RND + PROBLEMS = MORE RND

saschagongala
Jul 29, 2015
1 min read

I have been spending a lot of time during the summer working on my short film. There are many things to model, many things to test and I am making a lot of progress. This is the first project I am going to use Houdini for all the FX on and by now I feel quite comfortable with this incredibly complicated software.

I recently spent some time looking into an OpenVDB worflow from Houdini to Maya and I have been comparing Arnold and Renderman for volume rendering. The results from these tests will probably influence the decision which renderer to use on the project.

In the past I have not been very happy with the way Arnold renders Maya fluids, but I am very happy with the results I am getting from the VDB. I will post some finished renders very soon.

I am struggeling a little with OpenVDB in Renderman, which is the renderer I have way less experience in. Renderman has a way to visualize the volume, whis is great, but it does not seem to work for me. I have created a topic in the renderman community to solve this problem.

Also rendering the volume does not work so far. For a while RIS was unable to render volumes which supposedly is not the case anymore. Just to be sure, I also rendered with REYES and the results are the same.