by Hammer Chen

When dealing with complex scene, sometimes you have to adjust forces in the scene back and forth to get the desired results. You have to change parameters, run the sim, render preview and change parameters again.

For creating ocean maelstrom, adding a vortex force might be a quick answer. However, finding the right parameters could be a nightmare for you. If the orbital speed too high, or it's falloff too short. Or if there is not enough radial pull. You might not be able to get the right maelstrom.

With new Force Preview, you can see how Phoenix or standard 3ds Max forces will influence the simulation — without multiple iterations

by Hammer Chen

It will be a very tedious job if we have to mannualy adding smoke emitters at each hoof of horses.

Fortunately, with the help of VRayDistance map, we could generate ground dust more procedurally. Here we have one single Alembic file containing hundreds of animated horse and one ground plane.

We could apply a simple material with VRayDistanceTex to a ground plane to visualize the procedural texture. The VRayDistanceTex is a V-Ray specific procedural texture that returns a different color based on a point's distance to an object(s) specified in a selection list.

We could utilize this feature of VRayDistance and use it as a mask for Phoenix FD Source (smoke). Add ground plane in the emitter node, and in the Mask, use Texmap - VRayDistance.

With this technique, the ground plane only emits smoke when horse' hoofs touch the ground. This trick is especially useful when we are dealing with a significant amount of animated objects.

by Hammer Chen

How could you explode a liquid in CG? The most intuitive approach is to put a gravity in the center of orange with a negative value. Here we use Phoenix FD Turbulence to agitate the liquid, making it spray out.

Create one Phoenix FD Turbulence in your scene and animate it's size and strength multiplier.

From frame 0 to frame 5, set the value of Multiply from 1500 to 0. Adjust its animation cure as shown above.

From frame 0 to frame 5, increase turbulence size from 5 to 30. Adjust its animation cure as shown above.

Steps per Frame (SPF): Left: SPF = 1; right: SPF = 2. Here you can see how dramatic SPF is affecting liquid mesh. The default value ( SPF = 1) makes the liquid too diffuse.

With appropriate dynamics settings for Phoenix FD liquid simulator, we can create a fruit explosion effect easily.


For step by step tutorial, and to download scene file, please check this official help page.

by Hammer Chen

Phoenix FD allows you to mix the liquid with different RGB color, chocolate, and milk for example. Here are few steps you can follow:

1. Out Grid RGB Channel

3. We could use the RGB channel data as a mask for mixing two V-Ray materials with VRayBlend.

Material for milk

Material for chocolate

Using VRayBlend to blend the two materials above, the key is what texture we can use when mixing the two?

PhoenixFDTexmap is the answer. Pick up your Source node "PhoenixFDLiquid" in the scene, and set your Channel as "RGB."

This image is the mask generated by PhoenixFDTexmap.

This small handy feature allows you to preview ocean mesh without any simulations. The video was recorded by Svetlin Nikolov.

by Hammer Chen

(Click Here to download the sample scene for max 2015)

Do you know you can create photo realistic surface condensation with Phoenix FD? The key is using a procedural texture map - Stucco as a mask for the LiquidSrc.

You could also animate the texture map (i.e., Z offset in this example), with the right timing you could get waterdrop sliding over the fruit surface.

Surface Tension is another key to simulate realistic droplet. The Droplet Breakup parameter controls the balances between the liquid forming tendrils or droplets. For more detail, you could visit Phoenix FD official help page.

by Hammer Chen

Creating an image-based colored smoke is pretty straightforward with Phoenix FD. Here are three key steps you need to know:

1. Output RGB channel
Check RGB checkbox in the output section


2. PHXSource with RGB checked and plugged in your custom texture map


3. Simulator / Rendering 
The default smoke color is based on "constant color," choose Based on "RGB" so you can render out your colorful smoke.