Some clouds

[jstrob]

Oh yes! It's far better with the "based on smoke" with the curve! Thanks for the tip!

like this:

[Paul Oblomov]

BTW. You can try using sphere interpolation, not default box (why on earth it is set to default), to get rid of boxy artefacts (previous pix).

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ummm, box is not the default - linear is. It's faster than spherical and with a production-scale resolution the difference in detail is not noticable anymore. Spherical should be used for low-res sims though.

[jstrob]

Ok thanks Paul I will try that. I never touch this setting. By default it was set to linear, not box but I will try sphere!

[jstrob]

Ummm, box is not the default - linear is. It's faster than spherical and with a production-scale resolution the difference in detail is not noticable anymore. Spherical should be used for low-res sims though.

Ok I see thanks Svetlin.

[squintnic]

slightly off topic here but still talking clouds.

im getting some clouds made up in houdini and exported for me as .vdb
is there any special export settings I need to make the artist aware of?
iv not used any vdb stuff before but have licenses of vray and phoenix and will be using these for a sky / cloud scene - is it a relatively straightfoward process to get them rendering in a normal set up scene? (im not very good with phoenix yet)

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Especially since you have no fire in the caches, they should work straight out of the box after you agree to apply a preset for Houdini smoke/fire, and then you can experiment with the smoke color/smoke opacity settings.

[squintnic]

thankyou svetlin, i will post my results here

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Good luck, keep us posted!

[squintnic]

low res vdb clouds, they worked seamlessly. cant wait to put this scene together now!
will post back with the higher res images as i go

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hehe, looking good. You could do those with Phoenix and using displacement too, but I guess it might be slower to render than the baked cache.

[squintnic]

i had a go with phoenix but the process of simming and stopping was beyond me and ended up quicker to use the cached vdbs
im having trouble instancing the vrayvolume grid however - when i click drag and instance they dissapear and wont render. any ideas?
thanks

[Ivaylo Katev]

vray volume grid is part of phoenix, and we stopped the support of the instancing in version 2.0.
the reason to stop the instancing was related to the simulation, each instance has contact with different objects and this makes the simulation ambiguous.
however this restriction is not valid for the vray grid, so we have to allow the instancing.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Yup, we have this issue written down, but still haven't gotten there. We'll up the priority.

[squintnic]

ok thanks for the heads up. it would be very useful when populating large scenes with smoke plumes / clouds.