Direct and Indirect elements broken rendering volume

[Dubbie99]

Any word on the new scattering and absorption shader Svetlin?

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, we have absorption color in the shader now in the Phoenix and V-Ray nightlies for Max and Maya. It takes manual picking for this to land in the V-Ray Houdini builds, so if you are not seeing it, please do tell. Basically you can pick a color for absorption and also map it via a texture and this is all. We are currently working on making it play nice with all other options, which is also helping retouch some old code which has bugs an limitations - e.g. probabilistic volumetrics were not able to work together with Fully Visible fire opacity mode. Therr are a few if those remaining, but it's shaping up...

[Dubbie99]

So what shader was Vlado using for his Disney cloud demo from 8 months ago? The multiple scattering looks really good.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

We haven't done anything major to the scattering for a looong time. Just make to set it to Ray-traced and not Approximate and this should be all

[ronald_a]

Ah, we have absorption color in the shader now in the Phoenix and V-Ray nightlies for Max and Maya. It takes manual picking for this to land in the V-Ray Houdini builds, so if you are not seeing it, please do tell. Basically you can pick a color for absorption and also map it via a texture and this is all. We are currently working on making it play nice with all other options, which is also helping retouch some old code which has bugs an limitations - e.g. probabilistic volumetrics were not able to work together with Fully Visible fire opacity mode. Therr are a few if those remaining, but it's shaping up...

very much looking forward to absorption

[pablo_rohtau]

Talking about volumetrics settings:
- Light Cache or Brute Force for GI (secondary lighting)?
- Secondary lighting is controlled by the Engine parameter (Global Illumination tab) in the Vray settings, but then in the Volume Grid you have the Scattering parameter, which I understand as precisely that, the secondary lighting in a volume, so how the Scattering parameter combines with the Engine parameter in the ROP Global Illumination tab?
- Finally what are your workflows for lookdev? This is another noob question. Progressive and Bucket samples are similar to what you have in Mantra with the difference that in Mantra the IPR by default uses Progressive and when you send to render it uses Bucket, you don't need to set them manually.
In Vray I found that I have to set Progressive to star the render in a decent time in many cases, Bucket sampling with IPR preview render for some reason takes ages to start in some cases.
Then progressive sampling give you a different result than Bucket so at the end I have to use the Render option in VFB rather than the Preview and change some settings in the ROP just for testing, like Render Current Frame, no Export, etc .. which is not ideal. Can I just render current frame using Buckets without touching anything in the ROP?

Thanks