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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.