy shelf which offers presets for common setups such as large scale ocean simulation or gasoline explosion, or small scale setups like coffee, beer, candle, etc.

Licenses

Phoenix FD is licensed using the ChaosGroup License Server which provides dongle or online licensing. There are two types of licenses - GUI licenses required for using the Maya user interface, and Simulation licenses which can be used to run simulations through managers such as Backburner or Deadline on remote machines. The combination of 1 GUI and 1 Simulation license is referred to as a Workstation license and is the minimum you need to be able to use Phoenix FD.

Rendering is free! Phoenix volumes such as smoke and fire, Phoenix meshed liquids or Phoenix particle systems such as Foam and Splash do not require a license for rendering - you just need Phoenix FD installed on the machine which will render the data. The same goes for any of the Phoenix textures.

Installations

Phoenix FD for Maya can run under Windows or Linux. It comes in 2 installation types - compatible with V-Ray 5 or V-Ray Next. If you don't have V-Ray, it does not matter at all which one you install - Phoenix would still be able to simulate, load, save and preview caches. If you do have V-Ray 5 or V-Ray Next, please take care to install a matching Phoenix build. You can see the system requirements of Phoenix FD here.

Rendering Phoenix simulations

Renderers with official support for Phoenix FD for Maya are V-Ray Next and newer, and Octane. In Maya Mesh mode, rendering is supported by any CPU renderer for Maya. Phoenix FD can also be rendered by 3rd party plugins or external software after exporting the simulation grid, mesh or particle data to OpenVDB, Field3D, Alembic, V-Ray VRmesh or VRscene. Phoenix can also shade data from other software with its dedicated volumetric shader for fire/smoke or its Particle Shader by importing OpenVDB or Field3D data.

V-Ray Next GPU and V-Ray 5 GPU can render fire/smoke and meshes, and the Phoenix Particle Shader in Fog mode. V-Ray 5 GPU can also render Particle Shaders in Bubble and Splash mode.

Phoenix goodies

Phoenix FD 4 adds support for Active Bodies interacting with the FLIP liquids, so objects can float over the liquid surface or be washed away by pouring liquid. Mutual interaction between Active Bodies is not supported yet.

Phoenix FD for Maya also provides real-time GPU preview of fire/smoke in the viewport, textures which can be used for ocean simulations and rendering or to extract grid and particle data from the simulator, dedicated forces and Voxel and Particle Tuners which can drive and art-direct the simulations, interoperability with Bullet, integration with nParticles, as well as MEL and Python scripting and a Phoenix C++ API.

Phoenix FD also comes with some handy tools for AUR, VDB and F3D cache files, such as a Standalone Cache Previewer and a cache converter.