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My Blender scene looks like this: enter image description here

On the left, you can see my cloud-like volume setup. The center screen is in Material Preview mode and shows my clouds (the volumes) just right. As you can see in the Dimensions panel, the selected Cloud Box is actually pretty large (30x30x30m), but the clipping of my camera is already set to 1000m.

The problem is, that in my renders, the volumes seem just invisible. Whatever I'm doing, even if I change the cloud color to black, it doesn't ever show up in the Cycles render.

Is there a setting I'm missing?

Update 1:

After following suggestions, I removed most of the nodes. For testing purpopses, I even disconnected the noise texture:

enter image description here

This looks quite foggy in the preview now:

enter image description here

And indeed, in the render output, I can see something, but not what I've seen in the preview. The rear-half of the plane looks kindo of blue-ish. And when I disable the rendering of my "Cloud Domain" objects, the blue-ish look disappears. So it seeems to be there. Cycles just seems to treat those volumes substentially different compared to Eevee.

enter image description here

The weird background is a Sky Texture node with the 2.9 new Nishita mode. I set it to be that dirty, because I wanted to see a better contrast to the clouds while I'm testing. It's the only light source by the way.

I'd still guess that it has something to do with my Render settings or the how the ligthing is configured, but I don't know what exactly this could be.

Some more images:

enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ maybe share the volumetric cube? I suppose you've made it visible in render in the Outliner? We can't see the camera icon... $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Jan 25, 2021 at 7:28
  • $\begingroup$ Thank you, I updated my question accordingly! $\endgroup$
    – fameman
    Jan 25, 2021 at 10:42
  • $\begingroup$ could you please just share a file with the cube you use? pasteall.org/blend $\endgroup$
    – moonboots
    Jan 25, 2021 at 10:58
  • $\begingroup$ Alright. My scene also contains an aircraft. Here's the blend file: pasteall.org/blend/b18cd43e6bed447d9d93cf6f319945c8 The cubes are at Z position 2177m. I duplicated many the cubes and most of them share the same material (at least the one visible from the camera do). Thank you in advance. $\endgroup$
    – fameman
    Jan 25, 2021 at 11:13
  • $\begingroup$ Do any on the cubes overlap? Overlapping volumetrics can cause unexpected results. $\endgroup$
    – Rich Sedman
    Jan 25, 2021 at 11:34

1 Answer 1

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Looking at your material nodes, you are mixing a Surface Shader (Transparent BSDF) in with the volumetric - this may be the cause of your problems as the preview may behave differently to the actual render (especially with versions that support Eevee since the material preview will use Eevee to render while the actual render is using Cycles).

Generally you do not need to mix in 'transparency' with volumetric shaders - simply control the Density instead; ie, zero density is 100% transparent.

Try connecting the Principled Volume directly into the Volume socket of the Material Output and use the Noise Texture to vary the Density of the volume rather than to vary a mix shader.

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  • $\begingroup$ Thank you for the answer! It brought me a step further. However, I wasn't able to solve the whole problem. I updated my question accordingly. It would be nice if you could take a look at it again. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – fameman
    Jan 25, 2021 at 10:42

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