A unique approach was taken when developing the Phoenix FD simulation core. Aggressive internal optimizations allow for reduced calculation times while keeping the whole simulation physically accurate. This allows some additional processes like pressure decay, thermal radiation cooling and mass-temperature relation to be simulated.
The simulation process of Phoenix FD runs independently and does not lock the UI of the 3ds Max. This allows the user to make changes in the simulation and even to perform rendering. Furthermore changes to the simulator parameters immediately affect the simulation.
Phoenix FD supports all the 3ds Max standard space warp modifiers which allows to easily affect the movement of the fluid.
Allows the user to simulate moving fluid oblecs (like torches, flying fireballs, etc) without the use of fake additional winds. Both linear and angular winds are simulated.
The simulation of slow moving fluids is a problem in many grid based simulators, because of the undesired diffusion in the Semi-Lagrangian advection process. Phoenix FD has been optimized to simulate arbitrary slow fluids without any undesired diffusion.
Using the effects channel of a Phoenix FD object the user can define an implicit surface and use it as a fluid source for another Phoenix FD object. This allows the creation of effects like burning liquids, water releasing vapour, etc.
Using geometry sources is not always suitable, especially when the fluid should appear "out of nothing". For such situations a particle system can be used as source and all the parameters can be animated in particle age time.
Setting up the rendering of flames and other emissive effects can be greatly accelerated with the help of the GPU preview function. It allows the user to fine tune the look of the final render since the preview matches it completely.
With the Phoenix FD ParticleFlow operators the user can move the particles along the fluid or change their events, which allows for a large variety of particle based effects.
Phoenix FD exports a number of MaxScript functions which give direct access to the simulator's content and the simulation result. Using the script mechanism the user can obtain results that are impossible or very hard to realize with the conventional methods. For example one can set some complicated initial conditions of the simulation, build their own procedural sources and volumetric textures, etc.
Each channel of the Phoenix FD simulator can be initialized or "attracted" by a volumetric texture map. The "attraction" option allows the user to give a tendency of the simulation with different level of "pressure".
One of the most powerfull features of Phoenix FD is fluid displacement, which provides a completely new way for adding fine details to the visualised fluid. As in the usual geometry displacement, the displaced fluid is moved along the normal with a certain value given by a texture. The fine details of the texture can be much smaller than the grid's cell and this leads to a totally new appearance of the rendered result.The Phoenix FD's displacement technique does not use a copy of the fluid with bigger resolution, and the user need not worry about the consumed memory. The displacement algorithm is fully multi threaded.
The Phoenix FD plugin comes with an additional 3D texture which allows the simulation result to be rendered with any general purpose volumetric shader like VrayEnvironmentFog. In addition to external shading, the texture export allows the creation of many special effects, for example lava-looking surface achieved with displaced transparency channel and non displaced emissive channel etc.
In addition to the usual simulation channels (temperature, smoke etc) the Phoenix FD volumetric shader can use any other procedural textures as emissive, diffuse, effects and transparency sources. This allows Phoenix FD to be used as a very fast general purpose volumetric shader or to create some sophisticated render setups.
Using this tool the user can generate a displacement texture based on particles dragged by the fluid, achieving fine details moved along the fluid. Technically the texture is not specifically related to other Phoenix FD objects and can be used independently.
A well known issue of atmospheric objects is the inability to blend properly two or more overlapped atmospheres. Rendering in geometry mode allows the user to blend many Phoenix FD objects in a correct way.
In this mode the rays traced inside the simulator's volume are redirected based on the content's gradient. All scalar channels can be used as a heat haze source.
In this mode the content is rendered as a procedural geometry object with surface determined by the threshold value of the selected channel. Using this mode the user can in few minutes simulate and render realistically looking liquids.
Using a special blending algorithm, Phoenix FD is able to construct intermediate frames and to play the simulation result with variable speed.
The user can choose different core modes depending on the simulation task. For example, the mass sensitive conservation algorithm is more suitable for simulating denser, more liquid-like fluids, while the uniform mass conservation algorithm favors the simulation of flames.
Phoenix FD is able to work in 2D mode that is suitable for many purposes.
The simulation result of Phoenix FD is written in compressed files to avoid excessive disk space usage. The user can select quality/size ratio of the compression method based on his/her needs.
Global illumination plays an important role in the visualization of smoke effects. Phoenix FD supports all of V-Ray's GI features and adds some accelerating options to avoid the local scattering.
The user is able to drag UVW coordinates with the fluid and use them to map other textures. The UVW channel can be also exported as a map.
As of September 14th, 2010 The first official upgrade of the new fluid dynamics system by Chaos Group is now available to all Phoenix FD users. The successful beta program and the great number of active users helped this free upgrade to be out on the market so soon after the official release. Here are some of the new features and fixes you can now enjoy in Phoenix FD 1. 1:
• Ability to select which channels to be affected from the sources • Conservative advection (for slow motion and big scale simulations) • Support of Thinking Particles systems as sources
• Improved multithreading of the simulation • FPS indicator of the GPU preview • Ability to change the channels presence during the simulation
• Memory leak when adaptive grid is used with smoke, UVW or fuel channel. • Crash when non solid object is used in brush mode • Artifacts when the light cache is combined with some GI settings. • The texture modulation does not work with explicit coordinates (uvw channel)
