In this tutorial, we are going to show you how to create a nebula with Phoenix. Since a nebula is a giant cloud of dust and gas in space, we will simulate it as smoke and then we will add lights to give it the appearance of a nebula. After simulating with a single Simulator, we will duplicate it into six instances. For better rendering performance we will render the scene using V-Ray GPU.
The simulation requires Phoenix 4.0040Official Release and V-Ray Next 5 Official Release for 3ds Max 20152017at least. If you notice a major difference between the results shown here and the behavior of your setup, please send an email to support@chaosgroup.com.
The Download button below provides you with an archive containing the start and end scenes.
Select the Phoenix Simulator. Disable the Gravity since a nebula supposedly forms in outer space. Change the Conservation Method to Buffered, with a Quality of 40. Set the Steps Per Frame to 2. The Buffered method has the weakest conservation strength and shortest range, but produces nice details. For in-depth information, check the Conservation documentation.
UI Text Box
type
info
As we simulated without the Temperature channel, in this special case, there is no difference in the simulation results with or without gravity.
Column
width
60%
...
Section
Column
width
45%
Here is a test render up to this step. We can see a better pattern formation, compared to the results with default Dynamics settings.
