Hi all,

I'm just wandering if it is possible to combine Volume Material, as demonstrated in Houdini 11 Mantra Masterclass http://vimeo.com/15198448 [vimeo.com] at 1hr03mins, with other standard material properties - especially Displacement. Reflection/refraction and maps would be amazing.

I used this material during Houdini Cook-Off competition. Could its functionality be extended at all? One work around I thought of would be to use a Mountain Sop at the moment. And the only way I figured out to get reflections/refractions is through compositing.

Thank you.
Mark

Yes, you can combine all of these things if you master vops shader writing. But for reflection you would need well defined normals which a volume does not have by default. I am not sure how a refraction map would work.

You can also use the isooffset node to convert your volume to a standard surface, which you can shade using standard shaders.

I can imagine environment maps to work but
refl/refr on volumes?
wouldn't it be evaluated each volumestep as the camera ray passes through the volume and each will shoot at least one refl/refr ray which will then need to march through volume and since they again need to evaluate each volumestep's color they will need to invoke another level of refl/refr rays and so on? It doesn't sound doable as such, but maybe I am imagining it all wrong, never tried it though since this looooong recursion came into my mind, maybe it doesn't work like this at all