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Update from Farsthary

24

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)

About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

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 Head of Community at Sketchfab.

24 Comments

  1. Nathan Braswell on

    Super cool! This is number one on my most wanted fetures list! Secound being photon mapping.
    O, Happy day!

    So many blendernation posts about features I want!

  2. Umm...was Light Cache: suppose to be its own bullet point?

    Anywho, awesome news. Sounds like it'll be a lot of fun to experiment with when it comes out and I finally get more than 10 minutes of free time a day.

  3. Hey, you forgot that he made Blender Internal an unbiased render engine, which is pictured in the article here!

    Farsthary, you are one of the best Blender developers, I think. You're up there with Ton Roosendaal with the number of features you're putting in!

    By the way, is there a Linux or Windows build of your unbiased rendering in Blender Internal up for grabs?

  4. Wow, excellent and awesome! This is one feature I don't want to miss............ super excellent! Thanks, Farsthary and Broken!

  5. I'm a little reserved about proclaiming any one individual as the best Blender developer because there are lot of guys out there doing an insane amount of work. But one thing though, Farsthary is working like a cyborg. He's more machine than man. Brecht, Niels, Nils, Raul, Ton, Matt, Aligorith, Daniel Genrich (and others) are all Blender's very own personal Jos Stam.

  6. Wow! That's an impressive lineup of features! I had no idea volumetrics could be used in all those scenarios.

    I want to try it NOW! But as Farsthary said in his blog,

    “Good, Beautiful and Cheap" pick two.

    So I guess I'll donate some money in the meantime ;)

    (@bart: Why do I have to login to make a comment?)

  7. @redbyte: if you want to post under a registered name, you'll have to log in. We took this measure because had a little problem with someone impersonating someone else a while back.

  8. @bob2bob Multiple Light Scattering is used to properly render light inside of a volume when it is from multiple sources, in simple terms ;) It is similar to SSS but for volumes.

  9. What makes this upcoming feature so delightful for me is that Raul has replied to my inquisitive e-mails with his own two hands. That's a level of intimacy that no other 3D package can offer me. :D

  10. Man, yet again something for the history books of blender. Let me jus say this is an inspiration to beginner programmers to really get to see what programming can do. I'm doing python right no but i cant wait to jump to the big C#!

  11. hitechB, I'm no expert but I think most of Blender is in C and C++, I don't think any of it is in C#. I myself am trying to learn C, so I can attempt to help develop Blender, though at this rate I find myself thinking I'll look like a second rate programmer that's just migrating code over, nothing more.

    This is some amazing stuff, and I can't wait for it to be in the main Blender trunk!

  12. Phenomenal looking early screen shots.
    Just as I'm wrapping on my 1st project using some blender internal lighting tricks I'd love to have tried this new engine out :D

    Looking forward to this one when (how ever long it takes) it's done :D

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