Review: Chaos Group’s Phoenix FD

Chaos Group’s powerful new fluids technology is great for creating realistic fire, smoke and explosions, rivalling current standards used in the visual effects industry.

Price: $895 | Developer: Chaos Group | Platform: Windows

Main features:

• Interactive feedback
• Adaptive fluid containers
• Displacement and texture mapping
• Fast viewport display and GPU-based previewing
• Robust Particle Flow support

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A mixture of speed, ease-ofuse and a comprehensive toolset makes Phoenix FD a serious contender for explosive VFX work

Phoenix FD, the latest FX plug-in to hit 3ds Max, is a fluid simulation solver primarily aimed at simulating realistic smoke, fire and explosions. It’s similar to Maya Fluids, and FumeFX which are the two most used commonly used fluid solutions in visual effects – at least for creating gaseous-based fluids, rather than water simulators like Glu3D and RealFlow.

Getting started is easy: you create a container which defines the boundaries of your effect – the smaller the container the better, as this way there is less volume to calculate resulting in faster simulation times. Usually at this point you’ll create an emitter, and tell it to emit from a specific object.

The software can save you loads of time and effort as it automatically associates everything you build in your scene with your container – unless you specify otherwise. This means that any emitters you have will
emit to that container, and objects in your scene will collide with your fluids. To stop them doing this, you simply add them to the exclude list.

Another notable feature is that Phoenix is completely interactive while simulating. After beginning your simulation, you’re able to continue to work – scrub through frames, create new objects, adjust values and so on – while it calculates. This powerful feature means you can experiment with values and try new things while enjoying instant feedback, which also proves useful in learning the plug-in, as you can play with the settings and see the results in real time.

A really unique and impressive feature is the fact that the grid is physically adaptive. Most other solvers will have fixed container dimensions which do not change. With Phoenix, the physical container is actually adaptive and grows and shrinks to match the dimensions of your fluid. This welcome feature could save countless hours of resimulating, especially if you’ve ever run overnight simulations to find your fluids were perfect, except for clipping on the ceiling or side of the container where the fluids went too far.

Good performance

Phoenix simulates quickly and outputs to a high quality. One thing that really stands out, at least compared to FumeFX, is that the viewport display is optimised and very fast to draw. FumeFX suffers from very poor viewport drawing, which renders it fairly useless when it comes to working with fluids in the viewport – instead you have to rely instead on its floating preview window.

But Phoenix draws very quickly, and also displays even if the container isn’t selected, unlike FumeFX 1.x. This makes it great for animators and lighters to visualise effects while they animate characters or set up interactive lighting.

And there’s more good news for lighting artists, as Phoenix has built-in illumination controls to help simulate light emanating from the fluids themselves, which is very handy. On top of this, Phoenix has a preview window, much like FumeFX’s, except it is GPU-accelerated, which leaves you free to fine-tune your simulation and adjust things like shading and lighting easily in the preview window.

Phoenix FD enables you to tweak simulation settings and see the results immediately

Unlimited control

The controls are very robust, although they are cramped into the command panel under dozens of rollouts. At first glance this can seem rather daunting, although it’s handy for power users who want all the controls in front of them. Adjusting your shader is controlled via a floating window, which enables you to adjust colours and ramps, and allows you to control your shader based on temperature or literally dozens of other
types of options for maximum control.

Phoenix makes tweaking results a cinch: you can adjust colours and transparency via the floating window, as well as control whether the shader is driven by heat, density or other attributes

Phoenix is closely based around physical scales, and although no fluid simulators are truly physically accurate, it does a great job of representing real-world scales and temperatures. You’re able to give it sensible controls that will cause it to react in different ways, rather than an arbitrary temperature of 500 and a fuel value of 3, for example, these will be based on real scales and temperature values.

Phoenix also plugs directly into Particle Flow, and has a lot of options and controls for how to path particles into Phoenix, and how to propagate and move your particles into other events based on various event tests that you set up.

The plug-in also features proper wind support, rather than relying on Space Warps, although you can still use all of the standard 3ds Max Space Warp modifiers to easily affect the movement of the fluid.

A demonstration of Phoenix's support for Space Warps: here the vortex Space Warp is used to make a wind tunnel of smoke

A refined first release

Overall, Phoenix FD is on a par with FumeFX and Maya’s Fluids: it has very fast simulation times – much faster than Maya’s – and has some features that make it favourable over FumeFX, such as faster viewport display, GPU-based previewing, adaptive containers and interactive sims.

Phoenix FD provides fine-tune control over your simulation, using graphs to attenuate density and texture maps to generate flames at specific areas

Other features include optional 2D container simulations, similar to those found in Maya. Additionally it has a 2D texture map function, allowing you to map your fluids as a texture onto objects, plus skydome lighting for getting a pseudo-daylight source onto your fluids for more realistic renders.

Temperatures can plug into V-Ray’s heat haze rendering feature to allow for heat distortions based on the fluid temperatures.

Representing your textures as a 3D procedural texture, and also allowing you to map textures onto your fluids are both excellent additions.

With too many features to cover here, Phoenix FD is definitely production worthy and stands out in many ways ahead of some of the already industry-proven solvers. With its realistic scale representation, adaptive grid, fast simulation times, and control over your effects, Phoenix FD is definitely a plug-in to watch out for.

Verdict

PROS

• True adaptive containers
• Fast viewport display and simulation

CONS

• Clunky interface
• Requires hardware USB-dongle

Phoenix FD definitely fits the bill and challenges the leading production fluids solvers currently available. Very flexible and powerful, with a few features that help to place it ahead of the rest.

Posted on Wednesday, December 15th, 2010 at 2:27 pm under Plug-ins, Reviews. You can subscribe to comments. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: Chaos Group, fluid effects, fluids, Phoenix, Phoenix FD, plug-in, VFX