I have seen Mental Ray do some amazing stuff in my time, but usually in a book somewhere, where the artist or author of the book, never ever gets into the actual method of creation or how the effect was done.

i am not here to be told about afterburn or pyrocluster. I want to do it without a plug-in.

I see images like this all the time. http://www.solardigital.com/Site/Procedural.html#6

Or this.

Perhaps maybe ... http://www.radioactive-sandwich.com/reel/clip_subaru_01_01.htm

All of these have something great in common, volumetrics. How are people creating these effects. And I don’t mean,

“parti_volume_shader to volume, then transmat to surface”..... I got all that. What I want to know is, how are artists able to add in the rippling smoke effect or actually tell mental ray to create a volume of an object?

This image here (http://www.awn.com/files/imagepicker/35/amelia02_NightSky.jpg) for instance, look at those clouds, what does the shader tree for a cloud like that look like? I can grab a sphere drop a noise on it to bubble it up a little, then apply some crazy “Cloud algorithm”? How?

What does a shader tree look like for a puffy cloud? i’ve spent years trying. Any ideas?

Good question.

i am not here to be told about afterburn or pyrocluster. I want to do it without a plug-in.

I don’t think this is being done with Max as it comes out of the box. The volumetric effects in Max are a bit limited. The traditional volume effects, fog, fire, vol light etc… are very old and not mr friendly. The mr Pati Volume is OK for some things, but I’ve not had any luck mapping it. It could be I don’t know what I’m doing, but mapping it using the 3D procedurals just seems to project the 2D pattern onto the next surface behind it, and I can’t get falloff within a volume to get a puff effect like Afterburn.
There are other mr volume shaders out there if you look, that seem to use 3D procedural maps. But again, that is straying from the original Max shaders.
I did see this tutorial on how to fake it with particles without any plugins or additional shaders. Still not sure if that is the answer you are looking for.

There’s an mr Solid Volume shader ?here, but I must admit I can’t make much sense of it. Does anyone know of any tutorial or documentation for it? There are a lot of parameters and map slots and I don’t know what they do. So far I’ve only managed to get flat shaded colour with mapping flat on the surface.

but tis is for maya, I don’t have maya. Is there a way to get it into max?

It says Maya, but it’s for mr, which is in both programs. Copy the .mi (include files) into your Max/mental ray/shaders_autoload/inclulde folder, and the .dll files into the shaders_autoload/shaders folder.
You need to re-start Max.
Strangely it doesn’t go in the Volume slot, but the Surface slot.
Also note, it’s 32 bit only.

have you ever tried using the MR UV Generator?

That’s a new one to me. Where is that?