But we would like better integration of the lighting if possible. Two ways we can think of are:
1) In the case of particle systems or emitters that are driving FumeFX create non-rendering sphere emitter objects that track them in Octane. Unsure if this will look good though.
2) Create a mesh from a FumeFX volume which we could then set as emitter in Octane - but I am not sure how well that would work and there seems to be no direct way of doing this with FumeFX.
I wondered if anyone had tried anything similar?
Also in the case of using FumeFX for clouds and to cast a shadow down onto an Octane rendered scene we are not sure what to do other than comping. Perhaps baking a top down view of the clouds into a stack of opacity textures to be mapped on planes above the scene in Octane could work well enough?
Obviously it would be great if Otoy worked with the FumeFX guys to integrate volumetrics in properly with the 3dsmax plugin but I guess that's not on the immediate radar
