VrayVolumeGrid PFlow or Forest Pack

[White Wizard]

i haven't had any luck scattering volumegrids via pflow or forest pack. My goal is to scatter a handful of fumefx fires over a large area to save on memory and hard drive space. However vrayvolumegrids don't seem to work at all via object instancing/scattering tools.

To go further, does manually instancing volume grids even reduce the memory utilized during rendering?

EDIT: volume grids don't seem to allow being instanced based on a quick test. However you can copy them which leads me to believe they also cannot be used with particle systems or scattering plugins. I would love to know if their is a script or workaround for this.

It appears despite being copies rather than instances, each additional copy does not create redundancies in the memory it utilizes.

EDIT: Instancing volumegrids appears to be broken and/or useless, however copying the grid works as you would expect instancing would. Since scattering plugins rely on instancing to work (at least to my knowledge), would it not make sense to make instancing a volumegrid take on the functionality of the way it makes copies now?

[White Wizard]

I received an official response from Forest Pack regarding this and I thought I'd share.

I'm afraid, the VRayVolumeGrid object isn't fully supported (neither Krakatoa's PRT Volume object). I can confirm, we would like to add support for Point Cloud objects, but it's still under development.

Thought not all its features are supported, it's possible to get it working by using the Mesh (or Ocean / Cap where the content is converted into a mesh) Rendering mode (attaching screenshot).

You're right, that for some reason instancing doesn't seem to work on those object and we've contacted the Chaos Group team regarding it too.

"... is there a way for me to specify in forest pack to place custom objects as copies rather than as instanced geometry?"

All distributed items are handled as instances. A possible work-flow would be to convert the Forest object (or its copy) to instances with help of the Forest Tools utility (to individual instanced objects) and than hit the Make unique button for all those objects.

Hopefully Chaos Group can address the instancing issue. I'll update this thread if I find a temporary solution. I have to imagine this workflow would be incredibly useful for other users. I'll be trying the recommendation from Itoo later.

Edit:
Itoo's forest tool solution actually worked perfectly with Fumefx grids, but didn't work at all with vrayvolumegrids.

[White Wizard]

I apologize for triple posting and also for bugging the staff once again, but I was hoping somebody from Chaos Group could address this issue.

I would have posted in the Problems forums originally but I didn't assume this to be a bug at first. I'm optimistic there might be a possibility to get a quick hot fix so I can continue to work and make my deadline, but I lack the knowledge to know if that's truly the case. Hopefully at least I can get some feedback from Chaos Group? Thanks in advance.

[squintnic]

i had this problem with vrayvolume grid trying to make clouds with a number of methods (forest, pflow and old object replace)
instancing is broken

[georgi.zhekov]

Hello,

Instancing was never implemented for VRayVolumeGrid, it is in our to-do list but I can't give you an exact time frame when this will be done.

[White Wizard]

Hello,

Instancing was never implemented for VRayVolumeGrid, it is in our to-do list but I can't give you an exact time frame when this will be done.

It's been a few months. Is there any expectation to have instancing working with volumegrids in the next sp?

[georgi.zhekov]

This is one of our priorities and we'll try to make it in for the next service pack but I can't promise anything.

[White Wizard]

This is one of our priorities and we'll try to make it in for the next service pack but I can't promise anything.

Great. Thank you.