Equi-Angular Homogeneous Volume Sampling

equiangular

    This adds an option in the Volume Sampling panel, which helps rendering lamps inside or near volumes with less noise. It can also increase noise though and needs improvements to support MIS and heterogeneous volumes, but since it’s useful in some cases already (especially world volumes) it’s there now.
    Based on the code in the old branch by Stuart, with modifications by Thomas and Brecht.

-Brecht, commit

Thomas rendered the image above with just 10 samples! Cycles isn’t as slow as you thought ;)

Volume Test

volume_spot
volume_spot (1)
volume_render

A long time ago in a version far far away, an anonymous user named ‘storm’ wrote a patch for volumetric rendering in cycles.

Recently, Thomas and Stuart (them crazy coder guys) made some changes and cleanups to the code – meaning it’s possible to download a patch, compile Blender and render some volumes!

Don’t get too excited just yet though, in it’s current state there’s no way to give it any fancy voxel textures from the smoke simulator or anything – all in due time!

volume_render_1

Images courtesy of Thomas Dinges, because I’m too lazy to compile it myself