Chaos Group has released Phoenix FD4 for Max and Maya. New features include the return of Active Bodies to allow the user to float geometry over liquid and push it with flooding water. Currently, there are still no collisions between the bodies and the fire/smoke simulators cannot blow active bodies away, but this apparently is coming.
Voxel and Particle Tuners gain a couple of new nodes for advanced control over the simulation. It is now possible to check each voxel or particle against a custom condition and change its channels or delete it.
A new channel called TexUVW transports texture coordinates with the fluid simulation. After that, at render time the user can use it to have displacement flow with the fluid in the Mesh or Volumetric modes. It is also possible to modulate or replace the colour and opacity of volumetrics with flowing texture maps, in order to recolour the fluid after simulating or to add more detail.
In 3DS Max 3 Phoenix operators have been added to thinkingParticles, much like the existing Particle Flow operators. There is a Birth operator for creating Thinking Particles where the Phoenix fluid passes certain conditions, a Force operator for pushing Thinking Particles along with the Phoenix fluid, and a Sample operator that reads properties of the Phoenix fluids that can be used in expressions in the TP graph.
Finally, there’s a new Standalone Cache Preview tool that loads AUR, VDB and F3D cache files and shows a voxel preview of them that is much faster than the 3DS Max and Maya viewports. There’s also an experimental new Streamline Velocity preview which helps visualize the fluid movement much better.
To find out more, visit the Chaos Group blog.
I wonder if this will allow Phoenix 3.X installs to stay, or if it removes that install altogether when installing 4, or if they will guarantee backwards compatibility? I had an initial bad experience going from 2 to 3. Some of my sims I had to completely redo because they wouldn’t render correctly. Not fun when a client wanted a simple change to a year old project not relating to the sim, and you end up redoing the sim too. Not to mention z fighting issues introduced that I never had before (which required going to the slower volumetric geometry mode to remedy), and lack of compatibility for progressive rendering that 2 used to do well and fast when in a crunch…whatever they did to lose that, I wish they would go back to. :/
Hey, yes – just like V-Ray installs, the older version is replaced. However, Phoenix 4.0 should render Phoenix 3.14 scenes quite similarly, and there would only be minor differences in simulations as a few parameters now act differently – this has been the case for all minor Phoenix 3 updates so far – from 3.13 to 3.14, from 3.12 to 3.13, etc. Over time, scenes simulated and rendered with much older versions could change, as adding new stuff sometimes requires breaking compatibility, but it Phoenix 4.0 definitely won’t differ from 3.14 as much as 3.0 differed from 2.2, because there were more than 2 years of development in Phoenix 3.0, while Phoenix 4.0 is now just the first version of the new generation 4 which we intend to keep releasing updates for every 3-4 months. Thank you very much for asking! If you have any compatibility issues, please ping us in the ChaosGroup forums and we will help you find a workaround.
I guess it just would be nice if you could have both versions installed for situations like 2 to 3. A couple years can go by, and you never know when a client makes a small change where the newer version can be wrong enough that it won’t pass.