PHENIX – a GPU-native particle system for Blender
Issanou updated his Blender particle system to run entirely on the GPU.
I just released the GPU version of Phenix: the result of a full year of dedicated development to finally complete the vision I had for this tool. The entire particle simulation now runs on your graphics card, not the CPU — so you play, scrub and tweak heavy particle counts in real time, right in the viewport, instead of waiting on slow CPU bakes.
What Phenix can do today
- Full GPU simulation — emission, forces, fluids, collisions, constraints and custom procedures, all on the GPU (Vulkan / Metal / DX12).
- A new constraint solver for stable cloth, hair, ropes, jelly and chains, with ready-made material presets (Silk, Denim, Hair, Chain, Jelly…).
- Custom Shader node — write your own WGSL GPU code right inside Blender.
- Built-in debug tools — GPU memory & performance profilers, a 3D plotter and a spreadsheet, all live in the node editor.
- Export to USD or glTF for your pipeline.
- AI-ready — Phenix can talk to AI assistants to help you learn and build setups faster.
Where it’s heading
Next, I want to bring Phenix to the web — a place to share node graphs the way ShaderToy shares shaders, and run premium particle effects right in the browser (a Phenix graph already compiles to shaders). More performance, more realism.
Phenix v5 is available now as a release candidate on Superhive (formerly Blender Market). Documentation: ik3d.fr/docs/phenix
I’d love your feedback — this RC is in your hands before the stable cut.
— Issa
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