I am working on a tornado simulation and wanting to render particles as volumes? I have been trying a few techniques such as copying geometry to the particles with an isoOffset node and rest node attached and applying a billowy smoke shader but I can see the noise swimming across the textures. Not sure whether that is noise or shadows. I have seen a couple examples in the past where you export the particle data to 3ds max and render it. I have no experience with max and would like to stick to houdini to make things a little simpler.
Is there a better technique to this in houdini?
My goal is to render tornadoes as clouds with self shadows.
I am also attaching my renders as a movie files.

I had this problem too….the best solution i've found is just copy to metaballs, and set meta “metaballs as volume” on the geometry node….

That doesn't solve my problem. It will only give me a volume which I am already getting through isoOffset node. The problem to solve is applying the shader with noise that animates over time and has no artifacts.

Download the “fx tools” shelf and have a look at the heavy smoke.
There is a space transformation taking place inside the shader. It does require your particles to be written to disk. You can open up the asset and modify the particle system. Or rip out the transformation part and use it for your own purpose.

This might be of interest to you too:
http://forums.odforce.net/index.php?/topic/8527-power-noise-volume-shader/ [forums.odforce.net]

Hi,
Thanks for the link to the post. I does give a new way to render volumes but the swimming noise texture problem persists.