Using volume materials

Very briefly (because there are dedicated recipes in the last chapter of this Cookbook), let's take a look at how volumetric materials work in Cycles.

Volumetric materials are exactly what they sound like. Instead of the surface of an object, Cycles renders the inner volume of that object, and this gives space to a lot of interesting possibilities—not only can elusive materials such as smoke, fire, clouds, or light transmission effects through the medium be realized, but peculiar shapes can also be obtained from the volume itself by Boolean operations made through material nodes.

The drawback is that volume materials are slow—a lot slower compared to the surface materials, but hopefully, this is an issue that will be fixed ...

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