CGTalk - Volcano smoke?

BazC

03-26-2006, 08:39 AM

OK don't jump down my throat, I know this has been asked loads of times before, I have done searches, I have found one or two Hypervoxel tutorials and presets. The problem is Newtek.com is playing up and I can't access the tutorials properly and the the presets take forever to render! (Welcome to the world of hypervoxels?)

My problem is I have to create a landscape with a smoking volcano in the background at print resolution, probably around 2500x4000 pixels. At that size Hypervoxels are going to teke days judging from my current tests! I'm rendering one null out at 640x480 and it's been going a good half hour and it's only halfway through!

So I'm wondering about taking my render of one particle (a nice ball of volcano smoke) and using that to render my whole billowing mushroom cloud using sprites. Is this a feasable solution or is it likely to look like a whole load of flat picture stuck together?

Pardon the newbie question but I've never used Hypervoxels before.

Any suggestions? Comments?

ztreem

03-26-2006, 02:00 PM

I can't tell how the sprite thing would look like, but I would give it a try, it could work. Otherwise I would look in to using the dynamite plugin, I think it is easier to setup than hypervoxels. But the fastes solution would be to use particle illusion or maybe since this is a still image you can find a photo of real smoke and paint on it in photoshop then composite it in you render.

BazC

03-26-2006, 05:48 PM

Thanks for your suggestions. I've been playing with Hypervoxel sprites and I suspect that if you know what you are doing then decent volcano smoke would be a possibility. I, on the other hand, have no idea what I'm doing and MY results have been terrible! lol! I don't have time to keep fiddling with it so I'm going to go the 2d route and composite or use a backdrop.

Thanks again! - Baz

gerardo

03-26-2006, 08:29 PM

Some time ago I shared an experimental technique that might be useful in this case:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=203932

Other way can be using the VBK!!!'s technique for clouds:

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=211875

or AVTBump+ and motion blur.

Another way might be to make a separate pass for your volcano smoke, render it with HVs Volume at 1/2 - 1/3 of resolution and scale it with genuine fractals.

Gerardo

BazC

03-26-2006, 09:25 PM

Thanks Gerardo, very useful links!

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