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What volumetric material can create this plasma effect?
Hello guys, I am trying to create this kind of plasma effect, where geometry has a soft edge, and the color/material changes based on the opacity, thickness, normal direction, and camera angle.
I have tried FastSSS, falloff map (fresnel), fluid simulation (tyflow or PhoenixFD), vdb volumetric grid, nothing can come any close. Especially particle simulations generated by PhoenixFD then applied with foam particle shader always look very sharp and clear, lacks the soft edge. vdb on the other hand can generate soft edges, but seems like an overkill for this kind of tasks.
I remember there are some atmosphere effects in 3dsMax, such as fog, volume fog, vray environment fog, which require gizmo to help shape the geometry. But there are only 3 types of gizmos, box, sphere, cylinder, no gizmos can use a mesh as a reference source, which makes it impossible to apply the effect to a custom mesh.
So, what's the best way to create effects like this, ideally without tons of simulations and millions of particles? Thank you so much!
I remember some volumetric material can create effects like this, with help of noise map.
These two below should be done with simple geometry, no need for fluid simulation, right?
For comparison, here is my super ugly test rendering with tyflow, even when I increased the particle number and motion blur to a very high value, the particles are still so sharp and don't give this kind of result, and rendering takes forever.
I have tried FastSSS, falloff map (fresnel), fluid simulation (tyflow or PhoenixFD), vdb volumetric grid, nothing can come any close. Especially particle simulations generated by PhoenixFD then applied with foam particle shader always look very sharp and clear, lacks the soft edge. vdb on the other hand can generate soft edges, but seems like an overkill for this kind of tasks.
I remember there are some atmosphere effects in 3dsMax, such as fog, volume fog, vray environment fog, which require gizmo to help shape the geometry. But there are only 3 types of gizmos, box, sphere, cylinder, no gizmos can use a mesh as a reference source, which makes it impossible to apply the effect to a custom mesh.
So, what's the best way to create effects like this, ideally without tons of simulations and millions of particles? Thank you so much!
I remember some volumetric material can create effects like this, with help of noise map.
These two below should be done with simple geometry, no need for fluid simulation, right?
For comparison, here is my super ugly test rendering with tyflow, even when I increased the particle number and motion blur to a very high value, the particles are still so sharp and don't give this kind of result, and rendering takes forever.
One of the reasons why I am learning Houdini now. 
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