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We start off the tutorial by creating a poly plane and using the Large Scale Smoke preset to generate the Phoenix Source and Simulator. The funnel shape of the dust devil is achieved through the use of an animated 3ds Max Vortex force. Phoenix Turbulence force is used to further break-up the smoke shape. Finally, we tweak the Volumetric Rendering parameters of the Phoenix Simulator for a final render. A Time-Bend Resimulation guide is also provided as an extra option at the end of this tutorial.

The simulation requires Phoenix 4.41 Official Release and V-Ray 5 Update 2.3 Official Release for 3ds Max 2018 or later. You can download official Phoenix and V-Ray from https://download.chaos.com. If you notice a major difference between the results shown here and the behavior of your setup, please reach us using the Support Form.

The Download button below provides you with an archive containing the start and end scenes.

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.

The dust devil effect we're creating is about 1 meter in height so we choose to view the units as Centimeters.

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.