trying to develop a bread rendering technique (like in Pixar's Ratatouille)

[flino2004]

Besides the holes in your example you can see the fibers of the bread going in groups with the same direction

[jstrob]

Sorry to start the thread but didn't follow up. Finally didn't see any answer here before today but I used a krakatoa-frost method. I used krakatoa and frost to mesh a cellullar noise volume map using several levels one inside another like someone said. The result is exactly what I wanted.

You can see my results here:

[jstrob]

and here (modeled the exterior in zbrush and inside with the krakatoa-frost method (I should do some more close-up to see the effect better).:

[super gnu]

id have imagined ( not knowing anything much about krakatoa/frost) that you could use the same cellular noise, with vraymetaball, to generate a mesh like that. might not render very fast compared to a pure mesh though.

[jstrob]

Krakatoa is for the particles generation from the 3D space of the 3D cellular procedural texture. And frost is for the skin generation. Yes vraymetaball can generate a skin but not the particles. And Frost has a lot more feature for mesh generation than vray metaball.

[super gnu]

if you generate a generic solid mass of particles inside a mesh volume using standard max tools, you can apply the procedural texture directly to the vraymetaball field to produce your unlimited-detail dynamic mesh. , dont follow why it should be necessary to use krakatoa.. ?

edit: anyway your end result is great, just had an afterthought about another possible method.. maybe i should have a play.

[jstrob]

Ok I didn't know that. I will try it.

[jstrob]

Ok I just try and it doen't work like I expected. The effect of the 3D procedural cellular texture on the metaball field is not 3D. It looks more like a displacement of the outer surface of the metaball mesh.

[super gnu]

seems to be a 3d effect to me.. attached a quick test with a couple of nested cellular maps. are you using the default "multiply" mode for the procedural map, or the "additive" mode? additive looks more like displacement.

as mentioned in a "problems" thread i have started however, the rendertimes are truly atrocious, so i expect you used by far the best solution.

[jstrob]

My soluiton is also a but more expansive. I just send a check of more than 1000$ to thinkbox for my support renewal for frost, krakatoa, stoke and deadline...

If I could do this with less plugin I would be happy. So I will try it again and post my result in a few minutes.

[kagemaru]

My soluiton is also a but more expansive. I just send a check of more than 1000$ to thinkbox for my support renewal for frost, krakatoa, stoke and deadline...

If I could do this with less plugin I would be happy. So I will try it again and post my result in a few minutes.

Not really a less expensive way but you could have a look inside houdini vdb operations. It just does all of this in a much more efficient way.

[jstrob]

Cool to know! Cause I'm learing houdini right now! And for me yes that's the less expensive solution cause I just bought houdini indie for a meager 200$! These days I'm completely blown away by what houdini indie can do for 200$. I will be testing vray for houdini very soon too.

[kagemaru]

Cool to know! Cause I'm learing houdini right now! And for me yes that's the less expensive solution cause I just bought houdini indie for a meager 200$! These days I'm completely blown away by what houdini indie can do for 200$. I will be testing vray for houdini very soon too.

http://www.openvdb.org/download/
http://www.openvdb.org/download/houd...amples.hip.zip

There's a hip file completed with very nice examples of houdini's vdb node. I learned a lot from this.

[jstrob]

Thanks kagemaru I will take a look at it.

[jstrob]

You can see here that the vraymetabal texture is just applied as a displacement and doesn't carve inside the 3D volume. I guess your pic Super gnu, you just use a so huge displcement that the surface just exploded a bit and intersect itself so it look kind of 3d, but if you can try to make a swiss cheese you will see.

On this render on the left is a frost surface with a krakatoa volume with a magma modifier carving the particles with a cellular noise. On the right, just a particle flow volume cube and a vray metaball skinning it with the same cellular noise applied in multiplication mode. I'm trying another render with the multiplier set to 10 just to see, but it's really slow to generate thre skin with vraymetabal compared to frost so I will stop there. You can see the surface is kinf of coarse but I can't go higher or it will take all day on this small test....