City Sun

Compare the lighting above, with the photo of the Chrysler building taken by Aishado.


Chrysler Blue
by ~Aishado on deviantART

Skull

Transverse fly through of MRI scan of Homo Sapiens cranium.



Coronal fly through of MRI scan of Homo Sapiens cranium.



Sagittal fly through of MRI scan of Homo Sapiens cranium.



Rotation of volume rendered MRI scan of Homo Sapiens cranium.

Yakushi-ji 薬師寺

Yakushi-ji (薬師寺), Nara, Japan.



The temple of Bhaiṣajyaguru, the Buddha of Medicine.

Twenty five years ago I was granted permission by the Japanese government to study the entire Heibonsha art and architecture survey. I remember weeping when I saw the detail of Yakushi ji. At this time I had been studying and practising the tradition of Yakushi, in Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. A few years later I also studied the tradition in Tibetan as well, and more indepth research in the medical practices and pharmacology of it.

I have been following development of Lucille Global Illumination Renderer on Flickr for some time, and today got it to build on OpenSuSE 10.3. So I chose to celebrate by exporting an old model of Yakushiji and rendering it.

Exported from Blender via Mosaic to Lucille.

Blender to Renderman forum blog
Blender to Renderman forum newsgroup

Mosaic Renderman System.

Lucille Global Illumination Renderer.
Lucille github source code.
Lucille Blog
Lucille Wiki
Lucille Render on Flickr.

Yakushi-ji Wikipedia

Bhaisajyaguru Wikipedia

XLogo SuSE

RIBMosaic

During the last week, the author of RIBMosaic, WHiTeRaBBiT, has made a lot of improvements to it, and published some very impressive images demonstrating it's ability to export to a wider range of RenderMan Interface Specification and not so compatible renderers.

For full details, please go to the Blender to RenderMan Blog and read :

• Built-in shaders for MOSAIC


• Shader Integration and Pass Controls Complete!


• Another update in MOSAIC's recent progress
  

The rendered images and previous tests can also be seen on the Dreamscape Arts Gallery at MOSAICTestRenders.

After a few weeks of editing XHTML and CSS, and various liaison and admin tasks, I took a break to play with 2D graphic design for the first time in a while. The above RIBMosaic logo is the result.

It reflects the orange and blue Blender logo, but with a range of colours in a mosaic pattern, and a green centre instead, using the interlocking puzzle glyph, representing integration, of the Python logo in a rough texture beneath a smooth finish, suggesting reptilian, and the text in the same typeface Pixar chose for their logo. The edge of the shading band across the logo varies as if the green centre is refractive.

It says Blender, Python, RenderMan and MOSAIC, in one.

Blender to RenderMan Forum

In autumn last year the Blender to RenderMan forum created by Ted Gocek, that was at http://www.bestfreeforums.com/forums/blendertorender.html, was deleted by the host for no reason.

Neither he nor I have a copy of the SQL database, or the facilities to set up our own PHP forum server, or maintain one, so we discussed spreading a new forum across a Google Group, Blogger account, and Googlepages site.

These are now at :

• Blender to RenderMan Group


• Blender to RenderMan Blog


• Blender to RenderMan Site


• Blender to RenderMan Channel
  

Announcements, discussions, questions and answers can be posted to the group.

In addition, once developers of Blender to RenderMan export tools join the group, they will be invited to join the blog.

Announcements about exporters and other tools can be posted on the group, with a link to a more detailed post on the blog, which will also be able to include images, as well as better options for syntax highlighting of code.

When there are more videos of demonstrations, tutorials and rendered animations on individual YouTube accounts, I can create playlists on the Blender to RenderMan Channel, grouping them together in various ways, eg, a full set of tutorials for a particular BlenderMan exporter, another playlist for a collection of demos of all the exporters, collections of animations, and related off-topic content, for example, SGI and Pixar technology demos and shorts.

X-Ray shader

Disney Pixar, 1024x768, 540 KB.

Morphine X-Ray, 1024x768, 1.2 MB.

Some years ago, Simon Bunker created the simplest, fascinating RenderMan shader, an X-Ray effect shader.

I have seen hardly any work using it, and I find it useful for molecular and medical imaging, as well as for more creative effects.

Both the above images were created with POVMan, in Mac OS.

An animation of the molecular structure of Morphine, exported from Swiss PDB Viewer to Mac MegaPOV, manually modified in POVMan to use Pixar Renderman Shading Language, and encoded in Apple Quicktime, at 1 frame per degree, through a total of 360 degrees, at 640 x 480 pixels, can be downloaded from :

Morphine X-Ray 640x480 28 MB.

Right click on the video icon and save as MorphineXRay64048028.mov.

Alternatively, lower resolution versions can be seen on either Youtube or Google Video :

Morphine X-Ray Youtube
Morphine X-Ray Google

Simon Bunker's web site, RenderMania. POVMan web site, POVMan examples.

Yohimbine Fur

I wanted to see how Zeger Knaepen's fur shader looked on a molecule.
In his notes, he said the fur shader does not work for animation. I like it anyway.

Also, I could not resist using POVMan's ability to layer textures.
Specular highlights, as would normally only be seen on smooth shiny surfaces,
were added to the finish section, using POV's Scene Description Language.




A frame still, as will be rendered without specularity, 1024x768, 839 KB.

Created in POVMan on Mac OS Classic, rendered direct to Quicktime.
POVMan is a version of MegaPOV, that uses Renderman Shading Language.

I intended a rotation of 360 degrees, one frame each, this failed on f 147.
For smooth animation of the fur, I want to use 30 frames per degree :
10,800 frames, at 25 minutes render time per frame, 4,500 hours.

Don't expect to see the finished version before next year.

ShaderMan.Next source code released

Interesting news :

"Hello,

I've released the source code for ShaderMan.Next into a public domain at

http://code.google.com/p/shaderman.

New version is completely portable between Windows, Linux and Mac,
written in Python (less then 2000 lines of pretty straightforward code)
and extensible from the very beginning - current code drop allows to
create Renderman shaders, Unix pipelines and Python Image Library
(PIL) source code.

With best regards,

Alexei Puzikov
http://dream.com.ua
http://renderman.ru
http://code.google.com/p/shaderman "

to which Randolf Schultz replies :

"finally. :) Now I can begin to think about an integration into Ayam.
What about a "sink"-node that connects over sockets to an Ayam material?

best regards,
Randolf,
--
http://www.ayam3d.org/ Ayam, where export means NURBS. "

from

C.G.R.R ShaderMan.Next source code released

Animation Language : Bouncesphere

Technical details on Eurochemistry site Bouncesphere

Screenshots, and brief descriptions of the software used,
AL Bouncesphere II

The scene, animation and shader data, syntax highlighted,

AL Bouncesphere III

The original higher quality 640x480 video can be downloaded here
bouncesphere.avi

AVI, iPod and Sony PSP versions can be download from Google Video

HTML embed code is available from Google Video or Youtube

Steve May's AL page at ACCAD Ohio State University,
AL Animation Language