Page History

Requires Phoenix 3.11.00 Official Release and V-Ray Next Official Release for 3ds Max 2015 or newer. 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 instructions on this page guide you through the process of creating a Fire Tornado effect using Phoenix and 3ds Max.

The Download button below provides you with an archive containing the end scene, as well as a Phoenix Render Settings preset that you can use to quickly set up the volumetric shading options for the fire tornado simulation.

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 fire tornado effect we're creating is about 6 meters 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.