This is a special post just for David McSween who is concerned that volumetric rendering is a bit slow. My demo material is a sort of.. grapey.. chocolatey.. gel.. thing. Lighting as ever by sIBL Archive.
Just by itself, the volume part of the material isn’t actually that much more of a CPU hit – in a build from the volumetrics branch:
- a pure glossy surface render takes ~1:59 (volumetrics switched off)
- a pure volume render takes ~2:08
- surface AND volume together take ~2:42
The same pure glossy surface render takes only 1:49 in the official build. So yeah, there’s a speed hit.
Volume rendering a fluid looks like a super-dense gas.
Here is a YouTube link to see it all in motion.