You never know what files you are going to get from customers.  After several phone calls talking through using FTP or shipping a hard drive, confirming compression usage, acceptable file formats there is still the possibility weird naming schemes.

This is example of a schema that came through last week.

I was about to whip out my favorite file renaming software, but I wanted to retain the original names for communication with the customer.  The solution is pretty easy so I thought I’d share it.  There might be a tool that does this already but its good to know how to do this on any machine without any special tool installed.  We’re going to fix this problem with CMD.exe. muahahaha!

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This might be a rare acceptable usage of the bad x-ray look.  Along with the font, the music, and even the host (sorry, Mr. Hess) and presentation format,  the x-ray skull and brain graphic make The Knowledge Chamber look like a cheesy show from the early nineties.  But it’s not pretending to be an x-ray.  It is, however, a testament to how visualization techniques are often associated with an era.  Some of these are fads, and some are artifacts of the limitations of the technology at the time.  One hopes that when the limitations are lifted, the use of these visuals are deliberate design decisions.

Also, Congrats to Johnny Lee on your new position at MSR.

Ben Lipman

In part one, I talked about the terrible technique used to fake the look of an x-ray image.  Now that I’ve snatched away an item from your bag-of-tricks, it’s only fair to replace it with a new technique. But before I do that. Let’s explore how x-ray imaging works.

Simple Definition

This is the standard illumination model, or how our eyes and cameras work. This is actually a tiny sub-set but you get the idea. Light sources emit energy that bounces off objects into a camera and absorbed by a sensor. This could be film or a CCD on a digital camera.  Actually the purpose of the camera isn’t so much collecting the light from the image, rather the camera is blocking the light that is not the image from exposing the film.  Light is coming from all directions and bouncing all over (not shown), but only the light that converges through the lens is captured.  This is not the case for x-rays. The whole point of x-ray imaging is to have the energy mostly penetrate the object and measure the how much reaches the sensor. This type of imaging is analogous to cast shadows.

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For the Simbiont:Fusion plugin we added the ability use an image source as the texture coordinate for the Darktree. In this simple tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the UVW input to retexture a image sequence from 3D render passes. And I’ve provided the files so you can try it out yourself.

Simbiont:Fusion UVW Tutorial

Case Study

In this example we are showing how renders from a 3d software package can be used in conjunction with Simbiont:Fusion. I’ll only cover usage as diffuse color, but certainly other techniques can be employed. This example won’t be using any of the 3d tools in Fusion, only image sequences.

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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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