Metaball volume gradients

by David Rutten

Jul 24, 2014

Both transparency and diffuse textures auto-generated by Grasshopper. 400 textures in total, 256x256 pixels each. Takes about a minute and a half to generate all images (no optimization whatsoever; 2.6 billion point/pixel evaluations in total), about an hour and a half to render. The viewport capture is actually remarkably good. How *not* to do volume rendering 101...

  • Marios Tsiliakos

    Next challenge: 

    Slightly different type of cloud but I think it's a try.

    http://annesastronomynews.com/photo-gallery-ii/nebulae-clouds/n49-i...

    Jul 24, 2014

  • David Rutten

    It reminded me heavily of those star-nurseries.

    If you can come up with a way to compute the colour and transparency of any voxel in a space, this method can be used to generate an image. Just be ready for a long wait....

    Jul 24, 2014

  • David Rutten

    I think it's best to create the sections perpendicular to the camera direction, I just couldn't be bothered.

    Jul 24, 2014

  • Daniel Hambleton

    Looks great! What is the fps of the Rhino viewport with these textures?

    I feel like this kind of stuff is best handled as a shader (as you point out). It would be great if custom GLSL shaders could be written for Display Conduits...not sure if this going to happen, though :)

    Jul 24, 2014

  • David Rutten

    I get about 10/15 frames per second in Rhino. Notably not smooth, but not too bad.

    Jul 24, 2014