We want your feedback! Please help us make Phoenix FD even better..

[Ivaylo Katev]

coarse is repeated twice, because these two maps have equal displacement method, they displace the grid content on prepass. the fine displacement displaces the content during the rendering, and because of this can produce details smaller than the cell size.

[hammerbchen]

Hi guys, been using PHX for a while, here is my wishlist:


Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

1. Customisable geometry for particles. It is very sweet that PHX can simulate particle and render out particles directly. There is some situation I need to change shape of my particles, i.e., rocks, golden dust...etc
2. A clear cache (or Reset) button under "start" button. This is very common use for daily work. Like the one in Realflow.
3. Particle size control like FumeFX particle src (I guess you already have in the nightly)
4. Bake for foam/splash. Every time I hit render, PHX is doing his "foam, particles" things. It will be nice if PHX provides a baking option during specially during look-develop stage.
5. A preview animation that just works. Right now PHX seems not support by 3ds Max Preview Tools.

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

1. DSpline daemon like the one in Realfow, with radial, votex and axial on each vertex node.
2. Mesher. Able to export water mesh so another team member can use. ie: *.abc
3. Crown daemon like the one in Realflow
4. Render elements for smoke, fire, foam..., etc
5. Rigid body simulation. Again, like the one in Realflow
6. straghtforward retime workflow
7. a procedural "foam" pattern for ocean without using too much simulation power.

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don't work the way you want them to:

1. Less predictable than FumeFX and Realflow. My routine workflow always starts with low-res grid, once it looks okay, I make it higher res. Thought it won't be 100% similar, I found with PhoenixFD this process is much less predictable than FumeFX and Realflow.
2. GUI for the transparency. Need separate transparency control for smoke and fire. Even for nightly version, I still feel something wrong with it. The fire preset doesn't look realistic to me.
3. Overall simulation results of smoke are less realistic than FumeFX. With fumeFX I can get the very nice transition of smoke from start to fade away. With PHX, I found it is a little chunky. The buoyancy parameter seems not working correctly, when I adjust it, it doesn't change the dynamic too much as it should be.
4. Making a realistic fire shading is hard.
5. Overall simulation results of liquid are too noisy (compare with Realflow). With PHX sim is fast but still can't replace my daily use of Realflow.




Chen

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Thanks a ton for the suggestions - I have some comments or questions:

2. A clear cache (or Reset) button under "start" button.

This is under the Output panel cache path "..." button in the nightlies. In the official Phoenix 2.2 it's in the Output panel too.

5. A preview animation that just works. Right now PHX seems not support by 3ds Max Preview Tools.

We are using the preview tools daily with the GPU preview, the voxel and the mesh preview were also fine the last time I checked. Which mode do you have issue with? We definitely have to fix anything wrong there.

1. DSpline daemon like the one in Realfow, with radial, votex and axial on each vertex node.

In the nightlies there is the FollowPath force that should work in a similar way.

2. Mesher. Able to export water mesh so another team member can use. ie: *.abc

Once you turn on Show Mesh in the Preview panel, Phoenix will mesh the fluid into a standard 3ds max mesh and you should be able to export it to anything you like. Again - if you find any issue with that, please bump us - this has to be working.

2. GUI for the transparency. Need separate transparency control for smoke and fire. Even for nightly version, I still feel something wrong with it.

In the nightlies, there is a new Fire Opacity mode - "Own Opacity" - there you can directly control the opacity of the fire separately from the smoke's opacity.

3. Overall simulation results of smoke are less realistic than FumeFX. With fumeFX I can get the very nice transition of smoke from start to fade away.

The smoke in the nightlies should be much more realistic compared to the official 2.2 using PCG Symmetric with high conservation quality (>50) and Massive Vorticity. Could you share an example of the look you are after?

4. Making a realistic fire shading is hard.

True that. We have some ideas, and they must be tried out. Btw, do you mind if we adjust the Fire preset using the settings you shared here in a different forum thread? The Fire preset is a proof-of-concept in the nightlies and we'll be adding for adding more presets too, so they need to look good.

Most of your other suggestions coincide with things we have in mind, so I hope it's only a matter of time

Cheers and thank you!

[hammerbchen]

thank you Svetlin

I will look into each of these and reply soon.

[hammerbchen]

Hi Svetlin,

Here are comparison between my settings and the fire-preset. IMO, my settings is closer to real fire, though I might need to add some blue color at the root of fire. I will sent you my scene file to support team.



Cheers,


Chen

[hammerbchen]

I have found I need to add a editpoly modifier on top of Simulator, otherwise the alembic export won't work.

>Once you turn on Show Mesh in the Preview panel, Phoenix will mesh the fluid into a standard 3ds max mesh and you should be able to export it to anything you like. Again - if you find any issue with that, please bump us - this has to be working.

[Paul Oblomov]

It works for me.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

@hammerbchen, are you using Exocortex or the built-in abc exporter?

[Romain_P]

HI,
Mainly using PFD for creating simple but realistic ocean surfaces, with no dynamic simulations from PFD.
My main issue is that I cannot send projects to be rendered by renderfarms.
This is accentuated by the lack of "loop" feature, like in Dreamscape for example.
Will it be "commercially" possible in the future to add this texture in basic Vray textures? And keep the dynamics features in PFD?
Or special release for renderfarm owners, allowing us to render basic oceans?
Or do you have any trick to render externally?
Thanks and bravo anyway
RP - Exmachina

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Renderfarms are compatible with the latest official version of Phoenix - 2.2, and the infinite ocean is there as well.

Hopefully soon we will be ready to release a new official Phoenix, so any other new stuff would be picked up by render farms as well

Cheers!

[hammerbchen]

@hammerbchen, are you using Exocortex or the built-in abc exporter?

it was export with build-in abc exporter

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Affirmative, Exocortex works, but will check the build in exporter.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Alright, so in tomorrow's nightly (May 12) there will be proper support for the built-in 3ds max Alembic exporter. Since both the 3ds max exporter and Exocortex Crate cannot export both particles and meshes from the same node, Phoenix will have an option to expose either the particles or the mesh.

</end of thread hijacking Cheers!

[anthonyh]

hi,
one of my wishes is for phoenix not to send max to sleep so you can no longer press the stop sim button on heavier calculations. sometimes you have to just wait until the sim end or end process.
i don`t know if it`s just inherent to 3dsmax or if phoenix is a bit too greedy for cpu sometimes ?
anthony

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, this is a known issue, and we have significant progress in this direction. in the most cases the reason is the file export, it blocks the UI without real need to do this. currently the liquid solver does not block anymore the UI during the file export, but it still blocks during the scene interaction, that is unfortunately unavoidable, you see, it's not possible to read the scene if the user is allowed to modify it. fortunately the scene interaction is much faster compared to the cache export.