With Phoenix FD 4.30 we added force tuning to Voxel and Particle Tuners. This allows forces to affect particles or voxels with certain channels, inside or outside geometries, or according to textures, effectively allowing you to mask forces and gain precise control over how, when and where forces affect the simulation.
We sped up our particle preview and added the ability to preview the Rendering Displacement of the particles in the viewport.
Rendering of fire/smoke with the Use Probabilistic Shading option is now much faster with V-Ray 5. Both fire/smoke simulations, as well as large FLIP liquid simulations are also sped up.
We did some more changes to simulations, allowing for more control and quicker iterations, and we also improved our Standalone Preview and Cache Converter tools, so be sure to check them out!
Choose forces to affect the particles when the Tuner condition passes. This allows forces to affect particles with certain channels, inside or outside geometries or according to textures
Choose forces to affect the voxels when the Tuner condition passes, same as the Particle Tuner
Displace the particle preview in the viewport when Rendering Displacement is enabled
Cacheless Simulation option for speeding up large simulations. It keeps in memory only the last simulated frame and GPU Preview images or per-frame renders can be saved
Now Liquid particles can stick to WetMaps without the need for the Liquid to have viscosity. The strength of the sticky effect now depends only on the Sticky Liquid value and the WetMap viscosity
Delete Liquid particles when a Source's Inject Power is negative
Change the Motion Velocity, Viscosity or RGB of existing Liquid particles with a Source in Volume Brush mode with disabled Emit Liquid
Reduced the peak memory usage of the FLIP liquid simulations
Sped up the Multi-Pass Transport method with up to 20%
Sped up rendering of volumes when Use Probabilistic Shading is enabled
Color Map for the Particle Shader using V-Ray 5 GPU
Multithreaded gathering of Particle Preview data
Show multiple Simulators in the classic GPU Preview, instead of only the selected one
Sped up grid channel compression when saving AUR from the simulation or cache_converter tool
New layout where all panels can be docked, reordered or detached from the main window
Added information about the currently loaded path and the date of the cache's last modification
Convert all caches in a folder without specifying frame range
Convert VDB to AUR caches
Added a -storageQuality optional argument, useful when writing AUR caches
Stop the conversion and show a meaningful error message if the Cache Converter can't find its openvdbio.dll
Stop the simulation with the ESC key or SHIFT + ESC combination
Newborn Splash particles kept splitting and creating more Splashes underwater
WetMap's viscosity was ignored by the Sticky Liquids effect when interacting with variable viscosity Liquid particles
Sticky Liquid's strength did not scale Linearly
Foam's Half Life deleted different amount of particles when simulating on different number of threads
Liquid particles got deleted on contact with animated obstacles having only rotation
A fast moving simulator with Fillup For Ocean had particles created outside the grid, which are then not deleted
Crash on Load & Start with Drag particles with RGB
Different amount of Source Particles (Drag/Foam/Splash) was born each new simulation or on different number of simulation threads
Sources were emitting up to 50% slower in very high resolution scenes, since Phoenix FD 4.20
Crash when rendering AUR files over 2.1 billion voxels with Linear Sampler
Random crash in IPR when changing any properties of a Particle Shader
Setting Motion Blur Multiplier for Mesh modes did not affect the inertial velocity of a moving container
Crash after previewing the ocean mesh in the viewport, deleting the caches, and enabling Pure Ocean
Underwater Goggles did not render correctly with Motion Blur
Ocean Mesh mode with any 3ds Max modifiers did not render on V-Ray GPU
Multithreaded gathering of Particle Preview data
Size of particles simulated to OpenVDB were in voxels instead of units
Restoring from VDB causes missing FLIP particles, wrong Initial Fillup, and wrong results with rotating simulators
Could not save AUR caches where a single grid channel was over 3.05 GB. AUR files saved after the fix can not be opened with older Phoenix versions
Could not read huge particle systems from AUR cache files (with hundreds of millions of particles). New AUR files will not be readable by older Phoenix versions.
Rare crash while blending frames including particles with velocity data
Rarely caches were loaded with missing horizontal voxel slices, which affected the previews, and rendering of fire/smoke and meshes
Phoenix Textures could not be created in the Material Editor or the 3ds Max Map Browser when Arnold was set as current renderer
After pressing Cancel in the Browse dialog window, the saving path was erased
3D texture maps with Object XYZ mapping rendered with wrong scale with V-Ray Standalone on CPU
Animating any Phoenix curves or color gradients (in Discharge Modifiers, Volumetric Settings and Particle Texture) did not update them when scrolling the timeline