In December of 2020 I used the Christmas holiday to learn a bit of Octane volumetrics and test out lighting and cloud setups. Octane to this day still has the best fast-displacement method (which is why it’s such a mainstay for environment concept art) but Cycles’ recent RTX upgrades and K-Cycles addon are doing a lot to fill in the gap. So much so that I am tending to prefer staying put in Blender instead of hopping around to cycles builds.
The following are density fields modulated by a bunch of procedural noise, both warping by using noise to offset UVWs, and cutting holes by simple multiplication.
These are just some simple lighting tests using Octane. I used them as sources a painterly image reconstruction houdini tool.
The houdini painterly tool started as a tutorial by Animatrix on gradient descent. Instead of descending a literal heightmap and making countour lines, I wondered if it would be possible to adapt it to a “heightmap” that considers important image details in 2D and traces their contours. These are some results of that investigation
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Here are some videos of the tool in action: