Phoenix FD 2.2 : simple fire tutorial

[ #3dsMax #Simulation #VFX ] CG Record Author: Hammer Chen has created an Phoenix FD 2.2 for 3ds Max tutorial about how to make a simple fi...

[ #3dsMax #Simulation #VFX ]CG Record Author: Hammer Chen has created an Phoenix FD 2.2 for 3ds Max tutorial about how to make a simple fire simulation. Check it out! and you can also check this tutorial by Chinese version here

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Introduction

Hi everyone, Phoenix FD 2.2 is a very sophisticated and powerful fluid-dynamic plugin for both Maya and 3ds max. In this tutorial, I am going to share you my experiences on how to create a basic fire with PhoenixFD in 3ds max. The general workflow is using particle are source, with proper dynamics settings and a good exposure control, making a basic fire is easier than you might think.

Overview

The scene setup are very simple. One PHXSimulator as fluid-dynamic simulation grid. One PHXSource helper object, and we use Particle Flow as the fire source.

Preparation

Fluid dynamic are always scale-sensitive. Make sure you are not creating a fire in a ridiculous scene scale (ie: 100 km x 100 km). If you want to have exactly results of this tutorial, you can follow my settings, or you can just download my final 3ds Max scene file :D

Particle Flow

Please follow my screenshots to create a Particle Flow, we will use it as source of fire later on. The basic idea is creating little spheres shooting toward centre of the particle emitter, mimicking the motion of fuel of a campfire.

Go to Create Panel / Helpers / PhoenixFD and create a PHXSorce helper in your scene. Add PF Source -> Event 002 to it. Follow my highlighted settings.

Parameters for fluid dynamic 

Create a PhoenixFD simulation grid -- PHXSimulator
Go to the Create Panel > Geometry, click on the Drop-down menu and select PhoenixFD

Click on the PHXSimulator button and generate the container in the viewport by clicking and dragging. The PHXSimulator grid must cover the region of your fire. By default PhoenixFD simulation grid will include all object and PHXSource in your scene, so you don't have to mannually include them.

All important parameters and value are highlighted in the screenshot above. Cooling are similar or equivalent of "Burn Rate" in FumeFX. You need to give it some value otherwise temperature of your  PhoenixFD container will goes up too quickly. For conservation, you can choose "Symmetric" or "Smooth" method. As for Material Transfer, I use "Multi-Pass" method because it produce more details during simulation. The default Gravity setting tend to stretch out my fire, so I lower it down to 0.5. Enable burning is a nice feature and will give more turbulence and realism to your fire.

Default preview | Adjusted viewport preview | final rendering

The default value for previewing your fire in viewport are not accurate, as you can see the left image are not matching with final rendering image (on the right). In your PHXSimulaor / Preview, you can change the value of "As Fire" from 1000.0 to 1400.0, and this can provides you a accurate visual representation of your fire in the viewport (image in the middle)

Colors and rendering

The default settings of "Colors and Transparency" in PhoenixFD are too rough and unrealistic (See image above) . And I found it is difficult to get a right settings of colour and Intensity curve. Fortunately, PhoenixFD provides you options to load "Rendering Settings" from other scene file. You can open the "burning plane.max" sample scene file from your PhoenixFD installation, and save it's rendering settings as *.apr file. Or you can click HERE to download my setting. Then load up the setting in your current scene.

Once load up the *.apr file, you will have color gradient and curve above and ready to render.

To speed up your rendering, you can increase the Step(%) value. I found value 15 is a right balance between speed and quality.

Exposure Control

The default shading setting of PhoenixFD are tend to be overexposure and you will lose lots of details in rendering. You can simply go to Environment and Effects/ Add Logarithmic exposure control to fix the problem. Hit the Render Preview button and adjust the Contrast value until you get a good results. You can also use the Color Correction to adjust color of your fire.

Conclusion

This is my final rendering results.  I hope you enjoy this tutorial and start creating your own fire with PhoenixFD :)
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