www.si-community.com

Hi! Here's a test rendering with Holger's Particle_volume shader. No particles/simulation involved, just meshes.. all internal shapes are coming from the fractal_scalar/cell_scalar shader (which are also by Holger)

This one is with IBL lighting Render time for this (1400px*1000px) was ~1 hour

And some old tests with the same shader using high densities/3-point lighting. A render tree is shown in the bottom picture. Posted them on a xsiforum.de a while ago (Just checked.. 3 years ago )

Interesting. Very different, looks like cotton in some cases. I'm sure glad to see this is developing nicely. I'm curious to see how good clouds, smoke and fire can be done with it.

this are some interesting renders!
how fast/slow are they?

Just curious, the shader you use is the one integrated with Softimage 2012?
Or is it something from the commercial set Holger Schönberger sells or even one of his betas?

ActionArt: Would be interested if that looks good too. Maybe I'll do some more testing. The settings that produce the most realistic result are: Global density 5000, ambient lighting OFF, "high" marching settings, "full light raytrace" and cell size ca. 0.05-0.1... and a high contrast texture for density... I'll upload a scene in a few days.

Gustavo: With a more up-to-date PC the smaller ones would probably render in 10-30 minutes with 3-point lighting. These were done with a slow Core2 duo and took about 1 hour. Using IBL mode would roughly double that time.

HB: It's the built-in "Particle Volume Cloud" shader. For IBL, I used the ctrl_ghost_settings shader.

All renders with that shader are very welcome in this thread btw

Hello, is this shader available somewhere? Is it free? id like to run some tests.

Yes it's free it's the built-in "Particle Volume Cloud" shader

(Please post your test results here)

Space nebula (now with added lensflare!)

What a strange material you got there. I could easily see this as a background plate for a stopmotion remake of Carl Sagan's Cosmos series

Great tests there RRay! here is some of my recentish BA particle volume shader tests. with particles and not geometry and trying out the density distortion feature which had not tried before. was trying for a cloudy type look but ended up with Fur!





and the inverse density texture of the same pcloud



In the past Ive often reached a desired result with the Volume shader, but only ever on a still frame, it seems to fail when rendered over time, so for me it is mostly unusable for animated sequences. That and the huge render times when the cell subdivision is low, which you need to get less 'popping' over frames. eg here is a few tests of the above cloud rendered over time with some density and scattering paremeters animated.

Hm i never been successfull with this shader, lots of parameters and is not easy at all to setup, wish this would be a little smoother to use.
Interesting images anyway

never had the oportunity/need to use this shader. I also thought it was a little daughnting, not so much when you get down to business with it. Wish only I could know what settings would get more phisically-based vs hacky results... as this shader seems to have a lot of options and optimizations. here is a lame first image

ps: thank you for motivating us on getting our feets wet

here's my attempt

I've tried to avoid textures at all, it seems to be hard to avoid repeatable pattern, also all these fractals aren't so fast to render, nicely to say. So, entire shape is created by ICE.
Render settings are almost default, except high quality for ray-marching ( but adaptive subdivision was disabled, set to zero), full light trace. About minute on AA 0-0, on Quad Core.

Here is simple ICE compound. Basically, it creates clouds in three steps. First step is a basic emission of just few points ( here's about 20).
Then compound emits a huge number of clones, distributing them in small tetrahedron between closest points - that's what you see in third pic. Last step is turbulence over all. Usage:
1: create empty point cloud
2: create no-simulated ICE tree
3: connect null or implicit cube ( implicit cube should be 1 unit size, for better preview). Scaling of null or cube, determines a 'bounding box' of cloud. Higher number of 'first points'
means more detailed base structure, turbulence is for small details. Compound is able to set particle color by relative particle position into tetrahedron, let's say, more transparent at border.

Wow some of these renders look very cool guys!

I have the same problem as Tekano, I can get good results for stills with this shader but not in animated scenes. Don't know if I'm just missing something obvious.
I currently working on a project where I'm trying to create Evaporating clouds and boiling clouds. Does anyone have some ideas for me on how the achieve this effect?

Thanks for the compound Mathaeus I'll see if I can get anything going that way.

Zybrand wrote:Wow some of these renders look very cool guys!
Thanks for the compound Mathaeus I'll see if I can get anything going that way.

well, with this one, hardly you'll get anything smarter than usual "swimming" through the turbulence noise. As some rule of the thumb: take look at fluid flow in real world, then, if there is anything that goes backward to original flow, there is a time for some plugin, emFluid, Fury or maybe Curl Noise.
Motion should be first, when you get the motion, you choose how to shade this.

Anyway, I hope I'll find some old sequences rendered with this shader, and post them.

edit: I meant Slipstream instead of Fury, didn't know which one is simulator

Zybrand wrote:Wow some of these renders look very cool guys!

I have the same problem as Tekano, I can get good results for stills with this shader but not in animated scenes. Don't know if I'm just missing something obvious.
I currently working on a project where I'm trying to create Evaporating clouds and boiling clouds. Does anyone have some ideas for me on how the achieve this effect?

Thanks for the compound Mathaeus I'll see if I can get anything going that way.

yup, want that evaporating / bioling effect too, but it isn't easy! heres something that I've been trying to work out but failed to finish from lack of time & knowledge of the maths involved, from this thread here http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/to ... ge__st__12 . here is as far as I got , rendered with Exocortex Fury though not the volume shader