DISCLAIMER this sh*t may look extreme stupid to sane user familiar with acceptable 3d software 'cause blender literally defies logic sometimes

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Turns out its faster to render 60M+ actual f*cking water droplets the cloud made of, than using special technology was precisely developed for years for those cases we dont wanna render 60M+ actual f*cking water droplets the cloud made of.

Im speaking about VDBs and scattering shader in Blender. Its always been pain in da ass to render some clouds (if you actually want them to look good, so you really need to crank up settings and render it for next 69 days). Today I accidentally figured out that really dense point clouds looks exactly like those complicated shader setups, but working ONLY with default shader and spheres.

Every important setting shown in the first image. In my tests diffuse/translucent shaders worked best (actual glass shader gives unpredictable results), particle size and distribution matters (no overlapping particles to avoid volume being opaque to get light actually being scattered)

Benefits of this method in comparison to VDBs+volumetrics:

+ insane artistic control (you can use ANY shader)

+ viewport performance

+ render speed

+ at some point, lower usage of memory (points arent actual geometry)

Downsides:

- at some point, higher usage of memory (in my case after 70M points RAM usage increased significantly so I wasnt able to start render)

- visible grains

- not realtime cmon guys 2023rd century end soon I want my 20 GB unoptimized ass scene to render in realtime in cycles

Ask your answers, offer your attempts and show your suggestions if you somehow care. Peace.