Volumetric Placard Rendering

When you need to render volumetric effects involving hundreds of thousands or millions of particles quickly with creative control and effects then Storm Tracer is your perfect go to solution.

Storm Tracer brings the following features to Cinema 4D.

• Volumetric Placard Rendering
• Creative Particle Cloning options
• Integrated L-System for organic effects
• Custom sprite shaders
• Fast rendering of hundreds of thousands of particles

“Volumetric placard rendering” sounds like a mouthful and maybe even just a little bit nonsensical. After all, placards are flat, and volumes are… erm… volumes right?

Well as it turns out, rendering particles using flat placards in a 3D space allows you to create very quick and convincing volumetric effects. Many of the best and most convincing smokey and debris effects you have seen on film and especially realtime in game were actually rendered this way.

How it works is this. At every particles position you have a square (or round) plane, this plane can be shaded however you want, including using classic layer blending modes like “Multiply” and “Screen”. By rendering many of these overlapping planes that always face the camera, you can create an effect that reacts to the light and shadows like a volumetric does.

You can even use volumetric shaders such as 3D noise to help create an organic shifting effect.

What makes Storm Tracer so special for this? It’s incredibly in depth controls and integration with many third party particle systems such as X-Particles.

Storm has several methods of duplicating particles to create more complex effects, including a hierarchical growth system.

This allows it to go from simply a nice way to quickly knock out some smoke and clouds. To a great way to create interesting stroke effects along splines. Or slap some foliage on some plants. Or even to create some plants from scratch!

Storm Tracer is a creative playground for adding rendered particle effects from the subtle to the extreme.