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About Primivol

Primivol

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Primivol is a set of 4 volumetric primitives for Carrara. It contains a Fire primitive, a Cloud one, a Smog and a Rising Smoke. But these 4 primitives are in fact some build in presets of a far more generalist volumetric renderer. Primivol can render any 3D shader as a volumetric primitive, and can alter their shape with a set of modifiers and ramp-off functions. Lighting, self-shadow, density, color and many other parameters are accessible through the interface and can be precisely adjusted and animated.

An evaluation version can be downloaded following the Try Primivol links at the top of this page. In evaluation mode, a red and a green sphere will be renderered in 2 corners of the primitives, and the primitives will only render a limited number of pixels, until Carrara is restarted.

All the documentation is available through the tooltips, so the description here is just a few points to know before starting building complex volumes.

All these primitives share the same rendering engine and so have a common UI for their settings. This common part is divided in 3 panels:

1 The General Panel

This panel is used to set the quality, the 3D shape, the self shadow and the modifiers on the volume.
The Quality setting and the self shadow setting influence directly the rendering speed. The self shadows are pre-computed so when a volume with self shadows is rendered, some time is needed before rendering the first pixel. The rest of the rendering will be as fast as a regular rendering. Note that only distant lights (sun and moon light included) have an effect on the self shadows.
To get projected shadows, the light must use raytraced shadows. Shadow Buffer works only with faceted primitives.
The 3D shape of the volume is set with one of the 4 build-in noises, or with any 3D shaders of the scene. So for example all the Velouté noises can be rendered as volumes.
The deformers work like Carrara ones, and can be stacked one over another. The basic version contains 9 deformers (Bulge, Noise, Punch, Scale, Shift, Stretch, Taper, Twist and Wave), but more can be added later.

2 The Ramp Off Panel

This panel controls the way the intensity decreases with distance. 6 presets are available, but custom preset can be build using the 16 ramp off functions in the right part of the panel.

3 The Color Panel

By default, the color is chosen in a color gradient determined by the local volume density. But the color can also be set using ramp off functions (here too 6 presets are available) or with any 3D shader of the scene.

4 The custom panels

Each primitive has its own panel with its customs settings.

Here are the 4 basics primitives rendered with their default settings: Fog, Rising Smoke, Cloud and Fire.

5 Render through mesh

Primivol can also renders volumetric primitives using any mesh from the scene to delimit its shape. The short movie here shows an animated fire primitive using a text primitive to determine its shape.

Here's another render of the same primitive in a less compressed file format. The volumetric primitive and the text primitive used to shape it are render side by side.

To choose the mesh from the ones available in the scene, there's a new popup menu in the Ramp Off panel of the primitive. The Smoothing slider beside gives some control on the drop of density when the gas is near the sides of the mesh.

The mesh shape can be combined with the other ramp off options. To see only the mesh shape, all the other ramp off options must be unchecked (the 1st preset does it).

6 Sample Primitives

A fiew Primivol samples are available from the download page.