yeh, possibly bump vs normal (normal gives and extra axis of detail I think?) theres also a bump node, which has normal outputs. Heh, yeh you are right, i’ll ask in another thread, when I work on something significant i’ll ask around separately. Thanks for sharing the experiment.
kai, thats pretty cool!
This is awesome!
Cloud test…
Took 52:53.51 using 6 threads of my 4.2ghz Core i7 2700k with a 571.26MB peak memory usage. Used a 1.00 step size and 1024 max steps.
Beet Da Brat
Another test render: 27 minutes on an i5 M 430. Eyes: fire (blender sim) rendered with volumetric emission.
I fixed a bug (also reported) and patched the LuxRender exporter to enable fire voxel data export. Furthermore, I overcame a big interpolation issue with my smoke for cycles shader by switching to .exr. Expect an major update soon (smoke + fire working, higher precision, and cleaner code).
The Equi-angular sampling optimization (for volume rendering) based on code in the DingTo branch might still sneak its way into Master before 2.70 yet.
https://developer.blender.org/D291
It depends though, there’s discussion on how to deal with issues of the patch making everything brighter, but it seems mostly complete.
Sure, here it is,
The mesh itself is a subdivided cube randomly edited and then has a level 5 subsurf and displacement modifier.
@@andrewprice
That looks amazing! 
Beet Da Brat
Can someone explain to me how to render a smoke simulation on cycles, please?
Thanks a lot!
You can’t. There is no support yet for the Smoke Simulator.
Is the sky/cloud background a plane?
are you using world volume, or is this a camera inside a cube volume.
looks good.
You are quite welcome.
Beet Da Brat
I wonder if dingto or possibly someone knowledgeable can help me here?
I wonder if it will be possible in the future to create krakatoa like particles in the future.
I think I aksed before, but since its dedicated thread maybe someone can give me some insight.
I’m talking about the kind SSS/absorption like look these particles have, in krakatoa.
heres some video examples…
the individual particles appear to have some self shadowing too, which i’m not sure is an option in Blender.
I tried to make similar effects, with using icospheres as particle object, but unfortunatly its applying a shader to each particle object, and not to the entire thing (think as if it where meshed)
I hope what i’m saying is understandable, I tried to explain to brecht but I don’t think I was clear. I’ve only seen this type of effect krakatoa.
many thanks.
info on krakatoa
http://www.thinkboxsoftware.com/krak-mixing-additive-and-volum/
perhaps i’m mistaken and I’ll be able to do this once smoke/fire support is added.
I want to say having the point density texture in Cycles would do it, but I’m not 100% sure on that.
It’s important to recognize that Krakatoa is only a particle instancer. It’s not some magic plugin that makes these effects. In fact, most of the effect that you are seeing in these videos is done by Fume or turbulence. Krakatoa just allows you to render a much greater amount of particals then what you would normally be able to in Max. It also has some basic volumetric type shading effects too but they are pretty basic. We use it at work now and then but ultimately, I almost always wish I just a better volumetric engine to work with. It’s good for dust and particulate mater but when you are trying to pull off solid looking smoke or water, there are other plugins for that.
I’m aware of the function of instancing in krakatoa and that data is imported from something like fume or thinking particles or something.
i’m really just talking about way its shaded. This look,the sss/absorbtion look, is only something I see when it has been tagged with krakatoa. I haven’t seen this type of shading anywhere else, even houdini.
I only see it in houdini when the particles have been meshed for liquids.
like this…
I don’t know if i’m being clear, but it hard to be clear about something I don’t understand. 
in the krakoata examples I posted above, the particles seem to be a different color depending on how close they are together, compared to when they are less dense. This reminds me of absorption effect from here… http://agus3d.blogspot.com.ar/2012/05/blender-cycles-ray-length-node-output.html
currently can’t seem to achieve that effect with particles system dupli objs, you just get black, as it is applying the shader to each dupli obj rather than looking at the system as “one whole”
hope I can get some insight.
Not the answer you are looking for, but I can think of a couple different ways that you can accomplish this in compositing. The effect is pretty subtle after all.
Been playing with the volumetric scatter node (especially the anisotropic setting) over the past few hours and came up with an interesting application. Cats eyes.
If you set the anisotropic setting negative (say -1) - it backscatters the light back in the direction of the light source - just like a retro reflector does.
I’m currently rendering an animation to show the effect better.
I created a sphere with a glass node in the surface slot and a volumetric scatter node in the volume slot - set the anisotropy to -1. I applied a HRD environment light to the scene and turned MIS on. The first image the camera is offset relative to the light source (the sun in this instance). The second has the camera position moved so that the sun is directly behind the camera.
