Cloud rendering in Cycles study (using the Horizon Zero Dawn's volume rendering techniques)

Part 2.1: Beer’s Powder Blender Renders

First, let’s take a look at the cloud using the Point Density technique

Blender Vanilla Render:
image

Blender Beer’s Powder Render:
image

Not much of a difference at first sight, it almost looks the same in the light side, however, in the dark side, we can see that Beer’s Powder has more energy transmittance, and as we look closer (in the lower right corner) we see the pronounced edges of the Powder effect!

Both renders were made with the same Density multiplier (10x) of the Point Density input (which will be important later on)

However, how does Beer’s Powder technique looks on other implementations?, specially the Mesh to Volume implementation

Blender Vanilla Render:

Blender Beer’s Powder Render:
image

Ok, that looks… terrible, but what can we learn from that? Hmm, it seems like what the Beer’s Powder technique does it accentuate the edges of volume, doing that the edges reflect more light than what they absorb, or in general, the edges reflects more light than the rest of the volume. Can we try something similar in Blender Vanilla?

More info coming next in Part 3

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