Physical SSS - any good for rendering particles?

[danw]

I'm trying to get some reasonably-realistic multi-scattering in the foam from a water simulation... the foam being an up-to-~8million point particle object... I'm experimenting between rendering point-type particles, and raytracing spheres, which seems surprisingly fast, I presume as raytracing can deal implicitly with sphere primitives without needing to generate masses of geometry.

I did some work on this stuff a couple of years back in Mantra, using the Multi SSS node to take point clouds I'd pre-generated in SOPs, and it seemed to work quite well. The problem now is, it appears that Multi SSS has been depreciated, and the only option is the Physical SSS system. Point clouds appear not to work in quite the same way any more - they have no position information, just S and T coordinates and primitive identifiers... which is great for polygon objects, especially deforming ones, but it means I can't render subsurface scattering at all for a particle object.

Does anyone know if I'm missing something? Is there a way to get effective SSS on particles using the new physical rendering approach? (One that doesn't take hours to render?)

[Sifis]

I think this tutorial is what you need, It explains how to shade and render foam particles with a volume custom volume shader.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2179&Itemid=259

[danw]

Aha, thanks very much. I'd missed this somehow, looks like just the thing I'm after.

In retrospect, it was pretty unlikely SideFX would have gone in for FLIP fluids in such a major way without some way to render realistic foam :-P