Hey!
I’m about to ask my company to buy either of these and I would really appreciate if you could give me some feedback on them. I’m really new to fluid and smoke sims so my knowledge is limited to what I’ve heard, seen and read. I’d love to hear what you guys are using or prefer to use when it comes to rendering for realtime use or compositing use.
Which one is easier to use? (Good UI, expected results etc)
Which one have more tutorials available to it? (I’ve seen more FumeFX tuts than Phoenix but I could be wrong.)
Rendering outputs? (Transparency, heat, vectors, normals etc)
Being really new to fluid sims I’d love to hear what thoughts you guys have on this!
Please help!
Both are good but I prefer FumeFX. I think mostly because back in the days FumeFX fire&smoke solver was superior to Pheonix (it gave more natural results). I’m not sure if this is still the case. PheonixFD has one advantage over FumeFX tho - it can simulate and render fluids whereas FumeFX can “only” do fire/smoke. So if you don’t have enough money for Realflow or any other fluid simulation package and you do need fluids in your game, just buy Pheonix. Otherwise, I would go with Fumefx (also, FumeFX has much more tutorials available online).
Thanks @michalpiatek!
I think Phoenix had a pretty good update recently though.
Would you happen to know if the pipeline differs between Fume and Phoenix to get usable outputs for games? Can I render out the same type of data from Phoenix as I would be able to with Fume?
Well, both FumeFX and PheonixFD do render textures so the answer is: yes But I’m curious why you just give Maya Fluid a try? It’s a built-in fluids solver. You can simulate water, smoke, fire, explosions etc in it. No need to pay additional money if you already have Maya. It’s not as good as Fume or Pheonix but it should get the job done. I’ve seen some really good textures made with it.
Phoenix required a vray licence in order to render fluids, and that was much more expensive than Phoenix itself.
Maya has bifrost and fluids and they are both great for getting sprites for a game engine. Maya knowledge is much more portable from company to company, because most companies already have licenses, and you won’t need to ask for it.
3ds Max’s latest update has bifrost… I did a quick try and I love using it within max, but I wouldn’t get too tied into something that is not fully incorporated into the engine. (Bifrost on maya went through a lot of changes that made going back to old files kinda sketchy)
I’ve used fume fx, and phoenix, but I use maya fluids and bifrost now.
But I’m curious why you just give Maya Fluid a try? It’s a built-in fluids solver. You can simulate water, smoke, fire, explosions etc in it. No need to pay additional money if you already have Maya. It’s not as good as Fume or Pheonix but it should get the job done. I’ve seen some really good textures made with it.