Volumetric Renders

I’ve spent a bit more time both getting some decent volumetrics source data (via Mantaflow for the fluid simulations and better self-created procedural clouds for the images below) and improving Imagine’s Volumetrics rendering capabilities.

Below are two animations rendered of smoke fluid simulations:

Smoke filling a virtual tank:
Full Video

Smoke in Cornell Box:
Full Video

I’ve added importance sampling (not MIS yet - currently there’s a separate integrator for anything with volumetrics in it) of mediums, so noise is reduced a bit, and I’ve optimised several things - calculating the transmission integration through the medium for lighting is now done with double the step distance than Camera and other GI rays use (I could probably do the same for diffuse GI rays in the future), and I’ve added data window extents to my voxelbuffer format, both of which together give significant speedups (the latter especially with trilinear filtering and sparse volume extent).

I’ve also added initial emission support, but the results are currently pretty noisy.

Accurate Ocean Waves

I’ve now implemented the ability to create geometry for accurate open ocean waves, based on Jerry Tessendorf’s “Simulating Ocean Water” paper.

This is orders of magnitude more realistic than the previous hack effort I did (see previous post), and accurately models wave and wind interaction for very accurate wave shapes, specifically the tapered crests of waves.

Animations

I’ve been messing around with simple animations rendered out of Imagine recently, and I’ve put some of them up on Vimeo:

Robot Instances:
Full Video

Depth Of Field:
Full Video