Phoenix - Maya - smoke not rendering or showing up when GPU preview is on

Phoenix Issues
1

Good afternoon,
I hope this message finds you well.

I’ve used Phoenix before (6 months to a year ago) to simulate smoke for a few car racing shots and it worked reasonably well.
I’ve just installed the latest version for Maya 2023 and for some reason, I am unable to get the vfx to show up in viewport, via the GPU shade preview and sometimes they don’t come through in a render either.
If I set up a fresh scene, and use a preset from the toolbar, on a simple moving object, it usually works. If I add a fire sim and tweak the parameters as seen in one of the demo videos, to create tyre smoke as I did in the past, it doesn’t work anymore.
Often, the particles are visible in the viewport, if I toggle off the GPU shade preview, and sometimes they render correctly and I can see the fire/smoke, but other times, despite seeing the particles in the viewport, nothing comes out in the render.

This wasn’t happening before so I am a bit confused. If the plugin has changed in some ways since then and the parameters need to be set up slightly different, is there a better help document/page to learn about these changes as some of the demo videos (such as this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OoHgHmaGFM) don’t seem to produce the same result as shown in there.

Many thanks!
best regards,
Virgil

2

Hey, is it possible that you updated your V-Ray version in the meantime? Phoenix has different installers for V-Ray 4, V-Ray 5 and V-Ray 6, so you need to make sure to install the correct one, matching the V-Ray version. Or are you using a different renderer?

Cheers!

3

Hi Svetlin,
thanks for your reply. I double checked and I am using the correct versions indeed, also for rendering I am using V-Ray. Following my initial post, I am now able to render the simulations, but I still cannot use the GPU shade preview. I’m using a RTX 3070 and as I said, sometimes on a blank/fresh scene, it works but more often if I start tweaking parameters, adjusting things, it won’t anymore.
All best,
Virgil

4

Hey Virgil,

Are you using Windows or Linux? Can you give us the exact steps that break it for you? Which versions of Phoenix and V-Ray are you using?

When the rendering breaks - are you using V-Ray GPU or V-Ray CPU for the rendering? Are there any errors in the V-Ray or the Phoenix logs? Here is where you can find the logs - Phoenix for Maya