Development

Update from Farsthary

Bart ·

It’s hard to miss the volumetrics work that Farsthary (Raul Fernandez Hernandez) and Broken (Matt Ebb) are working on. I contacted him and asked for an update on his work. Here’s his report.

Hello all!

Many of you have being following the development of volumetrics for Blender, initially started as a single man project (Raul Fernandez Hernandez a.k.a Farsthary), but later joined by the ecxelent artist/developer Matt Ebb (a.k.a Broken), who has refactored/catalized this project in the Sim_Physics branch toward the official integration into Blender at some happy point :)

Recently a number of improvements and additions have been made to it and the range of effects that could be achieved now with volumetrics is incredible: from stones to fluffy clouds, from ice to corals, from fire to smoke, foggy rooms or fantastic scene spaces… the posibilities are endless and the project is not finished yet!

Among the new aditions are:

  • Pointdensity texture: It allows to use particle system data to render volumetrics effects, hello tornadoes :) (discussion on BlenderArtists)
  • Voxeldata texture: Is an advanced feature that allows to import external volumetric datasets to blender, the source could be anything from simulators data (smoke,fire,etc) to medical and scientifical datasets.
  • Light Cache: This feature bake the full shading volume information to cut down render times and with it all sort of things are possible like the next feature.
  • Multiple Light Scattering: it models the behavior of ligth in optically thick media, like wax,clouds,ice diffunding the ligth as it travel in the media.

Is important to note that this project is not finished yet, so there´s room for lot of optimization and new features. See also the main thread of discussion.

This was a long awaited feature for many blender artist, and present in nearly every high end package.

Here´s a list of people that one way or other have supported this project and who deserve proper credits :)

Thanks to all and stay tuned because more amazing stuffs are in the horizon! :)

Raul Fernandez (Farsthary)

Author Bart
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Community Lead at n8n.
Advertisement