http://www.blender.org/developme...54-beta/volume-rendering/

3D Studio DOS to 3ds Max 2010
Windows XP 64
NVidia Quadro FX 3700
Dual Quad Xeon, 6Gb Ram

There is the mr Parti Volume shader (participating media). It can fill the scene or an object with a volume that reacts with light in a physically acurate way. I have yet to find a way of mapping it with 3D procedural maps, what tends to happen is the map is projected in 2D onto the geometry behind. It is a shame this does not work.
Some of those smoke and cloud effects can be done with volumetric plugins like Afterburn and Fume FX, or can be faked with various particle methods.
It is about time the volume effects were updated in Max.
If anyone knows how to properly map Parti Volume, speak up.

Samab, thanks for the swift reply.

I want to use this for showing some mist/haze at the waterline of a ship in transit.

I tried using ‘facing’ particles, alpha mapped with a noise-like texture, but rendering times were unacceptable. I guess that has something to do with the alpha map.

It’s strange that free software like Blender has this feature, while MAX still does not have it.

3D Studio DOS to 3ds Max 2010
Windows XP 64
NVidia Quadro FX 3700
Dual Quad Xeon, 6Gb Ram

Oh, it’s the ship’s bow wave effect, always a tricky one to do convincingly. Ihave to say that parti volume is not fast to render at all, in fact it’s very slow, I would not use it for this effect, though it’s good for underwater murk. If it is applied to a sphere to make a volumetric puff, you can’t get it to falloff toward the edges. If you don’t have plugins for this I think you should stick with the particles.

I have the intersection spline of the hull with the water plane. I was planning to use this spline to sweep a volume and filling this volume with a volume shader.

However if the parti volume shader doesn’t fall of towards the edges of the volume it won’t work.

Samab, do you have any idea why the particles render extremely slow?

3D Studio DOS to 3ds Max 2010
Windows XP 64
NVidia Quadro FX 3700
Dual Quad Xeon, 6Gb Ram

It’s hard to say why it’s so slow without knowing the scene, but usually with particles it’s because of the number of them. In the context of a sea scene, if you have raytraced water the renderer can have a hard time doing all the reflections/refractions for so many objects.