AMD Volumetric + Smoke

Is this a planned feature?

No, unless AMD makes it happen.

It would be great if one could render volumetrics separately with the cpu, while the rest of the scene will be rendered using the gpu.
While not gpu-accelerating volumetrics, it would still save a lot of time and won’t require proper support for amd gpus.

It is possible and works. :yes:
Just run same scene on two blenders, one set for rendering on CPU, other on GPU.

Another way:
Render two scenes in one Blender, delete all you not need in CPU scene and mix them in compositor.

Mib

You can just make it easier on yourself and make two render passes. One with all the GPU renderable stuff and the other with CPU only stuff. Then, render the GPU pass with the GPU and the CPU pass with the CPU. :wink:

double post.

The problem is you can’t change render settings per render layer. so you would have to disable one layer, render, toggle cpu/gpu, toggle render layers, then render, then composite them.

The scenes approach allows it to be a one click solution. An even easier solution is to use an Nvidia card, which has near feature parity with the CPU.

Why is it so? NVidia didn’t implement anything in cycles as far as I know.
Anywya, you have 3 solution:

  1. Render with Cycles on AMD GPU and start a second blender that will render only the part containing volumetrics (normally a very small amount of your complete animation). Faster than a one card solution and still pretty easy to do. I guess any guy serious about rendering can start 2 blender instances with different frame numbers to render. See here to make it even faster for both GPU and CPU rendering : https://www.blender.org/manual/de/render/workflows/command_line.html
  2. Using LuxCore, to have everything Cycles CUDA has to offer plus some bonuses and more realistic look. Easy, affordable and damn fast solution, but you have less libraries on the net and you have to convert the libraries you already created until the converter is better.
  3. Pay a lot to get a NVidia card and render nearly everything on one device, not the fastest solution, but the easiest one if you have the money.

From my barebones point of view rendering on 2-core CPU is a pita compared to 512-core Nvidia’s GPU.
Amount of RAM does not make any (significant) impact on CPU rendering, it either happens in RAM or uses HDD swap space if there is not enough RAM in which case you better kill the process while you still can.
True, while you can increase RAM amount easily (price as of today is 30EUR per 8GB sticks here) up to the limits of your mobo or whatever Win allows to use you can’t increase vRAM - have to live with what’s on GPU board.

Nvidia distribute freely CUDA toolkit which as shows Blender’s Cycles code, ‘just works’.

I for one can not quite get the idea of overlaying smoke over Scene in post; i don’t feel there is a way to deep compositing in Blender right now.
‘Flat’ something can be done faster in photo editor imho. Unfortunately Cycles do not like billboards and a lot of overlapping transparencies.

Yeah ah that’s true but it’s better than nothing. :wink: BTW, this seems like a great idea for an addon.