OTOY Forums

So I did some thinking, and I wondered what happened if the same mesh had faces with different volumetric (medium/scattering/absorpion) materials.

I had some thoughts like maybe it would blend through the materials through the volume or something.
Anyway the best thing to do is some experiments, and here are my results:

Model is simply a cube with different colored scatter volumes on each face.




So apparently what happens is that volume materials don't mix at all and are not even recognized through the volume except for at the surface for transmission/index/reflection values.

This isn't too bad but I wanted to call this to attention as I think it would be pretty cool if materials were volumetric too (not entirely sure how that would work though, that's for Refractive Software to figure out)

I was also experimenting with textures as inputs for absorption maps



Again it looks like a surface-only thing. I completely understand this for 2D images, but maybe there should be a 3D map node that allows for 3D generated patterns for volumetric inputs.

The map here is Turbulent Noise which is a 3-dimensional algorithm which I think could be relatively simple to map through a volume (or maybe not?)
You might need a distance transform inwards into the mesh for an extrapolated "volume map" or something so maps follow the shape of the mesh.
Just something to think about