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I have personally never been satisfied with smoke tutorials, smoke effects seen on various videos also caustic effects applied to objects that are behind other objects, like ice in a glass with fluid, so i decided to do something and share. Many people did amazing work, but like there was smth missing. Maybe this will help someone or give some ideas. I could have done FOV and a few more tweaks in post production but i'm a lazy ba$tard. Some settings are include in video. A tip: when making cigarette smoke, make it a bit transparent and add a bit of glow if you prefer, and avoid compositing transparent smoke using alpha, results are not as good. [ATTACH=CONFIG]47434[/ATTACH] 3ds Max 2010 64bit FumeFX Vray 90 frames rendered @ 720p HD, render time 1h 27min Intel i3 8GB DDR3 RAM GTX 460 GLH 1GB DDR5 sata3 controller speedup done VrayRT and PhysX for preview custom improved with Marwing http://www.r-labs.net

Hello all, I've been searching for some free plugins (or very cheap) or techniques to render volumetric smoke mainly to create clouds which react to the sunlight in the background of my architectural renderings. I know about afterburn, fume fx, and all the other plugins which work amazing but given the economy I don't have the money to spend on these plugins right now (expecially since they are just for the backgrounds or animations) and I wish to remain honest. I'm using 3ds max and mental ray and ive tried the mental ray volumetric shaders to try to fake it but to no avail. I used the environment fire effect in 3ds max but it doesnt work with mental ray and it doesnt have self shading. Ive tried particle systems with opacity maps mapped on planes etc... and got close but its still not behaving how I want. Ive tried modeling 3d clouds and making several different materials using sss and other techniques but doesnt work. I remember years ago (around 3ds max 3-4) I found some useful volumetric smoke plugins but i cant remember where or what they were called (maybe blur reyes or something). Anyone have any ideas. Im not looking for the plugins to look amazing just something to render volumetric effects that looks decent enough. Thanks for the help