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Hey everyone!
The time has come for a new Phoenix major version - today we officially release Phoenix 5.0!
Here is a sweet concept video from our 3D team:
We improved Active Body simulations and added two new helpers - Thruster that you can use to propel your Active Bodies, and Axis Lock that prevents bodies from rotating or moving in a certain direction. Also, now Active Bodies can be picked in Sources as emitters, in Tuner Expressions, as Render Cutters, and basically in all possible node selector slots in Phoenix, so you can go crazy with different setups and combinations. Active Bodies can use the Simulator's jammed walls as obstacles now, and you can also choose whether foam would push them together with the liquid or not. In Maya, Cosmos assets can now be used as Active Bodies (latest V-Ray 5 is needed for this).
Foam Patterns were boring and we added more options to make them more diverse and interesting. The 'B2B Interaction' option got an overhaul and also got renamed to 'Foam Volume', and now it can be used in ocean simulations too.
We added a new Voxel Shader node, which works just like the Particle Shader - you connect it to a Simulator and it renders its voxel data as a volume at the position of the Simulator. This way your Simulator can render as a Mesh or Isosurface, and the Voxel Shader can overlap this with a volumetric, so you can easily create whitewater based on vorticity or speed, or underwater fog of different density, so you can have god rays showing through it.
We created a separate Phoenix Standalone Simulator, which is just like the V-Ray Standalone - you export .simscene files from 3ds Max and Maya and it simulates them, producing caches files. You can view the sim progress in real time with the Phoenix Previewer, and the simulation runs up to 40% faster than inside 3ds Max and Maya. We still have a lot of options and capabilities to add to the Standalone Simulator - currently it only supports Simulator and Source nodes, as well as Phoenix node properties. Still to be added are: Foam/Splash options, support for animated options and animated geometries, resimulation, textures.
Alongside the standalone simulator and standalone previewer, we added a new Simscene Node Viewer that can open Phoenix .simscenes and V-Ray .vrscenes. The Phoenix Windows installer now associates by default AUR, VDB, F3D and PRT files with the Phoenix Previewer, and also caches can be drag and dropped into it. SIMSCENE files are automatically associated with the Phoenix Node Viewer application. The Phoenix previewer now has mesh preview mode as well.
We also improved our GPU Preview with texture support for smoke opacity, added more options to the cache converter tool, we added new presets to the toolbar and improved and sped up many of the old ones. We finally have Active Body presets directly in the toolbar, allowing you to quickly setup Ice Cubes or Speedboat simulations. A Stormy Sea preset and a Jet Engine preset are also added, as well as a Simulation Restore button right there in the toolbar. In 3ds Max, many of the Simulator options are getting tooltips now and we will keep adding them until all options have one.
With Phoenix 5.0, we officially add support for 3ds Max 2023 and Maya 2023 as well. Phoenix now runs on Windows 11 as well, recognizing correctly all the cores of NUMA machines.
We added macOS support for Phoenix for Maya.
As always, we sped up many parts of the simulation and rendering and now some scenes runs 2x faster compared to Phoenix 4.0, while our test suite of 220 3ds Max scenes now simulates on average 12% faster than Phoenix 4.41 and 21% faster than Phoenix 4.0. The speedup greatly depends on the scene though, with smaller scenes below 10 million voxels getting more speedup.
FLIP liquid simulations can now write separate cache files for the resimulated results. V-Ray GPU can now render Phoenix simulations without pausing the simulation. Our Particle Shader now has a shortcut to use the RGB channel of Phoenix particles for coloring the rendered particles, without the need to go through a Particle Texture, and now this makes rendering much faster. And last but not least, as always we fixed many bugs and issues so you can rely on Phoenix being stable and rock solid.
Here are the full changelogs:
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAX/5.00.00
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAYA/5.00.00
And last, but not least, our very own Cory Holm created a sleek and shiny Phoenix Basics tutorial video, going through the most important concept that you need to know in order to do anything imaginable with Phoenix. It will be live on the Chaos YouTube channel shortly (https://www.youtube.com/c/chaosgrouptv), stay tuned!
