I'm afraid your solution does not work. Volumes look real ugly and many underlying problems exist: no boolean etc. (but read on!). Try using a ball and a fire volume. Then try an imported ball and apply same volume material. Very different and positively ugly. I've been trying to find a way to do a Brycean explosion. For this I need expanding gases and fire. Volume objects offer a nice looking way to do those. But there's a problem: You can't put two volume object together and booleans don't work. All you get are ugly render errors. I tried every angle I could think off. I even tried to model a sequence of meshes for the explosion. But then I found that Volume material can be applied to only bryce primitives (where they don't work correctly). BUT!! Today I tried ROCKS!! And lo and behold Volumes work there beautifully. Boolean operation work also!! You can stretch, punch a hole with a negative, do fire with black smoke etc.. There's only a small drawback that you cannot edit rocks but at least now I have a building block for volumes that work. Fellow brycers: test it and report what you got.