I’ve picked up an idea from my social media stream, rendering a bubble soup. for this example, I used the idea from Entagma’s tutorial using a flip simulation for bubble soup movement.
the Flip simulation is quite simple and needs fixes to get correct with UV Distortion, but focused on the rendering part. the idea is quite simple using Fluids Dynamics to distort the UV on a sphere. a texture mapped on a sphere the UV’s to drive the thickness of thin-film shader. I used the default ThinFilm feature of regular Arnold Shader. This makes the setup super simple, all you need is Spheres is distorted UV’s.
the rendering from Arnold GPU is a little slow for GPU rendering but the Arnold CPU is extremely fast, the render time for HD was 12 seconds on superslow Xeon CPU. it’s by far the fastest thin-film rendering on the CPU, I’ve seen so far.
raw rendering. I need only AA sample of 1. below is transmission albedo, it quite graphics look on its own.
it almost looks like infrared images from Nasa of Jupiter.
for the next iteration is will great the type animation / noised structure within the shader only. it should be easy to re-recreate the dynamics with noise fields.
The following Standard Surface shader settings were used to create a soap bubble.
i made 2 minutes video how to creat AOV passes with Arnold in Solaris. I am using the Arnold ROP node to deal the Variables names and LightPath expression for my own passes in LOP’s
here 2 minutes video how to create Lightgroups asses within LOPs (Solaris). in Houdini 19
Here’s a simple kick trick to get a list of AOVs and LPEs. The -laovs flag lists all the AOVs in the loaded scene, but if you give kick no input, you’ll get a list of all built-in AOVs defined by Arnold. this only works when you have arnoldSDK installed.
recently i did some water rendering in Arnold renderer, which you can see here. the shading worked quite well on the water and whitewater.
after this started to sim a wave Tunnel in Houdini Flips. a huge wave where you actually could surf. But i run into some trouble for water shading and whitewater look, i needed some reference.
I went to beach and took trusty NikonV1 camera with me to shoot some reference Photos. This are tiny Waves (50cm in height), but easy to take some pictures and good enough as shading reference.
the nice shot of miniature breaking wave
a nice snapshot of translucent effects of the wave here we can see droplets (whitewater) in close up
here we can see more Droplets / Whitewater with sun in out back. a good example for anisotropy effect on shading.
droplets turn white with sunlight, depending on the sun direction.
There multiple Ways to render realistic Water. The old school way is to render a polygon water surface and volume underneath to simulate the light scattering. we did similar things back in 2008 on the Avatar Movie with custom written shaders for Renderman. Sidefx added presets for Houdini for its Ocean setup’s. The render time of this method are modest but the shading can quite difficult depending on camera angle and light situation.
these Days in the age of Path tracers, there 2 ways, rendering it with Sub-Surface Scattering (SSS) or Transmission Depth.
Sub-Surface Scattering simulates the effect of light entering an object and scattering beneath its surface. Not all light reflects from a surface. Some of it will penetrate below the surface of an illuminated object. There it will be absorbed by the material and scattered internally. Some of this scattered light will make its way back out of the surface and become visible to the camera. This is known as ‘sub-surface scattering’ or ‘SSS’. SSS is necessary for the realistic rendering of materials such as marble, skin, leaves, wax, and milk. The SSS component in this shader is calculated using a brute-force raytracing method.
While the Transmission Depth attribute controls volumetric light absorption within the object (fog), the Scatter attribute controls what percentage of the light will be scattered instead of absorbed, effectively creating the murky effect of semi-transparent materials.
Depth Controls the depth into the volume at which the transmission color is realized. Increasing this value makes the volume thinner, which means less absorption and scattering. It is a scale factor so that you can set a transmission_color and then tweak the depth to be appropriate for the size of your object.
Scattering is very import if wanna shader deep Materials like Ocean water. For the scattering effect to work Scatter must have a dominant percentage value, and the Depth attribute must generally be much lower. also the Opaque attribute must be unchecked in the Arnold attributes of the object’s shape node for the light to be able to pass into the mesh and illuminate the volume.
Rendering with refraction Depth is more “physical correct” way, but it does account tiny organism (light blockers) in this case you add textures to simulate plankton in the water.
I choose go with SSS route. The tycial Surface Scattering shading model has a similar volume light scatter look. the look can be limited but it works in case deep Ocean water. the advantage: it full support with current Arnold GPU renderer (Depth transmission is not supported yet) and SSS shading model is also faster to render. In addition, I’ ve added an extra underwater bubble simulation with particles to increase the realism.
fractal landscapes rendering in AnroldGPU (pure beauty pass) it looks like an alien world or quantum realm world. i even add astronaut and mars rover in there, if you can spot them.
I starting to dig up old projects and scenes I’ve finished. the idea of this Project was to take my Fractals and scatter it into a landscape. the goal is to create a “real” alien landscape. I was looking into “alien landscape” art, but they’re much to find on the Internet. most alien landscape art is quite earth-like with uber-epics rocks formation or giant Mushrooms. the closed thing I found was from games like “no Mans Sky”, Ratchet&Clank or Starlink.
so, here we go here one attempt on an alien landscape. the camera flight is rendered with 5000 splines primitives done in Arnold renderer.
I am starting to test Arnold Renderer in Houdini Solaris. it took me a while to figure how to makes it work in Solaris context. I’ve need to create beauty render pass and render product with contour sampling.
its work pretty good, there some crashes from Solaria. the live render navigation is difficult to navigate, because it take 2nd sample round to generate hatches. the shading is yet quite simple, but i will start to generate more complex toon shadings.
visualization of the hypercube from a higher dimension with light simulation. the material, I’ve chosen, was a glass medium with the correct cauchy equation, rendered with Indigo Renderer. the spectral renderer break the light quite nicely and produce realistic caustics.
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