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Requires Phoenix 3.11.00 Official Release and V-Ray Next Official Release for 3ds Max 2015 +at least. If you notice a major difference between the results shown here and the behaviour behavior of your setup, please reach us using the Support Form.

The instructions on this page guide you through the process of using the Phoenix Particle Texture to shade a particle simulation with Phoenix in 3ds Max.

The Download button below provides you with an archive containing the scene file.

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Units Setup

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Units Setup

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Scale is crucial for the behavior of any simulation. The real-world size of the Simulator in units is important for the simulation dynamics. Large-scale simulations appear to move more slowly, while mid-to-small scale simulations have lots of vigorous movement. When you create your Simulator, you must check the Grid rollout where the real-world extents of the Simulator are shown. If the size of the Simulator in the scene cannot be changed, you can cheat the solver into working as if the scale is larger or smaller by changing the Scene Scale option in the Grid rollout.

The Phoenix solver is not affected by how you choose to view the Display Unit Scale - it is just a matter of convenience.

Go to Customize → Units Setup and set Display Unit Scale to Metric Centimeters.

Also, set the System Units such that 1 Unit equals 1 Centimeter.

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Scene Layout

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Here's how the simulation looks at the moment. The liquid starts falling down and doesn't stick to the animated Torus geometry.

We need to disable the Gravity and add a Body Force that will pull the liquid towards the Torus.

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Phoenix Simulator Setup

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Phoenix Simulator Setup

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Select the Phoenix Simulator and from the Dynamics rollout disable the Gravity checkbox. This way once the liquid is emitted it won't start falling down due to the gravity.

As later we would want to shade our particles based on the liquid channels we need to set those for export to the cache files.

In the Output rollout tick the checkboxes for Velocity and RGB for both the Output Particles and the Output Grid channels.

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Here's the result with the both Body Forces affecting the simulation.

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Particle Shading

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Now that we have the scene setup we need to render it out. By default the Phoenix Liquid Simulator will be rendered as mesh, though in this case we would like to render out the simulation as particles.

Select the Liquid Simulator, right-click and from the Object Properties disable Renderable.

Create a Phoenix Particle Shader and from the Add button select the Simulator and pick the Liquid particle group.

If we hit the render button now you will notice that the render is blank. In order to see something we will need some lights.

Create a V-Ray Ambient Light and then set the Color to 0, 0, 255 Hue, Saturation, Value and the Intensity to 2.

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Here's how the result looks in motion.

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Particle Shading By Speed

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Turn on Remap Color from the Particle Texture options and set the Use Color Component to Length. This way the texture will use the speed of the particles, which is the length of the velocity vector.

Double click on the first color point to set its color and use 0.6, 1, 1 for Hue, Saturation, Value.

Double click on the second color point and set the color to 0.08, 0.734, 1.

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Moving the points, we can control how to colors are remapped based on the speed.

In order to figure out what the real velocity range is you can open the Simulation rollout of the Liquid Simulator and inside the Cache File Content check the range values for the Velocity channel. In this case it's from 0 to 279.40.

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Move the first color point to position of 86 and the second one to 198. This way the gradient will tighten up and give the result a bit contrasty look. Note that the numbers displayed on the color gradient are the leftmost and rightmost points on the gradient, and not the positions of the color markers.

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Here's how the result looks in motion.

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Another really cool thing that you can do with this approach is to combine both methods we have shown above.

So you can take the Particle Texture that reads the RGB channel and multiply it by the Particle Texture that reads the Speed of the Particles.

Duplicate the Particle Texture that we used for the Speed example above, set the Color from Particle Channel to RGB and turn off the color remapping.

In order to get a bit different result let's change the Color Remap gradient for the Speed Texture.

Set the first point to 0, 0, 0.1 Hue, Saturation, Value and move its position to 70. This sets the color to a dark gray and when we later multiply this color by the RGB texture some of the color will get through, but with a lower value.

Set the second point to 0, 0, 1 Hue, Saturation, Value and move its position to 100.

Create a V-Ray Comp Texture and connect the Speed and RGB particle textures to it.

Then set the Operator to Multiply and set the V-Ray Comp Texture as a Color map for the Particle Shader.

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Let's modify the overall look and make the particles a bit denser.

Select the Particle Shader and set the Point Alpha to 0.11 - this will bring the particles' opacity back up.

Set the Shadow Strength to 5 - this way we'll get stronger and darker shadows.

Now let's add some more V-Ray Lights.

Select the V-Ray Ambient Light we have already created and disable it.

Create a V-Ray Sphere Light and position it at X: 300, Y: -266, Z: 530. Set its Multiplier to 900.

Create another V-Ray Sphere Light and position it at X: -460, Y: 230, Z: 530. Set its Multiplier to 200.

And this is how the final result looks like.

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In addition, you can enable the Exposure and Curve options from the VFB Settings to make the render even more interesting.

Open the Exposure options and set the Exposure to 0.2.

Experiment with the Curve to achieve the desired look.

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And here is the final rendered result.

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Space Tools

Versions Compared

Old Version 10

New Version 11

Key

Units Setup

Units Setup

Scene Layout

Phoenix Simulator Setup

Phoenix Simulator Setup

Particle Shading

Particle Shading By Speed