I got a request of doing something like the attached image but animated and i could use some pointers where to start. Its like multicolored thick smoke or colored ink into water. Can something like this be done in max without plugins? i have some basic knowledge of pflow but i am not sure if i could get it to look right - i am experimenting with it right now. So if anyone have some tips or pointers how you guys would do something like this it would be nice to post here.
thanks in advance!
Phoenix FD is capable to do such simulations:
And Phoenix is a nice toy once you bought it 
It eats a big chunk of my spare time 
I dont think you can do anything near this with standart max features.
Another vote for phoenix.
You’ll never be able to do anything like it without plugins. Still the best way to do that exact look would be to film a ton of it and assemble it into what you need in post.
Thanks guys, that helps a lot. So its phoenix then
either pflow and krakatoa or phoenix…
get ready for 1TB of sims for a detailed ink cloud like the example though!
If you do a particle simulation in Phoenix and render that using point shader, it won’t take that much memory. You can get really detailed simulation using under 5 million voxel grid and 10-20 million particles or even more. It’s quite fast to simulate, but rendering it might take some time.
The example I posted is around 60 million particles and renders at about 20 minutes per frame on a single machine.
Thanks again for your help guys, if we will get this job i will report back with hopefully some awesome results
Had to create a quick test.
Nothing special, but I thought to share it anyway.
Looks great!
