位於東歐的保加利亞，其首都是蘇菲亞，這家公司成立於1997年，創辦人是 Peter Mitev 與 Vladimir Koylazov (Vlado), Peter Mitev 是CEO。1998年才正式營運，開始接廣告案子, 當時的經濟很不好，特別是廣告業。Peter的背景也是程式設計師，就在那時候發覺可以替業界開發軟體 ，在大學遇到 Vlado。Peter的大學時代大部分都在翹課，那時候遇到Vlado正在撰寫他高中時的遊戲引擎。Peter當時一家軟體公司上班，這家公司舉辦了比賽，有提供獎項，而Vlado參與了這個遊戲引擎，他還贏得了第一名! 而且還是Peter去頒的獎!
In this article, I am going to share my tips & tricks for making realistic honey with Phoenix FD.
1. Modeling a honeycomb
Finding a photo-realistic model is very difficult. Even you have a budget to purchase from the online shop doesn't guaranty you get the right 3D model for the project. So I decided to model it by myself.
I found a handy tool from Scriptspot - Honeycomb, a maxscript by Anubis. This script allows you to generate a honeycomb shape with just one button.
We recently introduced the Artillery Explosion tutorial available in Phoenix FD’s documentation. Now, we want to show you a variation of this scene setup - a winter explosion with its proper shading.
This scene is essentially the same as the Artillery Explosion one, except for the smoke color and HDRI lighting. The smoke color is set to light gray in order to get a snowy look. To focus on the shading we also limit the number of bombs to just one.
Since there is a hot explosion at the core, it could make the rendering over-exposed or lose detail in the white smoke volumetric shading.
The good news is Phoenix FD provides a cohort of parameters allowing you to fine-tune the shading. Here we compare some of the useful settings that deal with this issue.
Overall Setup
The scene we use here is modified from the Artillery Explosion scene, except we add one Phoenix FD Turbulence helper and change the color of the smoke. For a step-by-step tutorial of how the Fire / Smoke sources and thinkingParticles are set up, please check out the Artillery Explosion tutorial.
Whitewater is formed in a rapid, when a river's gradient increases enough to generate so much turbulence that air is entrained into the water body, that is, it forms a bubbly or aerated and unstable current; the frothy water appears white. --- Wikipedia
In this article, I am going to show you how to set up whitewater shading with Phoenix FD.
To set up a scene for whitewater shading you will need:
1. A Phoenix FD Liquid Simulator - for simulation of liquid and generate "Vorticity smooth" data
2. A Phoenix FD Fire/Smoke Simulator - this is not for simulation. This Fire/Smoke Simulator doesn't have to be high resolution, because it purely functions as a container to load up "Vorticity smooth" data from Liquid Simulator, and shading / rendering them as smoke.
3. LiquidSrc
In the previous post, we saw how to create a small-scale fire. In this article we are talking about large-scale fires. A large-scale fire can be a ground fire, a wooden house on fire, or maybe fire in an explosion. Let's explore how to create realistic large-scale fire with Phoenix FD.
Fire is very tricky to make in CG. In the previous article, we have introduced the VRayDistanceTex to alleviate artifacts at the fire root. That is, by using a VRayDistance texture to modulate the fire opacity. In this article, we are going to give more tips & tricks for creating convincing fire.
First of all, let's talk about how the fire is emitted. Take a ground fire for example, we can use a simple plane (with shell modifier on top) and vertex paint to mask the fluid source. To avoid getting one big chunk of fire, paint the vertex color with smaller areas. This way we can create a more natural form of the flame.
Secondly, Phoenix FD Turbulence has a great effect on the overall motion of fire. For example, below we compare the dynamics of a flame without Phoenix FD Turbulence and with Phoenix FD Turbulence. See how the flame looks dull without Turbulence.
Phoenix FD 4's new feature TexUVW opens a great opportunity for adding details to your fluids. It allows fluids to transport UVW information along with the moving fluid. You can find an example in the "Using TexUVW for Creating Thin Smoke" tutorial, available on the Phoenix FD official page. In the tutorial, smoke opacity is masked with a noise texture, with the help of TexUVW, to enhance the details that mimic thin smoke.
In this article, we are taking advantage of this new feature in order to create a lava flow. The folding character of the lava is generated through bump maps and displacement.
References
When creating a lava stream, we need to consider what type of lava we want to use for reference. A variety of lava types exist depending on terrain, speed, hotness, and material composition. For the purpose of this article, we will create a "pahoehoe" (pronounced 'paw-hoey-hoey") type of lava (see the reference images above), which creates folds as it moves. However, if you intend to simulate molten lava, you can check the "Solidifying of Molten Lava" tutorial on the official documentation site.
In this article, I am going to share some tips & tricks of how I made this deer crossing river animation. Although it might look daunting at first glance, the settings for Phoenix are quite simple. The most critical thing for making this animation is the hardware.
As you can see, the total cache size for the whole animation (250 frames) is around 535 GB. So you better have a faster RAM and a hard drive with enough space for this kind of project. Once you have your hardware ready, leave it to Phoenix, Don't worry, Phoenix FD does support large-scale fluids like this one.
The image above shows my scene setup. The herd of deer is generated from a single rigged deer, duplicated by using thinkingParticles. There is no animation variation of the deer character, so the setting is simple, only offsetting animation for each deer.
In this article I am going to show you the benefit of using Phoenix FD in tandem with VRayVolumeGrid. I will use a nuclear explosion as an example.
Phoenix FD is capable of simulating complex explosions, such as air strike, small or large scale explosion. For a realistic blast, it always involves many different components. For example, the nuclear explosion you have a major mushroom cloud that flies into the sky; and the ground dust triggered by the mushroom cloud explosion. With multiple fire/smoke sources, Phoenix FD can perform realistic nuclear explosion simulation. In fact, you can find a downloadable nuclear explosion scene on the ChaosGroup official sample page.
With that said, what if you want extra degree of freedoms for tweaking and shaping the extract nuke you want. Simulating each component separately might be a way to go. I'll explain why.
A collection of reference images from the Internet
Let’s take a look at physical reality. A nuclear bomb was placed on the ground, somewhere in an unknown desert. When the bomb blast off, initiate the chain reaction, heat climbing and generate lots of smoke as a by-product the chemical reaction; that major explosion pushes the ground dust which is already there before the blast. We can say the physical properties of those two elements (the ground dust and explosive mushroom) are no doubt different things.
Have you ever wondered how to create a bullet-time effect for liquids with Phoenix FD? Especially when working with rigid body simulation? The answer is surprisingly simple: animate the Phoenix FD's "Time Scale" parameter. In this article, I am going to show you the workflow.
1. Scene Setup
We have two wine glasses in the scene and a sphere flying from right to left, that hits and breaks the glasses. You can use any package to simulate the rigid body dynamics, for example, PFlow mParticles or RayFire. In this case, I use thinkingParticles.
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
In this article, I am going to show you some of the critical steps of making this burning motorcycle image with Phoenix FD.
The model was kindly provided by Lien Ying-Te. Though this is a sub-D model, there are a lot of parts and faces in the geometry. The first thing I do is attach all the pieces into one single mesh, and then use ProOptimizer to reduce the polyfaces to roughly 10% of its original polycounts. You get a significant simulation performance increase when you have fewer polycounts as a fire/smoke source.
