With Phoenix FD 4.20 we improved our Maya Mesh mode and the Maya Cached Playback integration.
We also improved our Standalone and Maya previews and added support for Particle Shader Fog mode rendering with V-Ray Next GPU, and we also added support for displacement for Fog mode.
We improved TexUVW for smoke simulations and implemented filling an emitter's volume with TexUVW and RGB.
Once more we did many changes under the hood so we can develop faster, and as usual we fixed many bugs.
NEW SOURCES Use surface texture maps or vertex color for Volume Brush and Volume Inject modes; Now you can fill volumes with RGB or TexUVW and melt them.
NEW PARTICLE SHADER Support for Particle Shaders in Fog mode in V-Ray Next GPU
NEW PREVIEW Velocity Streamline Preview, ported to Maya from the Standalone Preview
NEW STANDALONE PREVIEW Particle Preview in the Standalone Preview
IMPROVED GRID SOLVER Allow the RGB channel to be transported with Fuel like it does with Smoke
IMPROVED PARTICLE SHADER Support for displacement in Fog mode of the Particle Shader
IMPROVED MESHER Ported the Underwater Goggles and Motion Blur Prevent Self Intersection options from 3ds Max
IMPROVED GPU PREVIEW Save images in BMP and JPG formats
IMPROVED PREVIEW Option to disable the Particle Preview Color Scaling
IMPROVED MAYA INTEGRATION Maya Mesh support for Cached Playback in Maya 2019 and 2020
IMPROVED MAYA INTEGRATION Automatically name the Maya Mesh 'Motion Vector Color Set' with the name from the Simulator's 'Velocity Color Set'
IMPROVED CACHE I/O Sped up and now using less memory for blending frames having Grid Velocity or liquid particles (when using Time Bend controls)
IMPROVED VOLUME SHADER Render Fire without cache data just by offsetting the Fire Opacity curve above zero (Physically Based must be below 1.0)
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Save images in TIFF format
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Optimized the Velocity Streamlines Preview when the Auto Reduction is off
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Split the Log and Info windows
IMPROVED STANDALONE PREVIEW Renamed the executable from 'standalone_previewer' to 'phoenix_previewer'
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Renamed 'Blend Method' in the Input rollout to 'Grid Blend'
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Artifacts with texture mapped Volume Liquid Sources
FIXED FLIP SOLVER The WetMap particles were born with sizes equal to 1 scene unit, instead of 1 voxel
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Motion Velocity Multiplier of animated objects had no effect if a Phoenix Simulator with Fillup for Ocean was linked to them
FIXED FLIP SOLVER Blocky artifacts around submerged geometry with disabled Clear Inside, when simulating with Fillup For Ocean
FIXED ACTIVE BODIES Restoring Active Body simulation broke the animation of the original objects
FIXED TEXUVW Incorrect TexUVW on the borders of smoke simulations
FIXED TEXUVW Texture flickering with volumetric renders using TexUVW
FIXED RENDERING Crash when rendering a Phoenix Simulator after opening Maya with Hypershade open, since Phoenix FD 4.10
FIXED SOURCES Source Discharge Modifier diagram's maximize button did not work
FIXED SOURCES Discharge Modifier curves got reset to default if edited while the timeline was played
FIXED CACHE I/O AUR files where the grid data was over 8GB were unreadable
FIXED CACHE I/O Incorrect positions of recently born particles when retiming a simulation with adaptive grid
FIXED CACHE I/O The Simulator blended frames after the timeline changed when rendering with V-Ray Physical Camera with Motion Blur in Maya 2019+
FIXED CACHE I/O The Simulator loaded frames at the beginning of rendering even when Enable Rendering was off
FIXED VOLUME SHADER Border Fade did not affect fire in Own Opacity mode
FIXED RENDER CURVES Could not move points on the render curves while Cached Playback was caching
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Random crash during sequence render with Liquid simulator checkbox enabled in the Particle shader and Displacement turned on
FIXED OCEAN MESHER Ocean Mesh was not constructed properly when Stereo Camera was used with FoV larger than 180
FIXED PREVIEW All preview types except for Maya Mesh show the last exact frame if the timeline frame is fractional
FIXED PREVIEW Adaptive Grid's Manual Limits were not showing in the viewport if no cache was loaded and one of the positive directions was not set
FIXED PREVIEW Voxel channel color pickers were not editable when Auto Range was enabled
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The Save Images functionality did not respect the file extensions from the Save File As dialogue
FIXED GPU PREVIEW GPU Preview did not work in Wirefame, Textured and Bounding Box draw modes in viewport 2.0, since Phoenix FD 4.10
FIXED GPU PREVIEW The GPU Preview disappeared if the Simulator was flipped by using a negative scale
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW When Flip Up Axes was enabled the caches were rotating on every reload
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Could not type in manually in the Timeline Input box
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW Crash when selecting out of range start or end for saving a sequence
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW GPU Preview was displaying brighter on the first render pass
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW If the preview window was resized, saving an image with *.bmp extension produced a skewed picture
FIXED STANDALONE PREVIEW The Slice Level slider was not working in negative direction if Z axis was chosen
FIXED SCRIPTING Crash after rendering using vrend in OnSimulationEnd()
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION Cache paths inside the set Maya project were saved to scene files as absolute paths instead of relative to the project
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION The viewport repeatedly stalled for a long time when a large simulation was previewed in Maya Mesh mode
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION The timeline got re-cached with Maya 2019+, if you select the Simulator's attribute editor or open any rollout
FIXED MAYA INTEGRATION Crash when rendering Maya Mesh with V-Ray with motion blur and Cached Playback enabled, since Phoenix 4.10
FIXED USER INTERFACE The Total Cells field under the Manual Adaptive Limits section didn't show the maximum cells amount
FIXED PRESETS Resolved and full cache paths were erroneously saved to the Maya presets. Also, several Input attributes were not written to presets and some were written to Simulation instead of Rendering presets
FIXED SDK aurloader_s required missing vfree and vmalloc symbols