The time has come for a new Phoenix major version - today we officially release Phoenix 5.0!
Here is a sweet concept video from our 3D team:
We improved Active Body simulations and added two new helpers - Thruster that you can use to propel your Active Bodies, and Axis Lock that prevents bodies from rotating or moving in a certain direction. Also, now Active Bodies can be picked in Sources as emitters, in Tuner Expressions, as Render Cutters, and basically in all possible node selector slots in Phoenix, so you can go crazy with different setups and combinations. Active Bodies can use the Simulator's jammed walls as obstacles now, and you can also choose whether foam would push them together with the liquid or not. In Maya, Cosmos assets can now be used as Active Bodies (latest V-Ray 5 is needed for this).
Foam Patterns were boring and we added more options to make them more diverse and interesting. The 'B2B Interaction' option got an overhaul and also got renamed to 'Foam Volume', and now it can be used in ocean simulations too.
We added a new Voxel Shader node, which works just like the Particle Shader - you connect it to a Simulator and it renders its voxel data as a volume at the position of the Simulator. This way your Simulator can render as a Mesh or Isosurface, and the Voxel Shader can overlap this with a volumetric, so you can easily create whitewater based on vorticity or speed, or underwater fog of different density, so you can have god rays showing through it.
We created a separate Phoenix Standalone Simulator, which is just like the V-Ray Standalone - you export .simscene files from 3ds Max and Maya and it simulates them, producing caches files. You can view the sim progress in real time with the Phoenix Previewer, and the simulation runs up to 40% faster than inside 3ds Max and Maya. We still have a lot of options and capabilities to add to the Standalone Simulator - currently it only supports Simulator and Source nodes, as well as Phoenix node properties. Still to be added are: Foam/Splash options, support for animated options and animated geometries, resimulation, textures.
Alongside the standalone simulator and standalone previewer, we added a new Simscene Node Viewer that can open Phoenix .simscenes and V-Ray .vrscenes. The Phoenix Windows installer now associates by default AUR, VDB, F3D and PRT files with the Phoenix Previewer, and also caches can be drag and dropped into it. SIMSCENE files are automatically associated with the Phoenix Node Viewer application. The Phoenix previewer now has mesh preview mode as well.
We also improved our GPU Preview with texture support for smoke opacity, added more options to the cache converter tool, we added new presets to the toolbar and improved and sped up many of the old ones. We finally have Active Body presets directly in the toolbar, allowing you to quickly setup Ice Cubes or Speedboat simulations. A Stormy Sea preset and a Jet Engine preset are also added, as well as a Simulation Restore button right there in the toolbar. In 3ds Max, many of the Simulator options are getting tooltips now and we will keep adding them until all options have one.
With Phoenix 5.0, we officially add support for 3ds Max 2023 and Maya 2023 as well. Phoenix now runs on Windows 11 as well, recognizing correctly all the cores of NUMA machines.
We added macOS support for Phoenix for Maya.
As always, we sped up many parts of the simulation and rendering and now some scenes runs 2x faster compared to Phoenix 4.0, while our test suite of 220 3ds Max scenes now simulates on average 12% faster than Phoenix 4.41 and 21% faster than Phoenix 4.0. The speedup greatly depends on the scene though, with smaller scenes below 10 million voxels getting more speedup.
FLIP liquid simulations can now write separate cache files for the resimulated results. V-Ray GPU can now render Phoenix simulations without pausing the simulation. Our Particle Shader now has a shortcut to use the RGB channel of Phoenix particles for coloring the rendered particles, without the need to go through a Particle Texture, and now this makes rendering much faster. And last but not least, as always we fixed many bugs and issues so you can rely on Phoenix being stable and rock solid.
Here are the full changelogs:
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAX/5.00.00
https://docs.chaosgroup.com/display/PHX4MAYA/5.00.00
And last, but not least, our very own Cory Holm created a sleek and shiny Phoenix Basics tutorial video, going through the most important concept that you need to know in order to do anything imaginable with Phoenix. It will be live on the Chaos YouTube channel shortly (https://www.youtube.com/c/chaosgrouptv), stay tuned!
