How To Create Normals For Your Billboard Smoke Texture For Easy Relighting In Blender

Jesse Miettinen showcased a way to create a normal map-like texture from your volumetric smoke stored in a VDB, so that when you put this texture on a flat billboard, it can react to light direction properly. His approach looks nice, but thanks to feedback in the comments and Ram Vivek Sahu's suggestion to use the background as a light source, the updated version looks even better:

However, as Jesse put it, it's a volumetric object he's lighting using generated background texture coordinates to fake a normal map, so he's not really sure if there’s a right way to do it. Still, it's a useful tip worth exploring.

Jesse Miettinen, a legendary Blender artist and master of proceduralism. Check out some of his recent projects, like this liquid made without fluid simulation and an adaptive subdivision setup, discovered "accidentally":

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