This page provides information on the PhoenixFDGridTex.
Page Contents
Overview
PhoenixFD GridTex can be found in the Material Editor. It loads and exposes a grid channel of a selected Phoenix simulator object as a procedural texture. Using this component, you can shade the content in ways that the plain Phoenix shader does not support.
The main application of this texture is for shading the meshed of liquids which were simulated using an RGB color grid channel. The technique of mixing colored liquids and rendering their colors is available in the Paints Quick Setup preset.
You could also use it as a blending mask, as described in the Milk & Chocolate tutorial for Phoenix FD.
Another use of the PhoenixFD GridTex is for rendering via an external volumetric Shader such as the V-Ray Environment Fog. See the External Volumetric Shader section on the Tips and Tricks page for more information.
Parameters
Source node | node – Allows you to specify a Fire Smoke Simulator | FireSmokeSim or a Liquid Simulator | LiquidSim. Note that if the Grid Texture is plugged into a Particle Shader's Color Map slot and the Grid Texture's Coordinate Source is Object XYZ, then Liquid Simulator should also be enabled and connected in the Particle Shader, otherwise the Grid Texture wouldn't know how to get mapped because the Particle Shader has no grid box like the Phoenix Simulator.
Channel | channel – Specifies the channel retrieved from the Phoenix node:
Rendering Fire Color - Returns the resulting color for the Fire, as specified in the Rendering → Volumetric Options → Fire roll-out of the Phoenix FD Simulator.
Rendering Smoke Color - Returns the resulting color for the Smoke, as specified in the Rendering → Volumetric Options → Smoke roll-out of the Phoenix FD Simulator.
Rendering Smoke Opacity - Returns the resulting Smoke Opacity, as specified in the Rendering → Volumetric Options → Smoke Opacity roll-out of the Phoenix FD Simulator.
Channel Speed - Returns the contents of the Speed simulation channel. Speed Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
Channel Velocity - Returns the contents of the Velocity simulation channel. Velocity Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
Channel RGB - Returns the contents of the RGB simulation channel. RGB Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
Channel Temperature/Liquid - Returns the contents of the Temperature/Liquid simulation channel. Temper./Liquid Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
Channel Smoke - Returns the contents of the Smoke simulation channel. Smoke Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
Channel Fuel - Returns the contents of the Fuel simulation channel. Fuel Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work
Channel Viscosity - Returns the contents of the Viscosity simulation channel. Viscosity Grid Channel Output has to be enabled on the Phoenix FD Simulator for this to work.
When doing Liquid simulations, Phoenix FD populates the grid Velocity channel only for cells / voxels inside the liquid volume - empty (air) voxels contain no velocity information. To generate velocity information for the empty voxels, enable Simulate Air Effects under the Dynamics roll-out of the simulator and re-run the simulation.
Tiling mode | tiling – Specifies how to handle sampling outside of the box.
Single – The texture will not be tiled and the region outside the box will be empty.
Single Clamped – The texture will not be tiled but its edges will be clamped, thus "stretching" the edge pixels.
Wrap – Tiles the texture by repeating it infinitely.
Mirror – Tiles the texture by flipping it back and forth infinitely.
Sampler | sampler_type – Determines the blending method between adjacent grid cells.
Box – Displays cells as cubes. There is no blending between neighbor cells. This is the fastest mode.
Linear – Linear blending occurs between neighbor cells to smooth out the fluid's look. Sometimes this mode may unveil the grid-like structure of the fluid. Up to 20-30% faster than the Spherical option.
Spherical – Uses special weight-based sampling for the smoothest looking fluid. With increasing resolution, the visual advantage between this method and the Linear method becomes less noticeable.
Skip the Displacement | skip_fine_displ – When enabled, the content is sampled without adding Phoenix displacement.