Geo to vectron ? Tweet

[WoutTgh]

Hi,
just wondering if the Houdini plugin support importing geometry into something vectron can read. Add the option of plugging in textures to that and you get virtually infinite detailed displacement with very little pre processing time ? Anyone? he ? sounds good ? :p

[WoutTgh]

Soooooo, I got a little carried away but I managed to get something kinda working. Learend a lot about SDF's and Vectron.

I figured, you can't import geometry in a vectron shader but you can import images so I made a setup in Houdini that writes out voxel slices to an image and then wrote a vectron shader to read in the right slices. Kinda cool ! Now , of course, I'd like to somehow "mesh" the voxel grid or smooth it somehow, not sure how to do that...

[WoutTgh]

Little update:
On the left: points in Houdini, on the right: Octane rendering the points with a given radius with Vectron

[Renbry]

I'd love to know what you're up to with this workflow - it's really interesting! What are the benefits to you in rendering Vectron versions of geometry ? is there a reference image you can share or ideas of what interesting outcomes can come from this ? i'm keen to know : )

[WoutTgh]

Well, the idea of no geometry and doing infinite resolution surface detail on the gpu was what drew me to Vectron. After experimenting with it and understanding it a bit more, I came to the conclusion that's it's not really suited for what I had in mind. When you get to the point of having surface detail comparable to a mesh +displacement workflow, it quickly becomes very slow not to mention it requires a lot of extra steps and effort. For now, I think Vectron is best used for what you've probably seen already, rendering of fractals / math formulas.

[Renbry]

Interesting.

Did you notice the "Meshlets" tech coming in future Octane ? Jules described it as Nanite for Octane. It looks amazing!

[WoutTgh]

ooooh, that's the first I've heard of it, sound very interesting ! Do you have a link ? :p