Hello;

I am looking a bit this week at i3d to use for rendering some fluid particles. Thing I find is that all my renderings look a bit blury. I have tried a few of the different i3d shaders and settings but it always looks a bit blurry until I get down to sample sizes of 0.01 and texture resolution of 1024x1024 with high sampling and micropolygons and all. I also followed the vid tutorials at vislab and the houdini docs but I think the examples there a bit blurry too. Is there any ‘tips’n'tricks' settings that make i3d faster? (meaning, volume render is not going to be quick but maybe that can make it quicker when you are trying for sharp clouds/smoke).

Cheers

I think when you generate the i3d file it takes the metaball density which gives you the soft edges. Perhaps reducing the density threshold in the metacloud shader may sharpen the edges.

If you are trying to do water, why don't you copy metaballs to the particles and then do Convert to polys? This will give you a surface that will render faster rather than using i3D to get a volume which requires all that ray-marching and will have a fuzzy look (unless you create your own i3D shader perhaps…).

Also after you convert to polys try a series of smooth, polyreduce, subdivide, etc. SOPs to get something that looks a little more like what you want.

-Craig

don't forget the peak sop!

don't forget the peak sop!

Oh yeah, I forgot the Peak SOP!

If you want to render the limit isosurface of the i3d (basically the same as rendering the surface generated by the IsoSurface SOP in i3d mode, except down to the very micropoly level), don't forget you can use the Mantra Procedual called the “Image 3d Iso-Texture” to do it.

How?
—-
In an Object's “Render” tab, switch the Geometry parameter to “Procedural”. This enables the Mantra Procedure parameter field and now click on the “+” icon next to the field. In here you'll find the procedural settings and all you need to do is point to the i3d on disk.

This, of course, may very well be NOT what you want to do in the first place - but it IS fun.

Cheers,
Jason