Love the look of the Sky Rig.
I was wondering if it was possible, through some Houdini magic, to convert it into a VDB or Volume?

It is already (sort of) being done via the preview, so I assume it is technically possible.

I know an entire sky would be insane to do, but I have a willingness to try.

Anyone know?

Thanks for any help or hints!

OK, answered (most) of my own question:

It is possible, yes, just hook up a Convert VDB, change it from Volume to VDB
in the attributes for that node, then hook up a File node and navigate to a place to save it. Type NAME.vdb and change the Operation from Read to Write.

Advance one frame, and it saves the preview region as a VDB!

OK, now my last 10% of my question I can't figure out.
Can a conversion be done of a much larger area, using the settings
in the rendertime VOLUME VOP as a basis for how large an area and at what quality it will be converted to is?

Thanks again,

Perry

Hi Perry,

Can you clarify by what you mean by Render time?

Do you mean to switch the settings on the Volume VOP SOP to write out the larger higher resolution VDB grids to disk?

If that is the case, you can do this in a few different ways. The easiest is to separate the display/render flag in to a separate Display and Render flag on two different SOP targets. You can duplicate your Volume VOP SOP and have one be low res and the other set up to high res.

You can set a render flag target on any SOP in isolation by holding down the CTRL key as you press the display flag. The flag will turn purple and the SOP will have a purple halo under it indicating it is the render target and all upstream SOPs will evaluate (that need to).

Let me know if this helps.

Thank you for the help, Jeff. I will try your suggestion.

What I mean by Render Time was that the Sky Rig only renders the full sky at software render time with Mantra. Since I didn't want to render it in Houdini, but instead wanted to export a VDB to render in another package, I didn't know if they same quality settings at full sky coverage could be exported to VDB, since the full sky can't be seen unless I render it with Mantra (and God knows I don't have enough RAM to set my bounding box preview area to show the entire area the render would cover at that quality).

Sorry to hijack the thread but I was just wondering if there's a web page showing what Sky Rig can do? 8)

I myself have not seen a webpage showing what it can do, but I easily could have missed it.