We want your feedback! Please help us make Phoenix FD even better..

Phoenix General
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Hello everyone. My name is Michael McCarthy and I am working with the Chaos Group team as product designer for Phoenix FD. I wanted to see if I can get some feedback from your guys on your current wants and needs in Phoenix as well as issue or barriers you see in Phoenix that we can hopefully focus on and address. I have been through the forum and seen many of you have posted some great ideas, wishes, and needs. I was hoping we could use this thread consolidate and make sure we have the most updated list.

I would like to get a couple of “top 5” lists going. Please reply with your responses to one or all lists.

Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don’t work the way you want them to:

Any feedback is good so if you just have one thing that is an issue or feature you desperately need to see in a future release of Phoenix, please post it.

Thanks a bunch!
Michael McCarthy

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I’ve only been using it a week but here are some suggested improvements:

a) While PHX does a great job of producing complex fluids there is often a lot of work to get a complex appearance for the fluid. It would be great if PHX calculated the displacement based on the fluid sim. Putting a noise/cloud/fractal displacement over the top isn’t as good since it is even across the entire surface. It would be better if PHX calculated a fluid driven displacement based on the underlying simulation.
b) The separation between Emission and Diffuse is a little confusing. Where one starts and the other ends is displayed by the curves in the rendering section but it would be more intuitive if Emission and Diffuse were combined into one interface.
c) More presets to help you get started more quickly.
d) More example scenes.

[ D A V I D G O U L D ]
http://www.davidgouldstudios.com

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Hey David,

Thanks for the suggestions. Its great to have the perspective of a new user to the software. Almost all of these are on our radar so its good to see that they are important.

BTW I’m a fan of Illustrate. Nice work with that software :wink:

Thanks again
Michael McCarthy

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I started to play with Phoenix when it was still in beta. I got really easily good results for basic smoke setups, but good looking fire or later liquid was and is still quite hard. Nowadays I have learned to create really beautiful fires also. The biggest problem for me is the lack of good examples, tutorials, better manual that would actually explain things with examples. Its really hard to understand what each value is doing and how they connect to other values without clear examples. For me, it took too much trial and error rounds to understand how Phoenix works. Maybe I’m just stupid. :slight_smile:

Phoenix is a great product, but I’d like to get more answers for problems from the manual, so I dont always have to check from forum or spend long nights trying to find solutions by my self.

Sorry for the rant. After all, your support is always better than anywhere else.

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Prt output to allow conversion to Frost for rapid resizing without resimming and without the bottleneck of Particle Flow.

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frost should supports phoenix, doesn’t it?

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Hi Michael!
First of all, this is a very good thing you want to have clear picture of what customers and users would like to have in Phoenix and how they feel to use the product. This is why I love to use Chaos groups products, a very good support!

Many “little” things are already cover up in the nightlies or in this forum, but heres what im looking for. I know these are big things and I dont expect them to be right away in next release. Ivo and colleagues are having tons of work to do already:)

Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

1.Full list of main render passes (elements)

2.For me, node based user interface would be a good choice (still the present one is very OK to use)

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

1. Multithreading for all conservation modes!!
We are now lacking so much power with our simulation machine cause PHX does not support all of the 32 cores at the same time. Its desperate to see only 4 or so cores to do something when big simulation is on away.

2. Soft body support:
Some kind of mechanism to support collision objects to have a mass and different stiffness etc. Its very imperative to have an objects for example to float over the surface or
travel with the flow with its own parameters so we dont have to fake them with keyframes. Then the water could also behave naturally with collision objects and we wouldnt have to tweek and tweek to get simulation to meet the keyframe animations requirements, but have it go in the other way.

3. Full adaptiveness.:
The present one is good for smokes etc. but particularly with big water scenes it over kills the action. It would be so cool to have a real adaptiveness where only needed space is cover up with new cells. I know this HAS to bee very hard to accomplish, but for future I think it could be one of the key things why to choose PHX.

