Raytaced reflections/refractions and smoke.

[mightcouldb1]

I wanted to create a thread for this since everyone might not venture to the WIP section.

I have described what my problem is on this thread:

But to summarize it: Rendering volumetrics takes WAY too long when you start increasing the volume step size. I have smoke that is visible through glass, so I have to increase the step size or I will get very grainy results in the refracted areas. I am not raytracing the shadows, just the glass.

It's really annoying to have to wait 100 hours for 140 frames in a really simple scene.

[brianburke]

Yo dude. When you have glossy reflections and refractions you can get away with cheating a little bit. You can render your volumes normally without the tracing, make a surface out of your volumes using the volume sdf SOP in conjunction with the convert SOP, and project your render onto the surface. Tracing against this surface is superfast and looks almost identical to tracing out the actual volume.

Hope this helps.

-b

[mightcouldb1]

I was hoping that you would answer this! Thats definitely a nice work around. I'm going to go with that method.

I kind of stole your avatar a bit. Haha!

Thanks dude!