How to do animated smoke with environment fog?

[thomasfenger]

In the Examples section in the online manual under environment fog, there is some animated smoke done using environment fog.

http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150S...ronmentfog.htm

In the description it says;

"..The volumetric textures (density and emission) for this example are provided from a fluid dynamics simulation in the form of 3d textures.."

It looks very cool. Does anyone know how that is achieved, or where I can find a deeper explanation?

Thanks!

[instinct]

It was simulated using Phoenix, and then Phoenix' Texture was used to render the sim using EnvironmentFog rather than with Phoenix' built-in shading engine.

Regards,
Thorsten

[thomasfenger]

Thanks, Thorsten!

So was the textures 3d procedural or 2d bitmaps? I am interested in how to set up something similar with vray, but I don't fully understand how the textures should drive that very specific look.

Eddie; Ah, some further study revealed this from the feature list:

Procedural texture export
The Phoenix FD plugin comes with an additional 3D texture which allows the simulation result to be rendered with any general purpose volumetric shader like VrayEnvironmentFog. In addition to external shading, the texture export allows the creation of many special effects, for example lava-looking surface achieved with displaced transparency channel and non displaced emissive channel etc.

Neat..

[instinct]

Well Phoenix provides a 3d texturemap that is driven by the simulation container. So you do the fluid sim and can access the simulated channels via the texturemap