4. Maybe some more artistic friendly tweek parameters like dissipation.

5. Support to simulate in farm: No need to explain :slight_smile:

(Sorry, have to go above five)
6. Some kind of mechanism to create a small water drops, like shower or bursting water, and then when collected to the ground creating a mass of water. Hard to explain but something else than a visible column of water, if it is needed.

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don’t work the way you want them to:

1. With water, the steps generated over the diagonal surfaces. I know we have to use gizmos then, but some other “automatic” solution would be nice.

Maybe I update my list if I remember other things (which are not covered yet).

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Geddart’s List…

Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

1. Great online help with huge Grids of examples for every parameter. Vray’s help is Awesome!
2. Full Support for Light Include/Exclude/Mattes! No more second black Phoenix in Scene!
3. Working time remapping (see bugs)
4. Automated Particle Following for Displacement Maps
5. Adjustable Pivot for PheonixFD Objects.

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

1. GPU Acceleration, BSP Tree like adaptive Grid, Full Multithreading - anything that speeds up the sim!
2. Effectors like FumeFX (Sorry, they’re awesome!)
3. Fully customizable Particles (not just bubbles, could work great for ambers or sood in fires, custom geometry)
4. Modifier Support for PhoenixFD Objects: Bend, Twist, Shear, FFD and so on.
5. VolumeFogMode without simulation. (So mapping of Volumes with 3D Maps could happen interactively in the viewport)
6. Viewport Previews like Maya Fluids - I know Max is probably the problem - just dreaming…
7. VrayRT Support!

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don’t work the way you want them to:

1. Time remapping - Issue with disappearing frames with non integer frame numbers. (bug reported)
2. Full Support for Light Include/Exclude/Mattes! Please!
3. Faster Viewport Previews - More intelligent cache reading? It seems Phoenix reads the whole cache frame even if I display only 10% ?

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Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

1. Mesher
2. Ability to export/import field-3d
3. Mode when grid is tiled without additional memory consumption
4. Particles exporter
5. New nightlies installer, so I stop shutdown services by hands J

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

1. Revolutionary adaptive grid which will follow the form of the flow, and not that brutal big box (much like the cascades)
2. Phx_Wind
3. Compression option for phx_particles
4. Fast simple GPU-solver
5. Surface tension for liquid simulation, now liquids suitable only for ocean like sims (they are very basic)

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don’t work the way you want them to:

1. Liquids do not work as liquids at all. Blows like crazy every time
2. Adaptive grid react on flow changes very quick, need a bit gentle, soft adaptation (like ease out)
3. Motion blur doesn’t look like motion blur
4. Little curved surfaces renders dark when using foam (typical grid artifact)
5. Transparency curves very hard to get used to

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Great news[quote=“renee81, post:67, topic:36627, username:renee81”]
frost should supports phoenix, doesn’t it?
[/quote]

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Could use a more robust preset system that would include Source parameters and Foam linkages. Allow lists of multiple objects in the Source helper.

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It would also be great to add tooltips to each of the parameters in the Attribute Editor. Take the text from the existing documentation and use them as tooltips. Just helps explain quickly what a given parameter is.
Thanks.

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the tooltip feature was planed long ago, but it was always deferred :slight_smile:

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I suppose any detailed documentation would be great or some tutorials.
fume fx has a lot of good tutorials, where as phoenix has a few obscure ones on YouTube

example scenes are interesting - but for me hard to recreate - they also have really weird scales (2 units = 1 unit etc) making them not easy to use in my normal scaled scenes

i suppose phoenix isn’t meant for consumers / pro-sumers ultimately its a specialist tool for people who are coders or technical people

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It would also be great to have finer control over the Displacement:

a) Add individual Mid Point and Amplitudes for each of the Coarsest, Coarse, and Fine. Currently the displacement always pushes out the surface. By setting the Mid Point to 0.5 you’d get half pushed in half pushed out. By setting this to 1.0 you’d get the displacement entirely pushed in. The default for Mid Point to match existing scenes would be 0.0.
b) The Displacement Amount would be multiplied by the individual Amplitudes.
c) Change the names to Large, Medium, Small. Currently in the Attribute Editor the different levels show as Coarse, Coarse, Fine. “Coarse” is repeated twice.

