What's the standard method for achieving a cloudy liquid effect in Mantra? I'm a little baffled, the only option I can see right now is the uniform volume shader which is having no effect at all.

yes, uniform volume will do
maybe exclude your glass/liquid object from shadow casting or at least turn of faux caustics to allow light to illuminate your uniform volume object

tamte
yes, uniform volume will do
maybe exclude your glass/liquid object from shadow casting or at least turn of faux caustics to allow light to illuminate your uniform volume object

Okay I managed to figure out what was going on. I was applying the uniform volume material via a material node, that wasn't working, I had to apply it on the item level. That seems buggy to me…?

Thanks for the reply.

tamte
yes, uniform volume will do
maybe exclude your glass/liquid object from shadow casting or at least turn of faux caustics to allow light to illuminate your uniform volume object

What about non-uniform? Custom pathtracer the only way?

jsmack
What about non-uniform? Custom pathtracer the only way?

what do you mean? for non-uniform you just create actual volume with traditional volume shader (instead of using poly+uniform volume properties) but of course boundaries may not align perfectly
the shadow part is the same, unless you are brave enough to enable all paths

tamte

jsmack
What about non-uniform? Custom pathtracer the only way?

what do you mean? for non-uniform you just create actual volume with traditional volume shader (instead of using poly+uniform volume properties) but of course boundaries may not align perfectly
the shadow part is the same, unless you are brave enough to enable all paths

You would need to make the volume only visible to refraction rays or some such, but I'm not sure how to make the volume not occlude shadow rays when outside the polys. Maybe trace in -I to see if it hits a surface with N facing in that direction. You can't just rely on volume values to define the border, it has to be traced.

Alshaders refractive based single scatter was the easiest method of doing this. Shader based was so much easier, I miss it.

Yeah, more and more of the ubershaders out there are including participating media as part of the refractive component now. PxrSurface, Redshift Material, Standard Surface (Arnold 5) all have it.