Am I missing something? I cant find a SESI Masterclass on Volumes? Are volumes common knowledge or something?

Volumes are fairly broad in scope. Which application are you curious about: pyro, atomospherics, clouds, cvex procedurals, vector fields for driving simulations and other operations, heightfields, distance functions, mask fields, vdb specific workflow considerations, shading/material building or something else? I'm sure there is information tailored to at least some of these topics in video form.

A volume (at least a 3d volume) is just a set of data (1 component or more) indexed or indexable by three indices. That's all there is to a “volume”.
Any multi-dimensional array (list) will do as a volume. Obviously by “volume” you could also mean the content of a body

It's what you *DO* with a volume that can get complex, look good or eat up all your memory.

You can use “volumes” to give distances to surfaces (distance fields or signed distance fields), you can store arbitrary data (1 component like for density or fuel, more components for velocities and so on).
Still, the “volume” is just a set of data and means to access it.

Volumes are context-dependent, else they are just building blocks for anything …

Marc

Hmm..so how would I use one volume that has color to transfer that color to another intersecting volume?

Daryl Dunlap
Hmm..so how would I use one volume that has color to transfer that color to another intersecting volume?

A = B;

Assuming a and b are vectors bound to the 6 volumes. Volumes don't have color, so 3 volumes are used for each color. Volumes intersect everywhere since they extend to infinity, so a simple equality can be done to copy values from B to A. You might need to resize A first, so that it contains B. VDB's are a bit different, as they do support vector data, and don't have simple bounds to specify size. The vdb activate/vdb combine node can be used to combine the active areas of the two volumes in various ways (replace, union, intersect, subtract). Performing A=B in a volume vop should activate the result volume with the union of the input fields automatically though.

Dude, I seriously feel like I missed the boat on Volumes in general…and there doesnt seem to be much “learning” material to catch up either.

The dudes from entagma are doing a volume tutorial series…
https://www.patreon.com/entagma [www.patreon.com]

I have been doing a deep dive on volumes for a while now

There are some great examples in Jeff's class here:

https://www.sidefx.com/tutorials/houdini-vops [www.sidefx.com]

Here is a newish site that has a lot of amazing resources:

http://www.ytini.com/index.html [www.ytini.com]

There is a great paid FXPHD course on vex that has some really good volume workflows.

Thanks guys, I tried to teach myself but it didnt click.

Really appreciate the resources.

Thanks.

The best resource that I've found on Houdini volumes is Steven Knipping's training on CG Circuit [www.cgcircuit.com].

I subscribed to the Entagma guys on Patreon and their content is exactly what I was looking for and I wish SESI could make something like that available to everyone.