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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 4.30 Official Release and V-Ray 5 Official Release for 3ds Max 2017 at least. 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.

Create Helpers → Phoenix FD → PHXTurbulence.

Position to XYZ: [ -2.5, 9.0, 14.0 ].

Set the Strength to 350.0 and the Size to 30.0 m.

Reduce the Fractal Depth to 1.

Set the Decay type to Inv square.

Then go to the Fire/Smoke Simulator and run the simulation again.