surface and volume shader in arnold shader network

[treebog 2]

I'm trying to apply a surface and volume shader to a simple liquid (vdb) in htoa.

It seems I can't do this without having two separate VDBs (one for the surface, one for the volume). Is there any way to have a shader in arnold with both volume and surface components or is this impossible?

[schwungsau 272]

this very confusing question raises 25 more questions.
no render in the world will allow you to mix volume and surface shaders.....  

[anim 1,168]

If renderer allows that it's usually part of a single shader and mostly other way around, the shader is assigned to mesh and the enclosed volume can be shaded uniformly, may potentially work with iso surfaces like sdf also

Like octane material has medium input for volumetric shader

Or mantra can render geo as uniform volume and also use surface shader depending on dPdz, Bui it involves some render poroperties

Not sure what's Arnold's approach though

[treebog 2]

3 hours ago, schwungsau said:

this very confusing question raises 25 more questions.
no render in the world will allow you to mix volume and surface shaders.....  

Alright thanks, I was confused because the arnold shader network had both a volume and surface node.

[schwungsau 272]

in Arnold, you can assign a volume shader to a mesh and set the setup size an object property (a arnold parameter) --> Arnold will render it as uniform volume  ( if the mesh is closed). but you can not assign a surface shader to volume.
 

[anim 1,168]

3 hours ago, schwungsau said:

but you can not assign a surface shader to volume.

since the talk is about liquid VDB I'm pretty sure it's an SDF, which I recall Arnold can render as iso surface with surface material, I may be mistaken though