maps in texture surface slot of vrayvolumegrid

[super gnu]

that sounds very helpful. currently its quite painful to set up this method when you have the necessary huge grid.


on a related note, all the rendertimes ive seen from phoenix are nice and fast.. but im trying the VVG in atmosphere mode, with procedural texture as the smoke density source, and the rendertimes are painful.. even with the default step size and noticeably low detail its 10-15 minutes a frame.. with a step size of 40% im getting an eta of 1.5 hrs for a 720p image of a couple of cloud puffs.

is that to be expected?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Unfortunately yes - with a cache file and with the surface texture we have a voxel grid and can assume stuff about it, but if you use a texture as an atmospheric channel, about all our optimizations don't apply anymore because the texture is not voxelized and can have infinitely small detail that we wouldn't know about until the ray hits that certain point.

[super gnu]

does simplifying the textures or avoiding certain things speed things up? any way to "bake" a texture from an atmospheric channel into a cache?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

I can't think of any, no. Usually the textures must be used to increase the detail of a low-res grid, so we haven't thought of the opposite - converting them to a grid beforehand.