Volume Displacement Shader - possible for new 2.79 Principled volume shader?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
1

Hi,
recently i found that arnold uses volume displacement for its volume shader:

https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5AFMUG/Volume+-+Displacement


Is it possible to do so in Blender, or maybe using a workaround? Some help is appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

2

If it’s clouds you are trying to do, then you can get some not too bad results from using noise to distort the texture coordinates of a spherical gradient in a box - which kind of acts like displacing a spherical Volume. As far as I know, stuff like this Rabbit isn’t possible with Materials only in Cycles atm, because you would need some kind of Mask to controll the falloff of the noise to increase it’s density the further down under the surface it travels. If you just connect noise to the density, it will look cut of at the edges.
The Principled Volume shader doesn’t really add any new functionality that would allow this, it just makes it easier to set the stuff up, that was already possible before.

cloud_nodes.png1896×490 218 KB


cloud.png1716×426 388 KB


the cloud shader - the marked area is the important thing. Basically it distorts a spherical gradient texture with noise - or any other texture.

3

Brecht said he can add displacement socket too in future. https://developer.blender.org/D3033

4

At least, you can use surface displacement with a transparent shader for surface and Volume will follow this displacement.

5

Thanks to all of you guys for the answers. I hope the volume displacement will be integrated soon. Until then, Stuntkoalas and zeauros Workaround might help. I’ll give it a try.
My focus was not to create clouds, but to mimic the artworks of the great lee griggs.

Thanks !

6

Sorry to bump this thread, but is this still being integrated or was this abandoned? I am trying to search for any workarounds that emulate diaplacement for volumes in a similar way that displacement works for meshes now in cycles.