Testing out Cycles myself with a car-out-in-the-yard-on-a-cloudy-day kind of pic:
The car is by Mike Pan (mpan3), I just did the materials for Cycles. There’s some errors on the materials that still catch my eye, but that’s just inexperience with the engine on my part. :o
Render was visually complete at 200 samples (1m50secs) but I let it fly to 800 samples (7mins+).
Big thanks to Mike for sharing that model!
I did the post-pro in photoshop, but I added a glare effect in blender. It don’t have excesive postpro, only a few layers with some little details, the important work is over cycles.
Yep, 18 minutes is few, is the reason because I used cycles. But I have a question, can I change the cycles engine in blender but see the basic shader color in the viweport?? Because when I add a black material cycles change the color of the mesh in the viewport and in some cases, like black, i cannot see the wire to model.
Thanks
Yes you can assign an arbitrary color (per material) in the 3D viewport, just scroll the panel down, below the displacement settings
Another Volume Test with bmps. Made with five million tiny cubes. (250,000 particles with 20 children each.)
is something wrong, made a test texture, unwrapped my mesh. renders totally black with cycles. using nodes to select texture and uv’s as texture geo.
this is a non “physical” texture, just test texture packed into the .blend as png i suppose. is PNG the culprit?
it was the PNG format as blender packs as PNG by default
why is GLSL / Texture missing in 3d viewport with cycles?
I think that packed textures still aren’t supported in Cycles, that was since the beginning not supported and i haven’t heard a thing that its already supported.
It’s prolly the packing issue, like you guys suspect. However, I had a different thing happen with transparency enabled PNGs. I had to flatten the images for them to work… Hope it helps.
A little question. How can I show only one face of a polygon? I want tell… if I do a plane with emission I have a plane that emit light in both sides, but I only want one side.
Edit: I found it. ¬¬U
This is great! what is the render time? I mean the preload stuff?
It is actually quite fast to render. BVH build takes a while, though. Point Cloud calculation is absolutely excruciating long, depending on the complexity of the volume cage(cube is fast to calculate, Suzanne is slower, BMPS is slower still). I figure this method is not great for real use, just a fun test. For practical use, we need storm to fix his patch. I tried, but it’s more complicated than updating old patch context.
plug “Backfacing” (in input -> Geometry) as factor into a mix node fed with emission on first pin and nothing in the second
edit: …late
No, you’re not, because DcVertice didn’t tell, and you did. So thanks! 
Why are you using cubes, for a number of cases, you can easily get away with simple planes that face the camera and use a spherical blend texture to affect the alpha, you can also overlap them as well for a more convincing effect.
You could probably add one or two more faces facing in a different axis for those situations where they have to be seen from all angles providing they are as small as your cubes.
you’re right!
Why are you using cubes, for a number of cases, you can easily get away with simple planes that face the camera and use a spherical blend texture to affect the alpha, you can also overlap them as well for a more convincing effect.
You could probably add one or two more faces facing in a different axis for those situations where they have to be seen from all angles providing they are as small as your cubes.
They were originally random-rotated planes, but I got a problem where there would be empty patches at some angles where the plane and its children would be aligned with the cameras, and thus invisible.
I think that’s part of the problem you were having, when I faked volumetric effects in Blender Internal to render clouds, I used camera-aligned billboards, this would result in predictable and expected results because their normals all pointed at the camera.
I think that’s part of the problem you were having, when I faked volumetric effects in Blender Internal to render clouds, I used camera-aligned billboards, this would result in predictable and expected results because their normals all pointed at the camera.
That would take ages to calculate, as when you get to five million atoms, it can take several minutes for a change to propogate, and that’s not counting BVH build time, thus making Camera Navigation impossible.
You would need to use bigger planes and use a circular blend texture as well as a degree of transparency, trying to make a dense volumetric effect using millions of individual ‘atoms’ is simply not very feasible and will only bring a major slowdown in rendering and a major uptick in memory use.
I know you’re trying to go for a realistic effect here, but trying to go down to the atomic level may be pushing more than needed.
You would need to use bigger planes and use a circular blend texture as well as a degree of transparency, trying to make a dense volumetric effect using millions of individual ‘atoms’ is simply not very feasible and will only bring a major slowdown in rendering and a major uptick in memory use.
I know you’re trying to go for a realistic effect here, but trying to go down to the atomic level may be pushing more than needed.
Actually, five million is like the minimum. That’s why the cloud is so rough, and looks like a dust bunny. You would need at least three times as many atoms with each atom at a third original size to get a true volume effect.
Um… wouldn’t using tetrahedrons instead of cubes save you about 10 million faces and 20 million verts to calculate?
