The parameters in this rollout control the representation of the fluid’s caches in the viewport, showing a preview of what the fluid is doing. These preview controls can give you a sense of what is going on with your simulation, and whether it needs tweaking, before you decide to start rendering.
The Viewport Preview is almost completely independent from rendering, and allows you to control the visibility of specific Grid Channels and Particle Types, in order to customize the preview. Depending on the Read Cache for Preview mode used, all enabled parameters in this rollout will be displayed in the viewport, provided that the cache file’s content is within a parameter’s specified value range for that frame. |
Liquid simulations are displayed using the Particle Preview by default. You can also enable the Show Mesh mode, to override the Particle Preview and show the liquid as a mesh.
The Particle Preview section lets you control the visibility of different Particle Types, and manage their preview color. For example, you could preview only the Splash and Foam particles.
There is also a Voxel Preview, which uses 2D triangles to emulate the shape of the volume. You can choose to preview specific Grid Channels, such as Viscosity and RGB, or even preview the Liquid Channel as voxels if you plan to render the liquid particles using a volumetric render mode, for example.
In addition, you can preview the simulation’s Velocity, to see how Phoenix forces or standard 3ds Max forces affect the simulation.
Keep in mind that the Voxel and Particle preview parameters are all independent from rendering. They do not affect the render settings. |
UI Path: ||Select Liquid Simulator object|| > Modify panel > Preview rollout |
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The parameters here control the visualization of Particle Types generated by the Simulator. Phoenix can only preview the Particle Types present in the cache file for the current frame. |
You can specify a Particle Channel to use as a basis for adjusting the particle preview color, using the Scale Color By option. For example, you could set the Scale Color By option to the Speed particle channel, so that the faster the particles move, the whiter they appear in the preview. You can find more info on Particle Channels from the Particle Channel Ranges page. |
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The Voxel Preview displays the Grid Channel content of each cell. Phoenix can only preview the channels present in the cache file for the current frame. All enabled channels are drawn if their content is between the corresponding thresholds. To see the list of available channels and their ranges for an input sim cache, go to the Cache File Content section of the Simulation rollout. You can also find more info on the Grid Channel Ranges page. |
Note that you can also specify the Voxel Preview value range for any Grid Channel, if you disable the Auto Range option. For example, you could enable only Viscosity, and specify the range to be between 0.5 and 1.0, so that you can see where the liquid is more viscous. Grid Viscosity Channel values that are below 0.5, or above 1.0, would not appear in the preview at all. |
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The Slice preview displays only a single slice of voxels which can be convenient for debugging and fine-tuning a simulation. |
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