BA Volume Cloud is the fastest available Mray Volume shader for clouds for XSI.
This shader handles the whole volume rendering, it does not have any particle or texturing.
It has inputs for color and density to control the shape and the look of the volume.
It is like texturing an objects transparency with an matte. At the white parts the volume is visible, at the black parts of the texture the volume is completely transparent.
You have the whole freedom of the render tree as you like it.
You can plug nearly everything into the density for the volume, combine implicit primitives with particles, fractal textures and modeled polymeshes to get the shape that you want.
Key features
Fast shadow and density calculation with lookup table. Linear, cubic and full raytrace mode.
Normal calculation to render very dense dust
Support for single scattering
Highlights
Volumetric ambient occlusion
Preview mode for faster shading
Framebuffer support
Distance controled light absorption
Different illuminaiton/shading types (Flat, Lambert, Anisotropic, Rayleigh/Henyey-Greenstein )
Distortion input to distort the density input including particles
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