Brandy Ryan
Just before we signed off in 2023, we posted our best wishes for the holidays from all of us on the Autodesk Automotive team.
Pascal Siefert, Senior Technical Product Manager on our team, created a digital Christmas card that showcases the recently released Volume Rendering feature in VRED 2024.2. Pascal Siefert, Senior Technical Product Manager on our team, took the German Räuchermänchen (toy incense burner) into a holiday scene, added a VR headset, and gave him VR controllers.
Curious about how he did it? Here’s Pascal’s workflow.
The idea: showcase volume rendering in VRED 2024.2
This year, I wanted to create a digital Christmas card that showcases the recently released Volume Rendering feature in VRED 2024.2.
My idea was to create a visualization with Fusion360 that smokes, steams, or bursts fire, with a little German Christmas touch. While the southern part of Germany sets up nativity scenes during Christmas, the eastern part, the area I´m from, is known for its smoking men, also known as Räuchermänchen.
These are small handcrafted wooden figures in which you place a small incense candle with scents like frankincense, pine, or cinnamon, and enjoy them for decoration and their fragrance. It seemed like a funny idea to me to put a VR headset on this cute little smoking man, give him controllers in his hands, and add some festive decorations around.
Placing the smoking man in a nice environment, simulating some smoke and letting it play on an infinite loop was quite festive and cozy to me. This is the German version of Yuletide logs.
3D content creation in Fusion 360
The Räuchermänchen figures are mainly made out of wood created on a lathe, so its parts consist of simple rotational bodies. Fusion 360 seemed to be the perfect tool for me to create the basic body parts.
This was a very simple task to complete in Fusion 360 and took only an hour or two.
To add some color to this small, somewhat plain figure, I used Adobe Substance 3D Painter.
Adobe Substance Painter is also a relatively simple tool for applying different materials to the various body parts and painting directly on the 3D model, similar to using a real brush. It allowed me to give the figure some personality and bring it to life.
I enjoyed using the recently introduced Path Tool to create fine and accurate brush strokes, which gave the Räuchermänchen a cartoonish look and feel.
The 3D models used in the scene were downloaded from TurboSquid and imported as FBX to VRED.
Volume scatter material
To create an atmospheric volume effect in the overall scene, VRED offers the creation of scatter volumes. Those can be homogeneous or heterogeneous (noise) and be used for effects such as dust or fog, to create realistic visuals of light beams or crepuscular rays, also known as god-rays.
VDB volumes
In VRED 2024.2, there is an added feature that allows the import of OpenVDB or NanoVDB files or sequences, along with the ability to manipulate their appearance in the Material Editor. The VDB format is widely used for storing volumetric data of complex simulations, such as clouds, fire, smoke, and explosions, in a voxel grid.
To create these VDB files, I utilized EmberGen, a real-time volumetric fluid simulation tool developed by JangaFX. EmberGen offers VDB export capabilities and provides useful presets, such as the candle flame, which I used without any modifications.
For creating the wispy smoke that comes out of the Rächermänchen’s mouth, I imported the 3D model as a collider in EmberGen and adjusted the smoke simulation until it met my requirements. The real-time visualization of parameter changes in EmberGen is so powerful and such a game changer.
After all the components were ready, I assembled them in VRED and animated them as an infinite loop. The final result was rendered as an image sequence with Full GI and converted into a GIF sequence.
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If you’re not already an Alias or VRED user or would like to expand your skills at home, get started by downloading the new Alias & VRED 2024 Learning Editions:
For Alias Learning Edition, click here.
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