It's Parti Time!

There are a bunch of us working on thesis right now who want to use parti volumes for generating volumetric light fog. Unfortunately parti volumes require a bit too much setup; creating transmats, making connections to shading groups, connecting lights etc etc. It all adds up to quite a bit of setup when you're doing it across multiple scene files. So I decided to write a little interface for quickly creating and modifying parti volumes.

The interface exposes the most important mental ray render settings, allows you to select lights and create a parti volume that has those lights already attached, and allows you to add lights to existing parti volumes.

• "Auto Volume" has to be checked on and "Shadow Ray Depth" have to be set to at least 5 in order to cast volume shadows.
• The most important quality settings are the min and max step length attributes of the parti volume. Setting this too low will cause render times to shoot through the roof.

"Parti on Wayne."

"Parti on Garth."