render snow sim in maya (mesh/volumes)?

[MAYA_]

Hey everyone, 

I am wondering what your best approaches are for turning a grain sim (snow) into a renderable mesh. I have tried both, converting it to VDBs and then geo as well as using volumes for rendering. I am wondering what you'd recommend when bringing my sim into maya for rendering. Should I stick to points, convert it to a mesh or stick to volumes?

I am happy about any input, thank you!

[garf]

If it's just falling snow then points do fine

[MAYA_]

Woops, no sorry, forgot to clarify this. I am wondering about a grain sim, like ground interaction

[Phiphat]

What kind of ground interaction? Like a snowball fall to ground, or a snow ground with object colliding to it, or snow ball colliding with snow ground?

It depends on what you're using to render. I can tell you my process in Vray and hope that it helps. 

For points, I use Vray import proxy. It can import alembic files, so you can save your points from grain solver as bgeo and then export it as alembic. Go to "Create" Tab, "Vray", "Import proxy". browse to your files and once you select it, change the digits to <frame04>. your file path in the dialog box now will look like ..folder/folder/filename.<frame04>.abc (<frame04> is the decimal, ie: 1001.abc, 1002.abc is <frame04>. 101, 102 is <frame03>) This will import your points in and you can set the point size in Vray, currently there's two mode you can render your points in, as sphere and as point.  I found this method to render pretty quickly, compare to import your alembic in directly through normal means which import as particles, and also less buggy. It can also handle large amount of particles as well, which you'll probably need if you're doing a snow simulation. It looks similar to krakatoa, but not quite.

For Volume, I convert the caches to VDB and import them using Vray Volume Grid. 

Hope this helps,

Phiphat