Camera Inside Volumes Playground!

[maru]

A new feature added in our Chaos Corona 10 for 3ds Max daily builds now allows you to place a camera inside volumes!

Add volumetrics to your scene such as smoke, fire, water, clouds etc in the form of a .vdb file (fire/smoke), or just an object using a Corona Volume Material (smoke/fog) or Corona Physical Material with refraction and some volumetric effects enabled (water/other liquids/glass). You can then place your camera inside the volume and it will render fine.
Optionally, you can enable ''Camera Physical Size'' in the Corona Camera. This lets you place your camera at the border of two or more volumes and see the volumetric effects as expected (an example of this is partially submerging a camera so that you can see what is outside of the water and underwater).

See:
- New Volume Resolving in Corona 10 article in our Help Center
- C4D Playground Thread

Go ahead and share your results here. These are some of ours ;)

[pokoy]

Great that it's possible now.
One thing since it shows nice in your last image - it seems sun is not dimmed correctly when it's behind a thick volume. Even if the volume is thick enough to blocks any light the sun disc will still remain visible. Hopefully this can be resolved, it's certainly an undesired effect in some situations.

[alexyork]

Not sure if this is the best thread for this, but I'm discovering that the "camera physical size" parameter of a coronacamera is always oriented the same way regardless of rotation of camera (with or without target), meaning that if you have your camera for example pointing at 45 degrees instead of directly up, down, left or right, it will clip the apex of the "box" that it lives within.

This is with 11HF2. Is this fixed in 12.x? Or is there a workaround so that it properly follows the orientation of the camera?



Many thanks,

[Aram Avetisyan]

Not sure if this is the best thread for this, but I'm discovering that the "camera physical size" parameter of a coronacamera is always oriented the same way regardless of rotation of camera (with or without target), meaning that if you have your camera for example pointing at 45 degrees instead of directly up, down, left or right, it will clip the apex of the "box" that it lives within.

This is with 11HF2. Is this fixed in 12.x? Or is there a workaround so that it properly follows the orientation of the camera?



Many thanks,

Hi Alex,

Thanks for the bump. This has been fixed at least as of v12 update 1, maybe even in v12.
This was somehow missed from the changelog, will add it.

Not only it takes into consideration the camera transformations but also accounts for camera tilt.

[alexyork]

Great news! Thanks for confirming. Looking forward to updating to C12.2. Just waiting for all the usual suspects to update to support it first and we can then test this.

[alexyork]

Glad to see this align-with-camera is now working. But one issue remains that we ideally need the "camera" to be a rectangular cuboid i.e. ability to separately control it's 3 x dimensions. Because right now if you want to do this half-in-water effect you're forced to determine it with a cube, so if you want a close cut (say 10cm away from camera) it means you can still see the far faces of the cube in the render causing artifacts. We need to be able to make the width and height separate from the depth basically. As of right now I'm still having to overcome this by using a custom invisible box that I use as a coronaslicematerial to cut out of the water. Sorry no preview to share as it's under NDA.

[Aram Avetisyan]

Glad to see this align-with-camera is now working. But one issue remains that we ideally need the "camera" to be a rectangular cuboid i.e. ability to separately control it's 3 x dimensions. Because right now if you want to do this half-in-water effect you're forced to determine it with a cube, so if you want a close cut (say 10cm away from camera) it means you can still see the far faces of the cube in the render causing artifacts. We need to be able to make the width and height separate from the depth basically. As of right now I'm still having to overcome this by using a custom invisible box that I use as a coronaslicematerial to cut out of the water. Sorry no preview to share as it's under NDA.

Given the vast customization of the slicing volume with slicer material (custom shape, linking to camera, animating if needed), I don't think it is worth adding the same functionality (which will clutter the UI for a simple thing) into camera. Camera physical volume is intended for the general-use-case quick medium cuts aligned with the camera. I believe it does the same thing as slicer material under the hood, so good thinking on the workaround :)