Dust Particles in Air instead of Fog

[charles_messenger]

Is it possible to render very small dust particles in the light rays instead of environmental fog? I’ve tried even using a very small object in a scatter volume but they wouldn’t render the specular highlight I was hoping to see.

[konstantin_chaos]

Hi charles_messenger,

In other 3D platforms (like Maya or 3ds Max) this can be done with a particle system.

In V-Ray for SketchUp, the only off-the-shelf option would be scattering small objects with Scatter.
However, the number of scattered instances must be insanely high for the dust effect tow work which will most probably lead to issues.
One thing I can guarantee with such large numbers is you'll have to disable the viewport preview.

As an alternative you might be able to create a particle system in another app and then import it as an alembic cache into SketchUp using the V-Ray Proxy Mesh loader.
This workflow is not ideal though because of the high complexity and hard customizability at the end.

In all cases the particle highlights in the reference image are very tiny highlights that are enlarged due to the camera defocus.
This Bokeh effect would be extremely hard to sample even if you have the particles in the scene.

I'll think about this a little more and write back if I come up with an alternative.

Regards,
Konstantin

[charles_messenger]

Ah! That makes perfect sense about the particles being out of focus, I hadn't thought of that before. I did try scattering a tiny object once before and it didn't crash the system, but nothing really showed up either (maybe too small of an object to get a sample from?)

Not an urgent matter anyways, but would be a neat feature if integrated into SU. Thanks for looking into this!

Hi charles_messenger,

In other 3D platforms (like Maya or 3ds Max) this can be done with a particle system.

In V-Ray for SketchUp, the only off-the-shelf option would be scattering small objects with Scatter.
However, the number of scattered instances must be insanely high for the dust effect tow work which will most probably lead to issues.
One thing I can guarantee with such large numbers is you'll have to disable the viewport preview.

As an alternative you might be able to create a particle system in another app and then import it as an alembic cache into SketchUp using the V-Ray Proxy Mesh loader.
This workflow is not ideal though because of the high complexity and hard customizability at the end.

In all cases the particle highlights in the reference image are very tiny highlights that are enlarged due to the camera defocus.
This Bokeh effect would be extremely hard to sample even if you have the particles in the scene.

I'll think about this a little more and write back if I come up with an alternative.

Regards,
Konstantin