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MCJamZam
Hey!

So I'm working on a personal project right now and it's my first time using Mantra - I decided to switch from Redshift to Mantra because I think it'll work better seeing as there will be tons and tons of pyro effects in this shot, and the redshift pyro shader.. isn't exactly the best.

Now, on top of hopefully being able to make better looking pyro shaders with Mantra, I was also hoping to be able to skip setting up individual lights for my ship model and instead just rely on the emissive materials for volumetric light rays scattering through all the volumes in the scene. Though I can't seem to get this to work. In fact, I can't seem to get any volumetric light rays working? I tried looking up some tutorials on the subject but it seems almost everything is out of date, using nodes that doesn't exist with Houdini 18 to “fake” volumetric lighting.

What is the current “best practice” for setting up and controlling the intensity of volumetric light rays, with or without the inclusion of emissive materials?

For reference, here is the current look of my Mantra render:



This is using one distant light and the emissive textures on the ship for lighting, and with a general “atmosphere fog” volume covering the entire scene.



And this is an old render using Redshift as the render engine. This is more or less the general look I'm trying to recreate:





Any ideas? I'm kind of lost at this point, I thought adding a light and a density volume would be enough to get some good light rays in Mantra, but it doesn't seem like it?
ziconic
Did you set the Volume Limit on the Mantra node to a value greater than 0?
jsmack
Increasing volume limit as ziconic said would be needed to get emission contribution to volumes. Alternatively, there is the geometry light, which will treat emission as if it were light (limits, sampling and aov-wise).
alexwheezy
Try these development. I have used this in several projects and it basically gives good results.
VolumeLight [github.com]
MCJamZam
Hey, thanks for the responses! The VolumeLight github link looks great!

I posted about this on reddit [www.reddit.com] aswell, and after a little testing I came to the conclusion that switching from Redshift to Mantra wasn't actually the best option for me in this project. I've now switched back to using Redshift for the moment, but at the very least I learned a lot about Mantra for the future!
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