Phoenix and new Vray Instancer

Hey there,

I´ve been doing R&D for quite a while now for floating particles, since I need them in almost every medical project we are doing.
So far I always just did some simple pflow setup with wind turbulence or random walk.
But for some hero shots I´d love to have the ability to make the floating particles react realistically to objects moving through them, like they were actually in a fluid.
I did some R&D with mParticles and glue operator, but that was always very slow to simulate and very…crash intense.
So I was thinking, if I could somehow utilize phoenix to help me achieve that.
So i guess I could do something with drag particles, but since I prefer my floating particles be more than just dots (I have a bunch of objects for dust such as fuzzy little pieces of hair and stuff like that), I´m wondering if there is something I could do with the new Vray Instancer…

I´m in the middle of a project right now, so I can´t do any R&D myself, just waiting for some caches at the moment and thinking out loud here…

the instancer does not support phoenix particles, they are just dots and have no orientation channel.
but how about to use the phoenix operators to drive pf particles?

Damn…I didn´t even realize those Operators existed…guess I´m just tooo focussed when working with Pflow…
The most interesting op would probably be the Phoenix Force operator.
Is there anything I should know about the usage before experimenting?
From what I´ve understood so far, this is what I would do:

1. Setup my Phoenix grid.
2. Simulate whatever I want to simulate (just an empty grid with air inside, maybe some objects moving through it, or some liquid if needed).
3. Setup my Pflow with birth near/ inside the grid.
4. Add Phoenix force operator to the flow.

Actually…could I in theory use this to do some fluid-to-object interaction? Like floating objects on a liquid surface?

don’t forget to export the velocity :slight_smile: