Simulating the sun

Phoenix Issues
1

I’m sure I’m going to run into some troubles on this one so I’ll put everything related to it in this thread.

First up - scale.

I have created a giant (not as big as the sun) sphere inside a grid and selected it as the source. I set my path and clicked start then stopped after a few frames. Now the problem is that the grid at 27 million cells has totally frozen the viewport but there is nothing going on at the moment and the adaptive degradation is flicking on and off. Is there a way to optimise performance - is it cpu, graphics card or ram? I can lower the cell count but eventually I have to get back to that resolution.

Downsampling for the GPU preview is missing from the UI, seems to have been replaced by gamma.

How can I control the amount of smoke emitted from fuel being burnt? Smoke is unchecked on the source. Is it relative to the energy?

2

you can decrease the preview resolution, there is detail reduction control.
about the smoke - there is no control of the fuel - smoke ration, it is always 1. just decrease the smoke opacity if you need less smoke.

3

for solar plumes and stuff like in the intro to star trek (i think it was voyager) i used to use a mix of pflow and pheonix. Dont know how it would work anymore since i only had the old pheonix. its not compatible with my max or vray anymore (im waaaay behind) but in principle it should still work. and set full opacity for smoke like ivaylo said since there wouldnt be any smoke from the sun