Create Flame Effects with Phoenix FD for 3ds Max Tutorial
As the leading cloud rendering service provider and the best render farm, Fox Renderfarm is going to show you how to create flame effects with Phoenix FD for 3ds Max.
Phoenix FD 2.2 is a very complex and powerful fluid simulation plug-in that supports Maya and 3ds Max. This article will share how to make a basic flame effect. The workflow is basically using Particle Flow as the flame source, adjusting other dynamic parameters and good exposure conditions. Phoenix FD can also easily make realistic flame effects.
Overall settings
The entire scene setup is very simple. We need a PHXSimulator as the simulation area, a PHXSource helper, and a Particle Flow as the source of the flame.
Ready to work
The units of the scene have a great influence on the fluid simulation! Please make sure your flame is not simulated in an unreasonable range (for example, 100 km x 100 km). If you want to get exactly the same results as this tutorial, I suggest you use my scene unit settings or you can download this tutorial The final completion file.
Particle Flow
Please follow the screenshot below to create Particle Flow and use particles as the source of the flame. The basic concept is to launch many small ball particles to move to the center to simulate the dynamic effects of a fire.
Go to Create Panel / Helpers / PhoenixFD and drag out in the scene to generate PHXSorce helper. Add Particle Flow to it: PF Source-> Event 002 (as the source of the flame). Please follow the setting parameters of the fluorescent sign in the screen. Setting the Velocity value to 4.0 will make the flame have a spray effect, which can be weakened a little according to your needs.
Parameters of fluid dynamics
Create PhoenixFD simulation grid-PHXSimulator
Go to Create Panel> Geometry and click the drop-down menu. Select PhoenixFD.
Press the PHXSimulator button to drag the simulation out of the scene. This PHXSimulator grid must cover your flames. PhoenixFD's preset will take all objects and PHXSource into consideration, so you don't need to manually add objects to participate in simulation like FumeFX.
The important parameters are marked with a highlighter: The Cooling function is equivalent to the Burn Rate of FumeFX. It is necessary to increase this parameter slightly, otherwise, it is easy to heat up to overheat. Regarding energy conservation, you can use "Symmetric" or "Smooth". For Material Transfer, I use the "Multi-Pass" method, which can produce more details. The default Gravity makes it easy to pull the flame too long, so I lowered the gravity to 0.5. Enable burning can make the overall simulation more realistic.
Preset preview effect | Adjusted preview effect | Final rendering effect
The preset preview parameters are not accurate enough (left picture) and the final calculation result (right picture) is very different! in In PHXSimulaor / Preview you can adjust "As Fire" from 1000.0 to 1400.0 to make the preview closer. The final flame effect (middle).
Colors and rendering
The results of the "Colors and Transparency" preset by PhoenixFD are rough and unrealistic (above). I find it very unintuitive to adjust the colors and curves, and it is difficult to call up the desired effect (compared to FumeFX). Fortunately, PhoenixFD provides a method to load the settings of other scenes. You can open the sample file "burning plane.max" attached to the software after installation and save its "Rendering Settings" as a * .apr file, and then save it in the current The scene is loaded directly with good color and curve settings.
After loading the appropriate * .apr file, you can directly use the gradient and curve as shown above, which is suitable for flame calculation.
In order to speed up the calculation, you can increase the Step (%) parameter to 15 to achieve a good balance between speed and quality.
Exposure control
PhoenixFD's preset rendering effects are prone to overexposure (possibly due to the relationship between physical precision attributes). This will cause details to be lost. You can apply Environment and Effects / Add Logarithmic exposure control to solve the problem of overexposure. Press the Render Preview button and adjust the Contrast and Brightness values until you are satisfied. You can also use the Color Correction function to correct the color temperature problem.
Final effect
The above is the final animation effect of this tutorial brought to you by Fox Renderfarm. We hope you enjoy this teaching, so start to make your flame special effects with Phoenix FD! But if you need a good render farm and cloud rendering services, you can try Fox Renderfarm which offers a free $25 trial!
