Tuesday, October 09, 2007

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.

Thursday, September 27, 2007

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.

Thursday, July 26, 2007

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

Wednesday, May 30, 2007

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