TFD and Maxwellrender

Hi all,
I’m interested in using TFD alongside Maxwellrender and was wondering wether this combo works and produces good results…
Did anybody try an succeed?

I’d be happy to hear that. Unfortunately I can’t get past a pretty uniform and boring look, because Maxwell demo crashes when loading the vdb grids, that I could use to texture the fluid.

Cheers

Maxwell does not support rendering TFD volumes directly. But you could try to export your TFD caches as VDB files and render those.
See Quick bcf2vdb guide for more details.

If you want an unbiased render engine try Arnold…it supports TFD out off the box and allows you to control the shading direct from the TFD settings

@jascha: thank you, I followed the instructions in the manual, the problem is, that I can setup a volume object in maxwell studio (I’m on c4d r21 and there is no maxwell plugin or demo for c4d r21 yet) and import the vdb and the vdb grid. When rendering it keeps crashing. Without the grid it renders but as a ‘solid’ volume though with the correct shape.
@paul: I’m already on maxwell though only on v3 so that I’d have to upgrade… arnold for sure is a top renderer, I just refuse the subscription way…cycles from insydium could probably do the job…

This may sound blunt…but…sounds like a Maxwell issue and you really need to speak to them

You’re absolutely right I suppose, the problem is, that lately consistency and communication over at nextlimit are, well, …not what they were.
Therefore I was trying to find out here.
I posted in the maxwell forum and got no reply, the community has suffered in the last years of quasi total absence of nextlimit.
Thank you anyway!

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Sounds indeed like a Maxwell related problem. I’m sure Next Limit will work it out swiftly if they can reproduce the issue.

Arnold, Octane and Redshift are the most commonly used render engines with TFD. Either of them can produce great volume renders. Regarding volumes the distinguishing factors wrt. TFD renders are mostly the usability of the volume shaders and the render speed. For the Realflow/TFD show case we found Octane to be the fastest. This was before the GPU version of Arnold was available and before Maxwell had volume support, though. It’s worth re-checking that every now and then.