Support for PhoenixFD

Do you plan on adding support for PhoenixFD? would be great to use stoke with liquid simulation too inside of max! моля!

I tried to reproduce the fumefx tutorial with phoenix FD but no particles are generated. When I select the teapot, I press simulate and I get a system exception.

Currently PhoenixFD is only supported as particle source, not a field source.
Mostly because we added support for Phoenix particles to Krakatoa and inherited the code in Stoke.
I will make sure the wish is logged, but I cannot answer the “when” question yet, have to see what the developer thinks…
Also, this discussion belongs in the Beta forum.

Ok thanks!

Sorry I didn’t notice the beta forum. Will post there next time.

Hi Bobo, I just bought StokeMX 2.0 and I just remembered that question here but I didn’t remember the answer… I was hoping to be able to drive stoke by a liquid field from PhoenixFD. Is the wish logged finally? And did you have time to ask the developer what he thinks? thanks

According to the developer, PhoenixFD should be a valid Field source now. In theory, anywhere you can plug in a FumeFX sim, a PhoenixFD should work too.
That being said, since I don’t have PhFD myself (or any knowledge how to use it), I cannot test it and cannot confirm it.

If it does not work directly in the Stoke Particle Simulator object, try making a Stoke Field Magma object, create an InputField operator and try to pick the PhoenixFD as the source. Do you get any channels as sockets? If you do, you can write them to outputs like Velocity etc. and pick the Field Magma object as the velocity source of the Stoke Particle Sim.

If these approaches do not work, please let me know!

When I select the phoenixFD simulator and hit “Create a STOKE Particle Reflow Simulator” and I click in the viewport to place it, I get this error: “–Runtime error: Couldn’t find a previously defined paramblock in PHXSimulator.” and the maxscript StokeUI.ms is opened. Same if I try to pick it in the velocity filed source list of a previoulsly created stoke object.

If I create a magma InputField and I click on “Pick Field Object…” I can’t choose the PhoenixFD simulator.

I can pick the phoenixFD simulator as a distribution source. And then I see Velocity, ID, Age, LifeSpan and normalized Age.

I have the latest PhoenixFD 2.2.0 and max 2015. Stoke 2.0.15.56383 Krakatoa 2.3.1.56082.

Thanks, I will report this.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

thanks to you Bobo!

I was able to use a phoenixFD sim as a velocity source for Stoke! I just needed a bug fix from Chaosgroup and a few workarounds…

first there was a bug in the official release of PhoenixFD 2.2 preventing the export of prt particles in max 2015. they did the bug fix today and so I had to install today’s phoenixFD nightly revision (phoenixFD_adv_22000_max2015_vray_30_x64_24819)

Then I had to make my PhoenixFD source create particles (called drag particles), then export them to prt sequence. I tried to load it with the phoenix prt object but then I could pick the prt object as a velocity source but when I hit simulate it didn’t start with a message stating there was no valid velocity source. Then I tried creating a prt object with Krakatoa and it almost work but there was an error saying the file 0.prt did not exist (even if I put simulate from to 1). That’s because phoenixFD prt sequences start at 1.prt. So I copied the first prt file and renamed it to 0.prt and then it worked!!!

This means I can now create advanced liquid simulations directly into 3ds Max 2015, tweak them with stoke and mesh them with frost!

To avoid the error about 0.prt not existing, I can clip the range from 1 in the krakatoa prt loader instead so I don’t have to manually modify my prt files!

That’s what the custom range is for :slight_smile:
Glad to hear it is working!

I see that phoenixFD can be affected also by stoke field forces! I just did the first part of the tut: thinkboxsoftware.com/stk-fie … umefx-sim/

Next step I will try if I can make it follow the sine wave exactly by exporting a f3d field.

The next step does not work. It seems PhoenixFD can’t load the velocity from the f3d file sequnece exported by stoke. i load it and i don’t see anything in my cache imported channel list.

I also tried to do that step with fumeFX 2.1c but it doesn’t work neither. I guess you communicated with Kresimir Tkalcec to ask him to adjust his code to support stoke field? I will contact chaosgroup to see if they can do the same. Since my next projects involve mostly liquid, I was not planning to upgrade my fumeFX soon.

I contacted Chaosgroup support about that and they said the channels were not named the same and they will fix this.

forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread … om-stokeMX

Chaosgroup told me it’s now fixed in the latest nightly:
forums.chaosgroup.com/showthread … om-stokeMX

The latest nightly of Phoenix and the latest stoke don’t work together.

We’re currently working around this bug by using the phoenixTexmap inside a StokeFieldMagma texmap lookup.

It would be nice if this worked properly.

Thank you for your report! These issues should be fixed in Stoke 2.1. Please contact our sales department to get this update.

Ok great thanks Paul.