flcc

Just reducing the size of the box, who is unnecessary big IMO, work for me. I've no explanation.

Way more simple

This is one way to resize a vdb with bounds and combine_vdb. Resize_vdb.hip

Exterior Band voxel is relative to SDF (Distance VDB), not Fog. Band voxels isn't for volume resizing. May be you should take a look at some tutorials that explains how VDB work.

The price of your products is cool. Why go without !

I can give you one good reason why a lot of people have tried to switch from C4d to houdini. Yes, C4D is, among other things, a motion design tool. For motion design Mograph is cool but you also need a good particle system. The C4D particle system is totally obsolete, so you have to use x-particles. x-particles is expensive. Compare the price of C4D+x-particles to Houdini's indie price. for one third of the price you get the power of houdini AND you can keep C4D voila And I have to say that C4D + Houdini is a perfect duo. Everything that's missing from C4d is in houdini and vice versa. PS : I even don't talk of Smoke fire and fluid where you also need expensive plug-ins, or third application. (even if x-particle now incude these functionnality)

Unfortunately not. "So, at the end of the day, GI and volumes hate each other." : It's a bit radical, but yes, that's the point. Try like this and see if you get any improvement. It'll already give you a clue. See if this is visualy really different. If so, maybe you can keep the closest lamps that generate the shadows of the volume in the volume contribution, without forgetting to set their GI Contribution to zero. It's a bit of a tinkering thing.

yes meshligths are better than emissive materials but not as real light, especialy when it come to volumes. All these lights with volume contribution are probably not a good idea. Try to supress all volumes contribution and try to light your volume with a minimum of area lights to recreate your look. Then from these lights excude the scene or turn GI contribution to 0. In short a lighning for the scene and a lightning for the volume. The goal is to avoid GI interacting between the scene and all these light, with the volume. This kind of advice is from the devs themself. If you make still images it's not really a problem, but when it come to animation you have to take care how you build your lightning. Even with redshift [edit] Since it seems that all your materials are reflective but higly roughness you can try to reduce the maximum trace depth reflection to 2 even 1

That's exactly what I meant. Transparent Volume on the foreground. The worst-case scenario for the render time. It seems normal to have a rendering 3x longer than the "simple" scene. is your volume material is emissive ? How much lights contribute to the volume ? In this case contrary to what I said above, it may be necessary to raise brute force samples. You can also try to clamp the rays, set the max sub sample intensity to 1 (Sample filtering section) Also avoid to light the volume with mesh lights. However 8mn for the "simple" scene seems too long for me. but honestly, it's hard to say what's going on, without looking at the file. So much interactions between materials, lights, and settings, in your project can lead to these results !

Can you show what you name a simple shot ? cause 8mn for 1280x720 simple shot seem a long time. For volumes it depends on density and transparency. A far opque dense smoke don't take much time. On the other side transparent vaporous volume can require high settting thus up the render time. It's cases where I use denoiser. Can you post a file of the 8mn "simple shot" ? I have a little station with 1660 super which is roughly equivalent to your 1070 ti

Can you tell us what is the resolution of your render. 27 minutes still seems like a long time, but if your image is 8 or 16k it can be ok. I think you can lower min samples to 8. I personnaly never go over except in special cases. Can you try a render with 8-512 and another with 8-256. Normaly second render time must be half the first. If it's not the case there is something in your scene causing the problem. I suspect the volumes. Do they encircle the camera ?

Thank you. it's exactly what i'm after.

Hi probably a noob question, but I work on an animation where in the timeline I must use a straigth (linear) curve. But as I move a keyframe the curve is no more straight. I must premanently click the straight tangent button. Pretty annoying. Checking the doc you must "set selected segment to..." -> straight. but it's just a temporary setting. It's the same as the straight tangent button. How do you permanently make a straigth or zero length tangent curve ?

Your settings are really really high. If your not an redshift expert, let the defaut setting do the job. Usually in most cases you just have to adjust min and max sample : 8 - 128 or 256 work well in most of the case. And adaptative error threshold : 0,005 Eventually up a bit the GI bounce, but more than 8 doesn't really give better visual result. Let bute force GI ray by default. as Howitzer99 say disable progressive sample as it's mainly for preview purpose (by the way 128 it's ok) Avoid raising all parameters in the sampling overides section, as if you don't know what you do, this can result in bad performances. Test like this. If you get some noise Try to find out where the noise comes from : reflections, refraction, lights etc... If the reflection on a particular object is noisy, up the reflection sample in the object's material. If your volume are a bit noisy up the volume sample in the light who have volume contribution. Hope the help.

Sorry if I sound harsh, but it doesn't make sense to do a lookdev without context. There is no general rules. If you want steam, it'll be white. if it's the smoke from a volcano, brown or more or less dark gray. If it's a magical smoke, blue, pink or green, If it's a radioactive or chemical smoke, green. And in either case you have to adjust its shape and density. The lighting will be the final touch to highlight what you want to tell. If everything is coherent, you'll get a nice smoke. It's like saying, I want to make a beautiful painting, what colors should I use...

You need to be more specific, or show an example of what you try to achieve. I'm inclined to respond, if you make a black smoke make a blue sky background... but if it's a fire ? ... make a night background. Dark on light, light on dark, but it's a generic answer that's not valid most of the time, and no sens without context. There are billions of possible answers.

Definitively a missing functionnality in Houdini, which is present in every other dcc.

Nothing prevent you from making two portfolios.

To get better advice and even to make a good demo real, you need to be more specific. Which way you want to go. FX Artist ? Modeler - Scuplter Animator Your demo reel will not be the same. You need to focus (and so does your demo) on where you want to go. For example, the shot you're showing us is nice. But what does it showcase? Is the bird because it's one of your zbrush sculpt ?. Right now when you make a project your "storytelling" has to be guided by what you want to show. For the duration, there are no rules. Show only the best. Better a short demo, than a long one, which will bore the viewer. Avoid breakdowns, which only show that you don't have much to show. About demo-reel you can find some topics here. https://forums.odforce.net/topic/44577-entry-level-fx-simulation-reel-what-to-show/ https://forums.odforce.net/topic/42694-help-doing-the-right-choice-about-school/?tab=comments#comment-202937 but there are others.

However, due to confinement I was able to spend two months observing my lawn (kinda wild), and I can say that the grass is a bit flat, it's as if there had been a blanket on it. But I guess it's just a seting.

It's time to pass the Lawn Mower !

As davpe says when it comes to "flickering", impossible to help without seeing an animation. There are different kinds of "flickering". Specular is just the component of the shading where the "flickering" is most obvious.

Check this tutorial You must "customize" your material. Edit parammeter interface -> render properties -> openGL folder. Then add a "diffuse map" or "emissionmap" or ... properties with tagName as ogl_tex1. Or something like this. Sorry no very precise, (not really a mantra user), rather a clue. Better to look at the tutorial

The volumeamplefile is mainly used to retrieve values from another stream, such as you want to make a boolean opreation between two vdb, or use the vdbanalysis node. It just get any kind of value (Cd, gradient, density etc..) at a given position In your example the volumesamplefile node is not necessary. Just subtract aanoise (3D input, 1D noise) result to density (wich is a simple float value). Don't forget a fit node with aanoise. No reason to add or multiply density with position (vector), unless you want an attenuation according to the distance to the center. Another reason to use volumesamplefile in place of input P is when your volume vop is in a solver. Don't really know why, I'm also curious to know.

Nop, GTX 1660 super. I ran some tests (only redshift) because it's not even on the octane bench. It's roughly equivalent to a 1080 ti. When it came out, it was excellent value for money.