In Phoenix 5.21.00 the Particle and Voxel Tuners can now measure the distance from a point to the nearest particle or count the number of particles in a given radius. This allows for measuring the distance between different particle systems and deleting stray particles or modifying the simulation based on the number of particles in a certain region.
The Phoenix Simulator options that have their value changed from the default state will be colored and you can quickly see which ones were tweaked.
The emitter objects can now be picked by multiple Sources and will use only one of the Sources for actual simulation - for scenes where you have multiple simulators in the scene that use the same emitter object in different Source nodes.
The Sources can now emit Foam, Splash and Mist particles at the same time.
As always we did many user interface improvements and fixed many bugs in order to make the simulation process a lot smoother.
NEW TUNERS The Particle and Voxel Tuners are expanded with the functionality to measure the distance from a point to the nearest particle and to find the number of particles in a given radius
NEW USER INTERFACE Use a different color in the user interface of the Simulator for options that are different from their default value
IMPROVED ACTIVE BODIES 'Add Many' button in the Active Body Solver node, allowing to quickly add a list of nodes
IMPROVED SOURCES Gray out the Direct Velocity X/Y/Z slots when using Texture map or Vertex Color
IMPROVED SOURCES Allowed simply picking the same emitter in multiple Sources, and use only one of the Sources for the actual simulation
IMPROVED SOURCES Allowed emitting Foam, Splash and Mist particles simultaneously by Sources
IMPROVED PREVIEW Turn off the Particle Preview for Quick Setups that use GPU Preview that don't have particles, in order to make the Preview rollout shorter
IMPROVED PREVIEW Moved all the on/off switches for the different preview types to the top of the Preview rollout
IMPROVED PREVIEW Gray out the Velocity Preview if the Force preview is turned on, and the Velocity Streamlines if the Force Streamlines are enabled
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE 'Clear' right click menu item for the node selector buttons in the Simulator
IMPROVED USER INTERFACE Added a button to all Phoenix command panel rollouts to reset the position of the floating rollouts
IMPROVED ABC I/O Emit Motion Velocity from moving ABC meshes with varying vertex count
FIXED SIMULATION GENERAL The simulation appeared chopped when simulating a Simulator with Steps Per Frame above 1, parented to a Helper with an added Controller
FIXED FIRE/SMOKE SOLVER Any errors during PCG GPU simulation caused a crash
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Fixed waves appearing near the Simulator borders when the container was animated to translate horizontally
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Liquid particles could slide over the ocean surface for a long time before merging, even with Droplets Surfing of 0.0
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Crash if emitting Mist particles from a Source but Splash To Mist was 0 and there was Wetting with Consumed Liquid enabled
FIXED STANDALONE SIMULATOR Exporting simscenes to directories that didn't exist yet failed without displaying an appropriate error
FIXED SOURCES Crash if running out of memory when emitting from particles
FIXED SOURCES Emitting from particles in Volume Brush mode when using Noise in the Source often produced 100% brush effect even with very low Brush Effect values
FIXED SOURCES Directed Velocity was not calculated correctly when emitting from Particle Flow
FIXED PARTICLE TUNER Deleting Splash or Mist particles using a Tuner created Liquid particles when Affect Liquid was higher than 0
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Crash when rendering many particles in Bubbles or Cellular mode using a Count Multiplier higher than 1
FIXED PARTICLE SHADER Rendering slow-down with Particle Shader in Points mode with Volume Light cache enabled on NUMA machines
FIXED VOLUMETRIC ILLUMINATION Fire Lights were always created on the active render layer even if the Simulator was placed in another layer when the 'Hidden lights' option was off
FIXED PREVIEW Random crash when previewing a large number of particles
FIXED PREVIEW Viewport slowdown when loading VDB sequences, since Phoenix 5.20
FIXED PREVIEW Slow viewport preview with instanced VDB caches
FIXED PREVIEW Rendering an animation didn't update splines created by Auto bake Streamline Preview
FIXED CACHE I/O Input Grid Smoothing's Threshold/Similarity/Random Variation controls were broken, since Phoenix 5.20
FIXED CACHE I/O Input Grid Smoothing's Similarity was broken, since Phoenix 3.11
FIXED CACHE I/O Incorrect "Temperature" channel data range for a specific VDB file
FIXED CACHE I/O Crash during tyFlow particle simulation when reading Phoenix simulation data using Time Step below 1 frame with Phoenix for V-Ray 5
FIXED 3DS MAX INTEGRATION Phoenix atmosphere is automatically created upon render start when there was a Particle shader in the scene
FIXED PRESETS 3ds Max crashes when loading a Phoenix Render Preset in a V-Ray Volume Grid
FIXED PRT I/O The 'Export PRT Particles' right click menu was not visible when a Modifier is applied to the Simulator
FIXED PRT I/O Using a deformer over PRT cache loaded in the Simulator showed wrong deformation when changing the timeline frame
FIXED GRID TEXTURE Velocity data read by the Grid Texture had wrong direction when the Flip YZ option of the source Simulator was ON
FIXED GRID TEXTURE Mapper setting Grid Velocity to a Simulator read by a Grid Texture from a rotated Simulator produced wrong velocity directions
FIXED GRID TEXTURE Memory leak when simulating and a Grid Texture is used for some material when the simulation that has many steps per frame and contains particles
FIXED FLIP LIQUID SOLVER Memory leak during rendering with Corona when using Phoenix Grid texture
FIXED SUBMITTING SIMULATIONS Submitting a Simulator that used the default $(scene_path) output for Deadline .max scene simulation threw a MAXScript exception without showing a friendly error message
FIXED USER INTERFACE The cache was flipping back when changing any of the Input Grid Smoothing options while 'Flip Up Axis' was enabled
FIXED USER INTERFACE Phoenix Progress Bars were cropped in high DPI
FIXED USER INTERFACE Texture selector controls in floating rollouts didn't update when cleared while the Simulator's command panel was not shown