confusion with special channels and displacement

[TomGore]

Is there any tutorial or better explanation of what we can acheive with special sim channels? like surface or solid object voxel channels? I still dont grasp the idea of surface channel. If I want to use it to advect texture of a dense fluid (like lava with bitmap flowing along), there is circular dependency error. Making a copy of current sim grid only for workaround this error is sort of a sloppy solution. Cannot it be done internally by Phoenix. Then using Phoenix grid or particle texture advection would be much more intuitive. Also - what is the difference between adding vray displacement map modifier over phoenix liquid sim versus using displacement map slot in phoenix render settings? Its a bit confusing even for an experienced user. Also, you can add a vray material to actual phoenix sim grid and in the material you can use displacement texmap (or diffuse or bump). So this is a third possibility. Which one is the correct for phoenix engine?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Some of these channels are useful for us when we are debugging issues e.g. with broken geometry, and some others can be used for shading or as source masks. For example you can route the Vorticity channel through a Phoenix texmap and use it in a volumetric shader to get whitewater shading without particles.

The Phoenix displacement, when applied over a container in Mesh mode produces results directly in the viewport and you can further modify the resulting mesh. The V-Ray displacement is render-time only. Also, in Ocean/Cap Mesh mode, the Phoenix displacement takes care to subdivide the simulator's surface and the ocean extension plane in such a way that you have a lot of detail close to the camera and less vertices farther away.

Are you trying to achieve a lava effect? I don't think the special channels will be helpful in that. I hope I can get to correcting the particle texture so that it can advect UVs some time soon..

Cheers!