Helping other render companies to render Phoenix FD

[cb LLC]

Hi team
is there anyway Chaos can help other render companies with their Phoenix FD SDK so other renderers like Octane can render PHoenix FD bubbles, splash etc.

basically they said this "A There is no access to this PhoenixFD geometry data in its SDK." So is PhoenixFD for Vray only?



Bellow is the conversation>
Also a link to Otoy Forum where they can have Phoenix FD just render smoke and fire but not bubbles or splash
Link to Forum about supporting Phoenix FD:
https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewto...p?f=80&t=55044



https://render.otoy.com/forum/viewto...281589#p281589

"Hi does octane work with new Phoenix fd version 2.25 [available on chaos forum as nightly build] It is the newest version where 2.20 is old official version that is not really used anymore like 2 years ago.
Version 2.25 is very very different. (Liquid sim grid and fumes and smoke are separate sims, wetmap is not mesh anymore but particles that vray material uses to blend two materials to create wet effect) Will all this work with octane 3 4.1?


Q 3ds max 3.0 4.1 supports PhoenixFD what about splashes and bubbles. Will octane support it?


A There is no access to this PhoenixFD geometry data in its SDK.
But I'll investigate later if it is possible using some non standard tricks...
User avatar
JimStar
OctaneRender Team
OctaneRender Team

[vlado]

For the moment we are focused on our next version of Phoenix FD and our priority for that is seamless rendering with V-Ray. With that said, it should be possible to extract information about the foam/splashes particles in recent builds - I know we had to do it in order to get the exocortex crate and 3ds Max's native Alembic exporters to work. However it is the render engine's responsibility to do something meaningful with that data, i.e. apply proper foam/splashes shader to it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ivaylo Katev]

Actually Phoenix FD is quite friendly to other render engines, all the phoenix objects are obeying the 3ds max specifications and are accessible via 3ds max SDK, that's why we provide no SDK. Really, some features of Phoenix are working only with vray, but you will be surprised how low in count they are. You can achieve perfect ocean scene without VRAy, only using the standard 3ds max features.
The problem with Octane renderer is that it is not actually a fully integrated 3ds max rendenrer and does not support some very important 3ds max specifications.
1. Atmosphere support. If this feature is not supported, the renderer will be not able to render fire, smoke, splash,mist and foam.
2. Event notification (pre render, post render, etc). If this feature is not supported the renderer will be not able to render ocean, because the mesh LOD is different in preview and render mode.
3. 3ds max maps support. If this feature is not supported, the renderer will be not able to use the particle texture and the phoenix texture, making any advanced material setup impossible (for example wetting)

The features requiring VRay are:
1. Heathaze fire rendering
2. Reflections/refractions of closeup splash and foam
3. The foam water tint. About this feature we have provided work around, you can specify color tint in the foam shader, so we can consider it compatible with other render engines.
So, the only really important feature requiring VRay is the closeup foam reflections and refractions, i think 99% of the cases are not requiring this.

edit: i have no registration, but you can provide this info to the Octane team in the forum, at least the foam can be integrated in the same way they used for the smoke

[vlado]

@Ivaylo: Octane is a GPU engine; it can't possibly use the 3ds Max API for rendering.

Best regards,
Vlado

[Ivaylo Katev]

yes, i figured it out later

[cb LLC]

Thank you for explaining

[cb LLC]

here is reply from otoy octane about phoenix FD and SDK.
I just hope it will work one day with octane ;(

"all the phoenix objects are obeying the 3ds max specifications and are accessible via 3ds max SDK"

This is not true. First of all - you can "access" some objects using standard Max SDK, but just "accessing" them is unusable, 'cause you can't get some special (specific only to those objects) data from those objects without an API for those objects published by dev of these objects. Moreover, you can't even identify those objects properly when iterating through all the scene objects, because you don't have the object's ClassID (or an InterfaceID) published with API for those objects. It can be achieved using reverse-engineering approach, and I said previously that I'll try to overcome the lack of SDK for fume objects using this approach - but this will take more time, and perhaps may have no success...


