A few questions

Phoenix General
1

Hi,

I am doing some liquid sim in Phoenix and I have a few questions:

1- how can I create a mate ID on the splashes and foam? I can see the particle ID option but not sure how it works.

2- this one is more general how do you comp a water sim on footage of a see for example. is there any passes worth rendering to help?

3- I am using the Ocean option in Mesh, which create the water surface to the infiniti. Which also make my sim paper thin (no more volume). Is there a way to still keep the thin surface but without the water been extended to the horizon? Which is waht I see in the viewport.

4- The sim, I am doing is a simple object jumping out of the water. When starting the sim, I get a tiny wave on the edge of the liquid where it meets the Phoenix container. This gives me a square wave that moves inward. Is there an option, to get the water created at the 1st frame in rest position?

5- The sim is to be comped over a river, that i have created using displacement on a plane created using the Vray waterTex. Is there a way to apply this texture as displacement on my sim?

I am using this version:
Phoenix FD for Maya 2014, version 2.2.0 from Jun 12 2014, 05:31:18, revision 24651

Sorry if my questions are basic, but I would appreciate the help.

Thanks,
Yannick

2

1 - not sure that understand the question. anyway, if you can create mate id for any geometry, you can do it for the foam too, rendering it in geometry mode (see the parameters)
2 - never tried to make such a scene, can’t help you
3 - there is a mode called “cap” it does exactly this
4 - in the most cases the water surface is rendered with displacement and it hides this initial wave. if it does not, you have two options - wait several frames until it disappears, or increase the spf. the second option leads to slower simulation and it takes advantage only in the cases when the simulation is short and you have to wait more frames for the liquid than the frames that will be used.
5 - yes, any texture can be applied as displacement. you can use the embedded displacement, or you can add vray displacement over the simulation

3

Hi Ivaylo,

thanks for the answers.
on number 3, where is this cap option? I can’t seem to find it.

4- The problem I have is when I start the simulation, the liquid gets created but it is like it was pushed up (only on the first frame), then on frame 1, it shrink down, which created the square wave.

5- what is the embeded displacement? Do you mean the displacement option within Phoenix? I manage to have the vray waterTex to work but it gives me some weird result.

I have attached a file showing the problem for 4 and 5.

Thanks,

Yannick
test.zip (13.7 KB)

4

Another question, how do you use the Mapper?
The documentation isn’t explaining much.

I tried to set the channel to UVW and apply a texture to my material, but the result doesn’t seem to work.

Any tutorial on this?

Thanks,

Yannick

5

there is a list with render modes in the render panel, it contains a mode called “cap”
i know about the initial fill up problem, and be sure that we did as many as possible to fix it. actually the wave would be much bigger if there were no code to prevent it. this is a shadow of the real wave that appear when you just fill the container.
did you try to increase the spf? usually this decreases the initial wave a lot.
actually why you are using the vray water texture? phoenix has phoenix ocean texture, that produces waves .
about the mapper. it does not attach uv mapping to the liquid, it is used to affect the liquid using textures. its use is limited, you can do almost everything that it does using a normal source in brush mode.

6

I am using a fairly recent nightly build but I can see any of the option you mentioned.
I can’t see the cap option (see attachment).

I can create a PhoenixFDTexture but how can I link it to the simulation?

I was using the vray water texture as I didn’t know about the phoenix ocean texture. Do I need to connect the phoenix ocean texture in the Displacement texture slot? It doesn’t seem to work for me. Is there a sample scene I could study?

Thanks,

Yannick

option.jpg
option.jpg498×984 103 KB

7

I manage to get the phoenix ocean texture to displace my simulation, however, I cannot manage to get to work with the ocean option.
I can see the displacement preview in the viewport but I get nothing when rendering.
The only case where the displacement works, is when I set in Rendering/Surface/ Render mode to maya mesh but then the ocean option doesn’t work. All the other mode don’t show displacement and give me the error: // Warning: Unsupported texture PhoenixFDOceanTexture //
// Warning: Scene bounding box is too large, possible raycast errors. //

What am I doing wrong?

Thanks,

Yannick

8

Would it be possible to send us that scene for investigation?
Thank you very much in advance.

9

HI Svetlozar,

I sent a file with the issue this morning to the support. (Support Ticket Opened [#340150])

Cheers,

Yannick

10

I keep seeing some post on the forum about using the Forward Transfer Method for making an ocean. However when i check this method, the Ocean option doesnt work. is it normal?

Also did anyone had a chance to look at my displacement issue?

I am trying to find information about the conservation and material transfer, but the documentation has nothing concerning these topic. Is there somewhere I can learn more about it?

Thanks,

Yannick

11

Hello, here is the topic on conservation and material transfer in the help site: Chaos Docs

12

Thank you.
I had a look at the max version but it wasn’t this one obviously.

Cheers,

yannick

13

to follow up with my displacement not working.
I found the issue. Vray was missing the phoenix.txt in the shader folder.
So I added the file into the Vray installation folder and now it interpret the Phoenix Ocean shader.

Our installation is quite particular and we had issue with environment variables not working. So we had to manually move a few files in the vray folders in order to get it to work. The last missing file was the phoenix shader definition.

Cheers,

Yannick

14

thanks for the info, can be helpful for other users and for us too

15

Hi,
I have a few more questions:

I am using a recent nightly and I would like to know how to use the following do:

Phoenix FD emitter for particles and Phoenix FD emitter for nparticles, how is it use, what can it do? Could I use it to create splashes or foam?

What is the Set render gizmo?

I have a simulation, which include an object. How can I get the object to only emit splashes? Currently I can only emit liquid + splashes or nothing.

Is there somewhere, where I could download the test scene that are suppose to come with the install?

Thanks,

Yannick

16

Like the name suggest, it’s an emitter for Maya particles :). Here is the help page: http://help.chaosgroup.com/phoenix\_maya\_20/phoenix\_emitter.htm
You can set the source to emit only splashes, again it’s in the help http://help.chaosgroup.com/phoenix\_maya\_20/sources.htm#Options
The sample scenes come with the installation. On Windows, they are installed in the My Documents/Phoenix FD/samples maya folder.

17

Hi,

What would be the pros of using the Phoenix Emitter vs using a regular emitter?

Like I mentioned, my source either create liquid+splashes or nothing depending if I have Discharge set to 1 or 0.

The version we have doesn’t install the sample scenes. I was wondering if they were downloadable?

Thanks,

Yannick

18

There is no Phoenix FD version without samples. When you run the installer, you get a text field called “Phoenix FD sample scenes” where you specify where the samples should be installed. If you run the installer with special admin account, the samples will go to his directory, so you may want to change the path.

For Phoenix Emitter/Field, see the phx_emitter.ma sample
Here is a sample for splashes without liquid:
phx_splash.zip (11.8 KB)