This page provides information on Rendering Chaos Phoenix using V-Ray Standalone.


Overview

V-Ray Standalone is full-featured and programmable command-line renderer that allows you to render scenes exported in V-Ray’s native .vrscene file format.

V-Ray Standalone supports V-Ray's complete feature set including CPU & GPU rendering capabilities.


When rendering Phoenix volumes ( such as smoke and fire, Phoenix meshed liquids or Phoenix particle systems such as Foam, Splash and Mist or any of the Phoenix textures) on a machine that will be used only as a render node, but will not simulate - Phoenix will not require a license for rendering - you just need Phoenix installed on the machine which will render the data.

Setting up Phoenix Rendering using V-Ray Standalone

For more information on installing V-Ray Standalone, see the V-Ray Standalone Installation Guide page.


Installing Chaos Phoenix on a machine which will be used only as a render node, where there is no DCC application installed (such as 3ds Max) is straightforward  - just follow the steps in the Phoenix Setup and Installation page.

Alternatively after running the Phoenix installer, you could append the C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Phoenix FD\3ds Max 20xx for x64\vray6plugins path to the VRAY_PLUGINS environment variable, but please note that this would affect all installed V-Ray Standalone versions.

Another alternative and the official way to do this for V-Ray versions older than V-Ray 6 would be to copy all files from C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Phoenix FD\3ds Max 20xx for x64\vray5plugins to the V-Ray Standalone plugins folder C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Standalone for x64\bin\plugins

Troubleshooting

If the Phoenix fluid is missing when rendering with V-Ray Standalone or you get any errors in the console, please try the following:

  • Try using the latest versions of Phoenix and V-Ray.
  • Confirm that the versions of Phoenix and V-Ray are matching. Phoenix has different installers for V-Ray Next, V-Ray 5 and V-Ray 6.
  • If you're doing a DR render - make sure the simulation caches are shared on a network location that all the machines can see. Note: They all must have permissions to access this network folder. For more details, see Distributed Rendering of Fluid Caches for Phoenix.

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