Particle Rendering for fluids

[ikarus]

i was looking for an alternative way to render out particle fluids other than the pf surfacer. if the particles are dense enough you should be able to just render as points? the problem with this is the surface normals for the points will be wonky, so i tried to correct the normals of the points by isooffsetting (low res) for a surface then transfering the normals of that surface via vopsop. in the viewport the normals look like they should be fine, but in the renders they are anything but. not sure how solve this problem. maybe i need more particles? (scene file has only 1 partition) or should be applying the normals of the isosurface to a different attribute? dunno

the two pictures added have the same shader, but one particle-rendered, the other pf surfaced

if anyone could shed some light on this it would be great

particlerendering.hip

[Macha]

I suppose you have already tried this?

[Macha]

And presumably this should be unchecked(?).

Edited December 4, 2010 by Macha

[ikarus]

yes i have toggled both of those options, i even added an orient vector but the results are still similar to the original

[Macha]

Hm, here are 2 more ideas:

-do a low res particlesurface and the attribute transfer the (smoothed) normals. Perhaps a filtered metaball surface is best.

-do a low res particlesurface and scatter a zillion points on it.

[ikarus]

i already have a smoothed normals transfer from an isooffset though, which is why this is so baffling

[Marc]

What shader are you using? It's possible that the problem is coming from there.

M

[ikarus]

well at the basic level its just a lighting model node + an fresnel node attached to an environment map lookup

the lighting model results in black unless i use isotropic volume which is strange