I ve been using daz iray a fair bit, but am beginning to have questions about using it and its products. I ve a fair few shaders for iray and I ve seen that content creators like Sickleyield produce what appear to be volumetric effects (Fog, Smoke) however I ve a suspicion that these are all planes with bitmaps applied rather than truly volumetric. I know that the Philosopher has a Godrays and Volumetric lights product designed for iray that may truly be volumetric, but looking at other volumetric shaders - either free or payware most if not all seem to be designed to work with 3delight rather than Iray? Is this correct?

I suppose I may be hoping for too much in iray and Daz, after all I only have to turn caustics on using version 4.8 to usually have an instant crash to desktop! But if anyone can point me to Iray products that do produce volumetric effects - for things like fog, water shaders etc Id be very interested.

The Godrays are also planes with images on them, albeit done very well. I think DS may need a few more updates (and maybe Iray as well) before we get true volumetrics in DS. Having said that, you MIGHT be able to get them now (I'm just not sure if DS supports it) if you can make a shader in MDL and get it into DS. MDL is the shader language that Iray uses. I know there are some nodes in the Shader Mixer for MDL, I'm just not certain if any volumetric materials can be made with them at the current time.

Laurie

sample scenes (The sample scenes use only primatives, but are 4.9!)

That is 'proper' volumetric lighting. Sickleyield demonstrated a method of putting in a cube and setting it's SSS values.

Yes, I use retrodevil's atmosphere tool which does use proper volumetrics...the air/haze type of volumetrics like in the above image. As for clouds and things like that, as I said, they MAY be possible thru the shader mixer and MDL shader nodes, but I'm not sure since I don't use shader mixer yet. :)

Laurie