What is so interesting about this?
This is a demonstration of Krakatoa rendering without any particles in the scene!
Coming to you in Beta 2…
So is this possibly culling voxels to a mesh?
- Chad
A bit more universal. It creates a grid of particles inside the volume which can then be rendered as particles, as voxels, or saved as a particle cloud to disk and deformed by the mesh using KSW. So there ARE particles (2M in this case), but only during rendering, not in the scene. You add a Krakatoa GeoVolume modifier to any geometry object, specify the distance between the points and Krakatoa fills the volume with particles on the fly during rendering/saving. The grid can be jittered to get a random distribution, and we intend to add surface data acquisition like Normals, UVs etc.
It likes closed volumes, but other than culling, it is more tolerant and can handle a teapot with all its holes pretty nicely.
Interesting…
Is the grid view aligned, or object aligned?
And for the properties (color, density, normal), are you trying to get from the surface or from the material assigned to the surface?
- Chad
It is object-aligned. We are not getting any properties yet. When we do, we will read normal, UVs, Vertex Color channel and possibly respect the Material IDs. The color/density properties are taken from the material assigned to the object, so if there are 3D maps involved, it behaves as if you had a PRT Loader with a material assigned.
Nice. Very nice… But you can read normals from a texture, too, no?
I guess you could read in whatever map you wanted to whatever channel, in theory. Like UV’s could come from the Refraction map, or whatever.
I downloaded all the Stanford models, here is another test, this time rendered as particles (looks the same as voxels, but env. reflections with voxels are not in yet)
KRA_Dragon_Reflection_Turntable_v001.mov (3.67 MB)
That’s cool, this may seem a silly noobish question, if you were to use a shell modifier could you just populate the shell volume? I guess maybe it is not directly related to this functionality or maybe it is.
Nice turntable BTW 
Yes, you could add a Shell modifier and populate just the shell volume, but I am pushing for a built-in Shell capability in the GeoVolume modifier so you could filter out particles farther than N units from the surface and thus generate particles only within a shell distance (we support this with Particle Culling already).
wow this is really cool!
Here is another example of using GeoVolume to fill a 1M polygons mesh.
It took 4 seconds to generate 2.8M particles in the volume without surface data acquisition, but since I needed normals for the Env. Reflection, it took 13 seconds.
Then the particles were saved to a PRT file and loaded into PFlow where they were animated using a Krakatoa Geometry Volume to trigger the effect and some gravity to pull them down.
Render time was around 20 seconds/frame.
Before you ask, yes, a dedicated GeoVolume Birth operator would be really useful…
Guilty as charged!
Exploding human arms is OK though… 
LOL - (You can do anything you want to the Stanford bunny or the armadillo.)
Here are some of the things I did to the bunny…
Why the folks at Stanford insist on scanning religious statues is beyond me.
- Chad
Just curious, Is the second Bunny using the HairPRT or similar?
First and second Bunny use the HairAndFur2PRT script and the Max Hair WSM. The inside of the bunny is rendered as pinkish voxels to give it the “flesh” feeling.
The third bunny is pure voxel render with no hair involved, but still looks pretty fluffy
The third bunny is plush ( I guessed it was a voxel only as you can see the voxel stepping, something really dense FumeFX smoke is famous for) the color and light distribution over the surface looks really nice, gives it a very soft cuddly look…
Now Chad can give it the exploding arm treatment 
j/k
Sorry, it’s a ceramic bunny. Needs more of a shattering effect. I think I might actually have a CT of that bunny around here somewhere. Levoy used to be into that sort of thing too.
EDIT: Found it. Maybe I’ll give it a whirl.
- Chad