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Liquid Simulations can create pouring or flowing liquids, or any simulation that needs foam or mist, such as coffee or waterfalls.

You can think of the simulator as a 3D box, inside which simulations of fluids and Rigid Body Dynamics are performed. The simulator consists of voxels that contain the fluid's properties at a position and given time, such as the fluid’s velocity, its viscosity, its color, and so forth.

The fluid properties are written inside what are called Grid Channels. Each channel stores a type of value, such as Liquid or Velocity, with its own Grid Channel Range, which is the range of possible values that is most efficient for that specific channel type. Phoenix determines the fluid’s behavior at a given time, based on the content of these Grid Channels.

Liquid Simulators also generate particles for liquids that drive the simulation, by writing simulation data inside each voxel’s Grid Channels, so that the Grid Data is built from those particles.

Since Phoenix 3.0, Liquid Simulations have used a hybrid solver under the hood, called FLIP, which provides more realistic and faster simulations, with no stepping artifacts. In essence, the FLIP solver combines a Grid simulator with Particles, in order to take advantage of the benefits of both.

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Note that the simulator is represented as a single object for convenience. Internally, it contains two completely separate parts: a simulator component, and a rendering component responsible for the process of converting the Liquid particles into a renderable surface. Parameters that control the simulation are separated from those associated with the meshing and rendering process. As a result, no rollout will contain mixed parameters, and no parameter will affect both the simulation and rendering.
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Phoenix generates particles for liquids because they are useful for representing the characteristics and behavior of a fluid, and as a result look more natural when rendering liquids, especially when generated in very large amounts. The particles emulate real-world fluids by moving through 3D space within the simulation grid, and unlike voxels, each particle carries its own fluid properties with it, such as Position, Age, Velocity and so forth. These properties contained in each of the particles are called Particle Channels, and their values can change every frame, based on each channel's Particle Channel Range.

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The Particle Shader component is most often used in conjunction with the Liquid Simulator to shade particles such as Splash, Mist and Foam. However, it can also shade particles created from the Fire/Smoke Simulator, as well as standard particle systems such as Particle Flow, or particles from plugins like tyFlow, thinkingParticles, Krakatoa, etc. Note that while it is a geometry type in 3ds Max, the Particle Shader is not a simulator.

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Note that the

simulator

is represented as a single object for convenience. Internally, it contains two completely separate parts: a simulator component, and a rendering component responsible for the process of converting the Liquid particles into a renderable surface. Parameters that control the simulation are separated from those associated with the meshing and rendering process. As a result, no rollout will contain mixed parameters, and no parameter will affect both the simulation and rendering

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titleUI Path: ||Create panel|| > Geometry > PhoenixFD category > LiquidSim button

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