putting the PhoenixFD reader into Vray installation

[gardeler]

I have been wondering why you guys have Volume grid and phoenixFD as to different things?

What I mean is why don't you just strip out all the parts that has anything to do with simulation and output from the Phoenix node and ship that with vray?
Now we have the volumegrid that is based on the same code as phoenix, but does not have the same parameters, AND has a different update cycle? I understand that this might not affect most users, but in my mind it must be harder to maintain two different setups? And from a user standpoint it is always easier if you are met with the same interface when dealing with interfaces from the same company.

To be able to access the temperature channel from any simulation being fed into vray in maya, you are pretty much dead in the water with volumegrid. (the versions I have tried.) But it has been working for a long time with phoenixFD. So you need to get a phoenixlicense just to render stuff properly in maya (if you want to use grids with high values, like temp.)

that was a long rant, back to the question; why not replace the volumegrid with a "phoenix reader"?

And a BIG thanks for a brilliant 3.0 release!!

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

For 3ds Max, the Volume Grid is basically the same code as Phoenix with just a few differing lines - it automatically goes in the Phoenix and V-Ray nightlies and what you get in a V-Ray release would be the same as in the Phoenix nightlies and vice versa. We don't really put much effort in supporting this kind of setup. For Maya it's not the same situation and we have to do some stuff manually, but I'm hoping we would change that in the near future and equalize the Mayan VolumeGrid and Phoenix completely.

Not really sure about the issue with the Temperature, can you elaborate more on this?

Eventually I'm hoping we would break the volumetric shader and the mesher from the simulators into separate objects. This would allow you more flexibility, such as rendering a liquid mesh and whitewater at the same time using the same cache without having to add two overlapping simulators, excluding them from one another and such nonsense. The volume grid includes these two units, as well as the loader and previewer, so if we had nodes which we would be able to pack or break apart, we would have a fire sim, liquid sim, mesher, volumetric shader, particle shader, a previewer and a loader node and those building blocks would produce the two Phoenix objects we currently have and the volume grid as well. Will hopefully get there sometime soon

Cheers!

[gardeler]

Thank you for the quick reply, building blocks sounds good!
The issue with temperature is that the maya ramps in the volume grid only goes from 0 to 1. And often temp is 0-4000. But it might have been fixed since i last checked.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, I see - there should be a couple of additional controls, like offset and scale for the Maya ramps that the Mayan VVG still uses. I hope that quite soon we'll be able to drop those and substitute them with the common Phoenix ramps. In case of temperature [0-4000], the offset should be 0, and the scale should be 4000, but generally this is a painful way to work...

Cheers!

[gardeler]

Yes, you are right, it is very painful. Hence the whish to switch to Phoenix reader!