Thanks.

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coarse is repeated twice, because these two maps have equal displacement method, they displace the grid content on prepass. the fine displacement displaces the content during the rendering, and because of this can produce details smaller than the cell size.

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Hi guys, been using PHX for a while, here is my wishlist:

Top 5 things that would speed up your daily work with Phoenix:

1. Customisable geometry for particles. It is very sweet that PHX can simulate particle and render out particles directly. There is some situation I need to change shape of my particles, i.e., rocks, golden dust…etc
2. A clear cache (or Reset) button under “start” button. This is very common use for daily work. Like the one in Realflow.
3. Particle size control like FumeFX particle src (I guess you already have in the nightly)
4. Bake for foam/splash. Every time I hit render, PHX is doing his “foam, particles” things. It will be nice if PHX provides a baking option during specially during look-develop stage.
5. A preview animation that just works. Right now PHX seems not support by 3ds Max Preview Tools.

Top 5 features that you would like to be included in Phoenix in the future:

1. DSpline daemon like the one in Realfow, with radial, votex and axial on each vertex node.
2. Mesher. Able to export water mesh so another team member can use. ie: *.abc
3. Crown daemon like the one in Realflow
4. Render elements for smoke, fire, foam…, etc
5. Rigid body simulation. Again, like the one in Realflow
6. straghtforward retime workflow
7. a procedural “foam” pattern for ocean without using too much simulation power.

Top 5 issues, bugs, or things that just don’t work the way you want them to:

1. Less predictable than FumeFX and Realflow. My routine workflow always starts with low-res grid, once it looks okay, I make it higher res. Thought it won’t be 100% similar, I found with PhoenixFD this process is much less predictable than FumeFX and Realflow.
2. GUI for the transparency. Need separate transparency control for smoke and fire. Even for nightly version, I still feel something wrong with it. The fire preset doesn’t look realistic to me.
3. Overall simulation results of smoke are less realistic than FumeFX. With fumeFX I can get the very nice transition of smoke from start to fade away. With PHX, I found it is a little chunky. The buoyancy parameter seems not working correctly, when I adjust it, it doesn’t change the dynamic too much as it should be.
4. Making a realistic fire shading is hard.
5. Overall simulation results of liquid are too noisy (compare with Realflow). With PHX sim is fast but still can’t replace my daily use of Realflow.

Chen

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Hey,

Thanks a ton for the suggestions - I have some comments or questions:

This is under the Output panel cache path “…” button in the nightlies. In the official Phoenix 2.2 it’s in the Output panel too.

We are using the preview tools daily with the GPU preview, the voxel and the mesh preview were also fine the last time I checked. Which mode do you have issue with? We definitely have to fix anything wrong there.

In the nightlies there is the FollowPath force that should work in a similar way.

Once you turn on Show Mesh in the Preview panel, Phoenix will mesh the fluid into a standard 3ds max mesh and you should be able to export it to anything you like. Again - if you find any issue with that, please bump us - this has to be working.

In the nightlies, there is a new Fire Opacity mode - “Own Opacity” - there you can directly control the opacity of the fire separately from the smoke’s opacity.

The smoke in the nightlies should be much more realistic compared to the official 2.2 using PCG Symmetric with high conservation quality (>50) and Massive Vorticity. Could you share an example of the look you are after?

True that. We have some ideas, and they must be tried out. Btw, do you mind if we adjust the Fire preset using the settings you shared here in a different forum thread? The Fire preset is a proof-of-concept in the nightlies and we’ll be adding for adding more presets too, so they need to look good.

Most of your other suggestions coincide with things we have in mind, so I hope it’s only a matter of time :slight_smile:

Cheers and thank you!

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thank you Svetlin

I will look into each of these and reply soon.

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Hi Svetlin,

Here are comparison between my settings and the fire-preset. IMO, my settings is closer to real fire, though I might need to add some blue color at the root of fire. I will sent you my scene file to support team.

Cheers,

Chen

PhoenixFD_fire_shading_compare.jpg
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