Volume Fog node

[scooternva]

In the LightWave 2019.1.4 plugin, the "Octane Medium" group does not seem to include a "Volume Fog" node like there is with the Cinema 4D plugin.

I'm trying to follow this tutorial for creating a planet with an Octane fog volume atmosphere:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4OYR8MCI_xw

At 3:41 in the video the artist shows how the OctaneRender plugin for Cinema4D can make a sphere-shaped fog volume that wraps nicely around the planet with nice fuzzy blurred edges. He makes the fog sphere slightly larger so that the planet fits inside:

Fog in the shape of a sphere, with nicely fuzzed edges

But when I went to the "Octane Medium" group in the LightWave node editor, there is no "Volume Fog" node. The only options available don't seem to work the way that the Volume Fog node works in Cinema4D. And when I try to apply one of the volume nodes that is in the "Octane Medium" group to a sphere with a specular material (this seems to be the only way to get the LightWave volume nodes to work), I get a hard edge on the sphere.

You're too sharp! Where is the "Make Fuzzy" button??

Is there a technical reason (e.g., a limitation of the LightWave SDK) why the Cinema4D Volume Fog medium is not available in the plugin for LightWave?

Thanks.

[juanjgon]

Hi,

In the LightWave plugin, you have a custom object plugin to configure all the Octane volumetric features. In a null object, you can create a procedural volumetric object from a cube or sphere shape, that later can be configured inside the volumetrics node editor. Attached you have an example scene.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[scooternva]

Thank you Juanjo.

I'm going to get a little huffy here: OTOY needs to stop working on new features and get the @#$! documentation updated.

I actually stumbled upon the answer last night after searching this forum and finding this post from a few months back that I remembered reading: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=72180&start=10#p366096

OctaneRender's cool features do no one any good if they're not documented. If I hadn't remembered and located that post from last summer (or if you hadn't replied) I probably never would have stumbled onto having to dig deep down into an object's custom properties to control volumetrics. (Everything else in OR is done in the LightWave Node Editor; it would never have occurred to me to go looking somewhere else.) And even knowing that the volumetrics are controlled in a custom LW object property isn't enough--there is no documentation on how these settings work (or if there is I can't find it). Fortunately the aforementioned post also includes an example scene, so I'm able to do some experimentation with that example as a starting point, as well as the zipfile you posted just now.

OTOY needs to commit to keeping documentation up-to-date permanently, not just as a one-time "catch-up". (In other words, I trust that technical writer you mentioned a while back is not a contract worker who is being terminated after getting the plugin doc up to snuff.) OTOY also needs to ensure that new features (or changes in existing features) are not released without the documentation being updated in lockstep.

You guys sometimes make it really hard to love you.

Rant mode off.

Thanks.

[scooternva]

One last thing: you did not answer my question about the Volume Fog node, which appears to be quite different in LightWave vs. Cinema4D.

This is from 2:51 in the aforementioned video (https://youtu.be/4OYR8MCI_xw):

Are these settings buried somewhere else in LightWave??

Even after digging through the custom object properties dialog box in LightWave, I'm still not finding some of the settings that are available in the OctaneRender Cinema4D plugin; they just simply don't seem to exist in the LightWave plugin. For example, where do you control the edge feathering of the volumetric medium in LightWave?

Thanks.

[juanjgon]

This is not an Octane native feature. The volume fog object is something done on the plugin's side, so each plugin has its own workflow and parameters. In any case it is near the same. You have the size (that in LW is configured using the grid coordinates min and max parameteres), the voxel size (that in LW is configured using the grid resolution), the edge feather (configured using the volume falloff), etc.

Be aware that the plugins only can match the Octane native features, but there are a lot of tools added on the plugin's side that are not available for all the plugins, or they don't have the same features.

Thanks,
-Juanjo

[scooternva]

OK, so would this be why the "Mesh" volume shape doesn't work? No matter what I try I can only get the "Sphere" and "Cube" shapes to work with a procedural volume; "Mesh" does nothing.

UPDATE: Never mind. The culprit turned out to be non-existent documentation. After searching the forum I found this post from a year ago:
viewtopic.php?f=36&t=69737&p=351632&hil ... pe#p351649

The mesh volumes only work with triangulated meshes. It doesn't support objects with quads or ngons

Of course, this crucial information was not in the LightWave plugin documentation, since that manual was written for version 3.0.6 and is 2½ years old. Procedural volumes that use a mesh for their shape didn't exist back then. So I checked the standalone OctaneRender documentation... and it wasn't there either (or if it is, it's buried somewhere other than the page that talks about volume media).

Update. The. Documentation. PLEASE.