Because we’re often trying to simulate small wet transparent things we rely pretty heavily on stochastic raytracing. We can handle transparency, large light sources, depth of field, light scattering, etc. all at the same time. It’s a general purpose setup that works well for a broad range of “soft” phenomenon. Brazil is pretty fast, but there are limits to our patience, especially since the sampling isn’t reusable. Once you make any change at all to the scene, you essentially have to start over. So we try to get a lot of revisions done to refine a look and still keep the speeds good so we can get those revisions turned around quickly.

When you reduce the number of samples, you get a large increase in speed, but the downside is aliasing, which generally looks like noise, since it is stochastic.

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This is a Fusion toolscript that makes a BG and DX for you that are set to the global time range.

Download Graceful loader failure script 1.0

We treat time as a plastic thing in Fusion because we do so many temporal operations, like noise reduction, retiming, 3D filtering, planar reformatting, etc. This tool “pads” your data so that you can work with tools that are requesting time outside the range of your clip. Otherwise, many tools will simply fail, saying “AwesomeTool1 failed at time 42.” or some other nonsense.

So here’s my inaugural post…

SEM shaders, before and after

When I started working at Anatomical, we had a compositor (of sorts) working here who we would pass shots off to. Because a variety of reasons it wasn’t very effective, and so I pushed to have the process modified so that the people doing the 3D rendering were actively involved in the compositing workflow, and vice versa. Fast forward some years, and at this point, I comp nearly all of my own shots, and our “compositor” is pretty darn good with rendering from 3ds max.

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Hello World. In this inaugural post, I wanted to describe what we’re all about here at AT Research.  But rather than bombard you with jargon and mission statements, about cutting-edge rendering paradigms, highly-scalable volumetric acquisition processing pipelines, and Six-Sigma proven performance platforms, I think it would be best just to describe a type of problem we’re addressing.  Today, we’re going to discuss rendering X-Rays.

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When starting a new plugin project with Visual Studio, developers usually take one of three approaches:

1. Start a project from scratch using a standard type and customize.
2. Copy an earlier/sample plugin project and modify.
3. Use a wizard to setup include, linking, configuration, build settings and skeleton code.

The first two approaches are time-consuming and error-prone. #3 is certainly the better approach, but may only be worth your time if you will be producing a large number of plugins. If your application has a large enough community, there’s a good chance that a custom wizard is already available somewhere.

After getting tired of manually configuring Visual Studio Projects for every random plugin idea we’ve tried, I adapted the standard MFC DLL wizard to produce a Fusion 5 template. Microsoft’s Javascript-based wizard engine is definitely not the clearest collection of code that I’ve wandered through, but a little time invested here can save you repetitive overhead for every future project.

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