Finally I got this Almost the same settings RRay mentioned. Density 5000, but 0.005 for shadows, to allow translucency effect. About 3 minutes for rendering on Quad Core, AA 0-1, contrast 0.1. It seems that volume rendering don't need some heavy AA filtering, as it is already sampled by "self". Probably 0-0 might be enough. Could be problem if there is some hard surface in mix, anyway.

I cant get a single result off this shader...every render i do is just horrible. can someone share some settings or some basic scene? That would be awesome..

great render Mathaeus..

Hey thanks for posting tests and comments!
Here's a scn file: (needs color management to be turned on in Prefs->Display)

About the cloud billowing effect, no idea if this is actually related, but I noticed in the recent Übertage video (bottom one on this page) Holger was talking about per obj spherical coordinates in his new fractal4D shader (available for free in is BA_essentials package). It might prevent the swimming effect.

Nice test Mathaeus, an interesting looks, very coral or organic. is that a single particle at the end of each strand? maybe you should try the new spherical coordinate distortion as well to break up the uniformity of each particle a little.



Rray, yes! that is what I tested with the 2 renders I posted on page 1 of this thread. this was immediately after watching Holger's video, I jumped on it because that is what was needed for a pyroclastic primitive, so I think that is what the displacement was used in thoses renders, the new fractal4D shader and what I assume to be spherical coordinate distortion of each particle . Again, looks great as a still, even though it rendered a long time, but as a sequence it was dreadful with colors and particles popping all over the place. I have not tried with 5000 density though! It always seems to fail when transparencies and low total cell counts across the volume are involved, and unfortunately with clouds, transparencies are pretty essential.

Yes that shader needs most settings at max for something that's ok for animation.
Increasing the density makes this shader render faster luckily. Doesn't help with fluffy clouds though.

I still don't understand the whole power lookup thing. It looks like something's travedling along a magnetic field
Have to look a bit more into that couldn't even find a way to control the local texture coordinates per particle, that would be useful for a start.

Here's animation test with the "billowing" preset from the particle shaper:

It's Andorian anemone, everyone in universe knows it's growing exactly in this way . No ICE strands, just evenly distributed particles - without some especial reason for that. I've tried to get a feasible render time, mainly.

As an ICE addict, I'd always try to do as much possible with ICE, of course. BA volume works nicely with huge counts of particles, also it seems to be much faster without any texture - and preview is (almost) in real time.

But this pyroclastic primitive thing, looks like some already "artistic" implementation, and people somehow likes to be happy with just one primitive. Anyway, would be nice to play with all that stuff, one day.

@ Mathaeus Andovian? wasnt that the blue guy with tentatcles from Enterprise?

@ rray I wanted to join the 5000 density club as well. here is a render of simple particle sim with an attempt at using biult in particle volume shader for distorting spherically a noise on each particle, in this case ba_fractal4d , this is 5k density, cell size of 1, High ambient occlusion 5.0 and low 0.05 shadows. Rendered with physical sky & FG. took a long time , over 20 mintes, sorry didnt have exact time. also tweaked it a bit in gimp afterwards as it was very noisy

anyways heres a scene(2012 Sp1) attached to play with if anyone can handle 20+ minutes a frame

Well, my "particles only" idea seems to be wrong - cells in lookup table needs to be smaller than one particle. Huge count of small particles wants a huge lookup table too.
Definitively there are a lot of parameters, able to slowdown the render. Lookup table, marching settings, evaluated dept, alpha, ray-marching quality...
Nothing new when it comes to ray-marching render, anyway.

This one is rendered with a help of nodes from BA plugin - exactly, there is a 'mesh distance' node which makes a smooth falloff, when volume shader is applied to mesh. Theoretically, something similar could be done by filling a mesh volume by particles - but I'm not sure the result is same...
No any particle for this, just a mix of animated fractals. Render time for one frame is about 40 seconds on quad core, using 3 lights with shadows, AA 0-0.
There is small camera movement too. Beside default settings, a bit of 'color absorption', stronger shadow density.

FLV with animation

some time ago I tested a demo of Slipstream... I cached some stuff I did but never had the time to render it... now with thread I finally found the motivation for it.

I like the sim itself, and there was a lot of artist friendliness since you can use ICE to do anything with the particles. But doesnt matter how many particles put in (and specially with thick volumes) you can always see the individual particles... I feel like when fluids are rendered out of a voxel grid, one does get a better result.
I tried messing with the shader to change that, but no good results. I though Metaball behaivour could do the trick, but it cant...
Any thoughts?

Hi Gustavoeb,

in other softwares for rendering something like that it would be either Krakatoa and you would increase the point count to be massive and the point size to be tiny.. or yes, some fluid / cell grid volume solver would be more desirable. it is certainly possible to get some decent look though with much less particles using the built in BA particle volume shader. open up the example scene in samples/rendering/ ICE firedragon , change the gradient that drives it to something like what you have and render.