Chaos Group has released Phoenix FD 3.0 for 3DS Max. This latest version of their fluid dynamics plugin brings a list of new features including presets, FLIP solver, improved fire and smoke solver, and much more. You can find out more about Phoenix FD on the Chaos Group website.
Phoenix FD 3.0 for 3DS Max released
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Tries not to swear.
Damn.
…because you have abandonded Max?
Nope, just because it’s more impressive than I was expecting and it’s a free upgrade to existing users apparently.
Yes, it is free for existing users.
Quik question: is it possible to float objects e.g speed boat onto of the flip solver??
As far as I know, the fluid sims won’t affect any rigid bodies.
so, in terms of water, it is a step down the realflow plugin for c4d, is right?…wath a pity! at this point, I hope the next step will be a rigid body solver. Ragarding fire/smoke simulation, is it better comparable to FumeFX?
Awesome! Can’t wait to try it.
Looks like a big improvement and the flips look great. Explosions don’t look good though.
Bare in mind that it is an explosion preset, to get you started. Been using it in the nightlies for a year and its a world apart from 2.2 😀
I think it comes down to the user. I don’t have a link on hand, but I swear I’ve seen some great explosions done with PhoenixFD.
I do really love all the new features they added, the viewport preview looks great and of course the FLIP fluids.
I’m really hoping for a GPU solver to make it into either FumeFX or PhoenixFD now that GPUs are getting so much more ram, latest Quadro has 24GB which is enough to make some good sims. More importantly, it makes it quicker to iterate at lower resolutions.
I don’t know if technically an “out-of-core” approach would be possible as well to speed up simulation times?
Well.. we have a FLIP solver finally in max, and looks pretty good! Smoke viewport preview looks quite impressive also.
Very nice. Chaos Group is getting much competition in render arena but also giving competition to simulators.
Pretty cool 😀
Does anyone know if this new version able to export VDB and render deep? Last time I checked (phx v2.x nightly) it was still unable to do that.
Thanks!
No, we didn’t have time to finish the OpenVDB export in time for the release. It will be added in a service pack.
Wonderful, thanks Vlado.
It’s looks interesting. The most thing I’m interested is that what data access it has? Can I have like in FFX effector level of control.
Really impressive job on this release. Two small requests at this point…optional GPU solver and please port this plugin to Modo.
Great fluid solver.
However I am a little disappointed that this long awaited release didn’t really feature any new features, but more or less only improvements to existing ones.
Personally I would be interested in a granular solver and physical interaction with other scene objects, like floating rigid bodies, cloth and so on.
But as a in-program 3DSMax fluid solver it works really well.
I, too, was hoping there was some kind of support for interacting with objects. I’ve seen a video where someone passed Phoenix FD data through krakatoa and then through pflow to push objects around, so it is somewhat possible (even if a pain).
But overall, a really nice release, especially being free to previous users. And its in-program use makes it preferable over Realflow to me, even if it isn’t as powerful. I still find it difficult using Realflow after years of using it, and their last release (paid upgrade) has new features that aren’t production-ready IMO.
Hi, I was very excited about the release but I am sad to confirm that after over a year of reporting the file size problem even in this new release you cannot write .aur cache files bigger then 2Gb. When it tries to do that it writes an enormous file and crashes max. This is a known issue and was reported and acknowledged by Chaosgroup many many month ago in the beta forum but never fixed. 2Gb files for saving all that data and particles is not much when doing large scale water or pyro effects. I really hope this will be finally fixed or maybe they could switch to OpenVDB as a file cache. Neither Houdini nor FumeFX have that file size issue. PLEASE FIX THIS! Otherwise it’s just too risky to use it in production.
Chaos group confirmed the problem with a test scene I submitted to them and could finally recreate the issue and is working on a fix. Should be submitted with the next update / service pack. Just keep an eye on your cache files till then!