Rendering

General

Parameters

General

The Rendering rollout holds the parameters for the Phoenix shader

Parameters

Jittering (MXS: jitter) - When rendering a volumetric object some artifacts can occur due to the regular advancing step. To prevent this a small random offset can be added using this checkbox.

Step (MXS: rendstep) - The advancing step

Soft boundaries (MXS: softb) - The Phoenix shader has the capability to make the content near to the grid's boundaries more transparent, suppressing in this way the undesired visualization of the edges. This parameter controls how far from the boundaries to start the process.

Sampler type (MXS: sampler) - The sampling method determines how to calculate the values in the points with non-integer coordinates

• Trunc - direct use of the cell's content
• Linear - linear interpolation between nearest 8 cells (bounding box)
• Spherical - special weight based sampling

Gizmo (MXS:usegizmo,gizmo) - Specify a geometry that will clip the rendering.

Invert gizmo (MXS:invgizmo) - Enable the shading only outside the gizmo geometry. This is not the same as a gizmo with inverted geometry, because any rays that do not intersect the gizmo will be shaded, too.

Effects channel - Used for some effects like solid rendering, heat haze, displacement etc.

Source channel (MXS: sarg) - the source channel passed to the shader

• Temperature
  
• Smoke
• Velocity
• Texture
• Fuel
  

 

Texture (MXS: stex) - If the source channel is set to Texture, this slot specifies the texture

Surface level (MXS: surflevel, surflevel_m, surflevel_s, surflevel_t, surflevel_v) - the cut off level

Invert normal (MXS: solidbelow) - when set, the normal points to the bigger values of the channel.

Displacement section

Enable (MXS: displacement, displmul) – Enables the displacement and allows you to specify a multiplier.

 

Surface driven (MXS: displ2d) - switches between volumetric and surface driven displacement. More information can be found here.

Map1, 2, 3 (MXS: displ0, displ1, displ2) – Three maps for the displacement stages. The last one (at the bottom) is the fine displacement.

V-Ray group - This group affects the rendering under V-Ray

Geometry mode (MXS: geommode) – when checked the object is rendered like a geometry, not like an atmosphere. This enables some techniques unavailable in atmosphere mode.

Heat haze (MXS: heathaze, hhfactor) – Traces the ray changing its direction according to the gradient of the effects channel. Value=1 corresponds approximately to the normal heat haze in air caused by the temperature. If smoke or other channel is selected as source, you have to use bigger multiplier to achieve visible result.

Solid mode (MXS: rendsolid) – Enables solid mode

Colors and transparency - This button shows a floating dialog containing three parameter blocks - Emission, Diffuse color and Transparency. In the Phoenix's UI specific controls are used to represent the diagrams and gradients. The active commands are

• Double click – Creates a new point or changes existing one
• Mouse drag over a point drags the selection
• Middle button mouse drag over the background drags the visible area (for the diagrams only: near to the down/left border will scale in the corresponding direction)
• If the Ctrl key is pressed all the points are moved/scaled in the opposite direction
• Mouse wheel – Transforms the visible area keeping the cursor's point at the same place. If the Ctrl key is pressed, all the points are moved/scaled in the opposite direction
• Right mouse click – Brings out a drop down menu