V-Ray Standalone is full-featured and programmable command-line renderer that allows you to render scenes exported in V-Ray’s native .vrscene file format.
V-Ray Standalone supports V-Ray's complete feature set including CPU & GPU rendering capabilities.
When rendering Phoenix volumes ( such as smoke and fire, Phoenix meshed liquids or Phoenix particle systems such as Foam, Splash and Mist or any of the Phoenix textures) on a machine that will be used only as a render node, but will not simulate - Phoenix will not require a license for rendering - you just need Phoenix installed on the machine which will render the data.
For more information on installing V-Ray Standalone, see the V-Ray Standalone Installation Guide page.
Installing Chaos Phoenix on a machine which will be used only as a render node, where there is no DCC application installed (such as 3ds Max) is straightforward - just follow the steps in the Phoenix Setup and Installation page.
Alternatively after running the Phoenix installer, you could append the C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Phoenix FD\3ds Max 20xx for x64\vray6plugins path to the VRAY_PLUGINS environment variable, but please note that this would affect all installed V-Ray Standalone versions.
Another alternative and the official way to do this for V-Ray versions older than V-Ray 6 would be to copy all files from C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\Phoenix FD\3ds Max 20xx for x64\vray5plugins to the V-Ray Standalone plugins folder C:\Program Files\Chaos Group\V-Ray\Standalone for x64\bin\plugins
If the Phoenix fluid is missing when rendering with V-Ray Standalone or you get any errors in the console, please try the following: