volume displacement into geometry

[Anonymous]

Hi.

Does anyone know if its possibly to turn a volume displacement into a polymesh somehow?

Or can i export it as a vdb to read into houdini? Or any other workaround for that?

Thanks

Bert

[madsd]

You can scan any volume material/object to approximated triangle mesh provided the density is very high and there is no transparency.

[Anonymous]

What do you mean by "scan"? If you don`t mind do you think you can explain further please?

[madsd]

I dont know any other way than approaching the case as you would approach any other physical item. You simply do your construct, give it some random surface shader, put it in a studio shot rig and treat it as if it was a physical model you would take photos of. Then you take photos of the model from every possible angle, and use a post application to load the images into that can reconstuct a 3d mesh from the images. Do note you can get very high quality 3d scans this way, but never 100% accurate.

Attached some examples I did to illustrate, these are real life items I photoscanned. So you go about the volume in same way, as mentioned, obviously, you cant do it with a cloud, so make sure density is very high so the volume is compact, and add texture to the surface so the scanning software has an easier task at reconstructing the triangles, onces mesh is done you can simply reshade in houdini.

Its a hardcore Ghetto approach, but it will get the job done.

Autodesk had an app called 123D that could do it for free at a point.

[Anonymous]

Oh. I see, thank you very much for your explanation but i think its a bit of a missunderstanding.

I was talking about the arnold volume displacement feature:

https://support.solidangle.com/display/A5AFMUG/Polymesh+to+Volume

I was wondering if i can turn a VolumeDisplacement like seen on this page back into a polymesh.

If that makes sense?

[madsd]

No, I understood exactly what you meant, unfortunatly, the only way as I know of, is as described above. So obviously, the more detailed your displacement is, the less likely you are to want to shoot enough trace images to cover all angles of the inticate details. Technically, it is possible to cover everything, but it will require 1000s of frames and take a very long time to render.

Doesnt Houdini have a feature to turn a volume to mesh? you could construct it in different ways. You can just build a houdini volume doing the same thing then convert to mesh, camera projections and so forth, use same technic ~

.ass file perhaps?