LogInMarc Whitelaw shared his shader R&D and scene setup progress with Solaris and Karma.
Marc Whitelaw
Marc Whitelaw, Lead Compositor at Industrial Light & Magic, whose impressive photorealistic cloud simulations we've featured before, has shared some new captivating studies of different times of day created as part of his workflow practice using Houdini 20.5.
The artist explained that the ocean in this scene is actually just a picture. While he attempted to create a realistic ocean simulation, the scene was very large in scale, but using pictures ended up being an excellent reference for lighting. Marc Whitelaw also mentioned that rendering this in 4K using an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 took about 45 minutes per frame.
While volumes can typically be heavy to render, there are some shortcuts that can be used to reduce the render time without compromising quality. In addition to having a powerful GPU, the artist suggests lowering the volume limit, with a personal recommendation of setting it to 32. Adjusting the Albedo Contribution will increase the volume's brightness. Next, reduce the step rate until it starts to break, then slightly increase it again. You can also apply denoising in post-production for more control over the final result.
Marc highlighted that clouds depend on internal scattering, so these changes may reduce detail and impact their appearance. However, with careful adjustments, you should be able to find a balance between visual quality and render efficiency.
You can also watch Marc's video tutorial series, which covers the basic setup for rendering cloud VDBs in Houdini 20 using Karma:
See more of Marc's works here and join our 80 Level Talent platform and our new Discord server, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, TikTok, and Threads, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.