"that's why we provide no SDK"

Another not true. They do provide an SDK (two header files), we got it together with dev-license for PhoenixFD. And it only contains the API for accessing the simulator object - only allowing to obtain the volume data (smoke, temperature, velocity channels...). No API for the foam object, not ClassID, no InterfaceID, no description, nothing. I need to do my own investigation to get how it works internally and see what data I could get from it and how can it be used by Octane...

Other things are not true too. I just have no time to go through all of them. Octane is an integrated plugin, it has its own "atmosphere support", it uses pre- and post- render events, Octane has its own set of "textures" capable to do what is needed for certain objects (e.g. it does not need any standard or VRay texture nodes to render volumes properly), etc etc...

Don't worry, as I said - I will investigate this issue a little bit later, and will try to reverse-engineer this fume object. If we will have the need - we will ask Chaos Group about some additional info...

[Ivaylo Katev]

Well, i think would be better to contact directly with the team, apparently they have interest to support Phoenix, we can help them to achieve this.
I'm sure with small efforts the ocean can be rendered with Octane, i mean to build proper mesh for rendering, but the rest of the objects are questionable due to the GPU based engine.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, we really better contact the guys directly. The guy you are speaking with seems quite irritated and he denies obvious facts, e.g. obtaining a ClassID from any object is a matter of seconds.

Anyway, we will sort this out internally and I hope sometime soon we'll have good news for you

Cheers!

[cb LLC]

Thank you! I think if you can get Phoenix FD to work with Octane you will have a lot of sales because a lot of users want to use it but cannot

[cb LLC]

Hi. Otoy did make it where we can render fire and smoke but is there anyway to change smoke color. Etc.
Also seems like they used PhoenixFD 2.20 and unfortunately they dont have 2.25 is there anyway when Chaos promised to help Otoy they will help them using 2.25 version and not 2.20 Thank you!

All controls we have
"Implemented the PhoenixFD simulator support. You need to apply the new "OctaneVolume" modifier on top of simulator object to have access to additional Octane-specific settings. Mapping of PhoenixFD channels to Octane: temperature -> emission, smoke -> apsorption -> scatter, and velocity -> velocity."

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Sure - everyone with 2.20 can also ask Support for access to a nightly and it will be granted. What happens when you put the modifier on a newer simulator? We are already speaking to the Octane guys and I'll ask them about that - no more need to copy-pasting between forums

Keep in mind that often 3rd party software prefers to work with official versions only - this is why few render farms support the nightly versions as well - at any point in time there could be a bug in the nightlies or we could change something that breaks compatibility, so generally it's safer and easier to support only official versions.

Also - the render controls are entirely in Octane's playfield because they need to implement GPU shading of the volumetrics from the ground up and can only try to mimic the original settings. Much like the V-Ray Volume Grid has access to the raw cache data, but has to add its own parameters. I'll have to redirect you to OTOY for this question.

Cheers!

[cb LLC]

Hi When just dont see OCtane Volume modifier with Phoenix 2.25 But it works fine with 2.20 When we select 2.20 sim grid we see Octane Volume in the modifier list

[cb LLC]

Well I guess we will not see OCtane to work with Phoenix 2.25 any time soon.

This is Otoy response "Ok, just to be clear, 2.20 is the current stable version of PhoenixFD - we can't support 2.25 until it is released as stable by ChaosGroup - we really can't release a new OctaneSDK for every nightly build of 2.25 (it is also very different from 2.20) - apologies for any inconvenience"




And I am not sure if you are planning to release 2.25 version as official build to the public any time soon. It was out almost two years as test version and still not released. It might be years to come before Phoenix FD 2.3 or 2.5 will ever come out

Thank you

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I will not be years before it