I did some experiments a few years ago with lux and you can do some really nice things like the example below. But most of the fancy renderers are surface-oriented and if they handle volumes at all it’s for like clouds or flame.
Also they are very slow even gpu accelerated. They will basically run forever tracing light paths and you decide when the picture is good enough.
I think if we are going to invest time it’s better to try improving the existing volume rendering pipelines like we’ve been doing (although it would be great if there were more open source options).
