robochimp

Thanks for the feedback, Andrew…

>The two look fairly similar for me in my simple tests. Changing it to 0.001 actually make >Maya's look really different. Maybe this depends on the actual volume (scale and density)?

it's then most likely a object scale issue, I'd assume if my object was much smaller, the density would be much greater (less need to dial up the visualization of it in the fluidShape)

Been experimenting some more with volumes using HE (for Linux/Maya2014)…

A few observations

when visualizing the volume in maya, it's always necessary to turn on Lighting>self shadow on the fluidShape node… shouldn't this be defaulted to ON? It makes a huge difference in the quality.

Maybe also Display>Boundry Draw (on fluidShape) could be defaulted to OFF - just to be a bit more on par with what we see in Houdini.

I was just playing around with viewport 2.0 (turned ON) and noticed a huge speed increase when orbiting the camera around volumes, only problem is a lot of the interactive params I have in my OTL (density mult, etc) stop working until I set the viewport back to default.

Also, I don't know if it is a bug, but I notice a lot of times I 'll need to set Shading>Transparency (fluidShape) to R .001, G 0, B 0 in order to see the volume closer to how it appears in Houdini.

Maybe it is my volume example, but setting Display>Slices Per Voxel to 1 (on fluidShape) yields a better volume viz result and speeds the viewport interactivity at least 2x.

Any way in maya to work with volumes and lights interactively rather that using the light controls in the fluidShape?

Maybe some of these things have been resolved in newer versions of Maya.