Field3D

Sony Pictures Image works is working on an open source voxel storage format, Field3D.  You can check out the project or the programmer’s guide.

GPU Illumination

Went to the course titled Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting, fortunately it wasn’t a rehash of the 2006 book, but had mostly new work, including some really nice ambient occlusion, scattering, and shadowing techniques.  Also showed some of Voreen.  Really nice bunch of guys.

Ok, I’m off to see a panel discussion with Jenny Sabin of LabStudio.

We’ve seen some pretty cool things at SIGGraph so far…

Gel Sight

Gel Sight is a retrographic surface imaging technique that was wonderfully elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness.  They also gave out free samples…

Cuda raycasting 13GB of cryomacrotome goodness (in stereo)

Nvidia had a stereographic interactive realtime rendering of the full 13GB Visible Human dataset being rendered in CUDA on 3 Quadroplexi.  Very impressive.  The glasses used were the new Nvidia active shutter glasses, and were very effective.

Resistive multitouch in many form factors

A new startup out of NYU showed a novel resistive multitouch device.  Very effective, low cost, and suitable to many applications.

UPDATE: Sorry about the broken link, Touchco was bought up by Amazon, so pretty much all of the cool applications they had in mind are replaced by the Kindle 3.

VLC madness courtesy 2 Fusion-io cards

Fusion-io showed their new “budget” nonvolatile storage adapter, the ioXtreme.   $900 gets you 80GB, with a read speed o 700MB/s.  The IO’s aren’t very high, much less their enterprise solutions, but that doesn’t matter if you are reading sequential data.  The booth was pretty crazy, too, one of the better live hardware demos I’ve seen in a while.  I’ll get some pictures tomorrow.  VLC never looked so impressive…

Here’s a little attempt at making a 3D vectorscope using particles.  It’s cute like the centroid comp, elegant and simple with no plugins or fuses needed.   Nothing wrong with fuses or plugins, it’s just neat to be able to have something that works for any using Fusion 5.2 or later without anything else, and lets you see what Fusion can do out of the box.

3D Vectorscope Fun!

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Trying out some new datasets and new techniques…

EDIT:  Jim asked for some more details, and I already had some images that I intended to post, but forgot about.  So here’s a breakdown of the three layers used to make the above image…

Chameleon rendered layers

The left layer is an environment map lookup, the middle is a front lit with high opacity, and the right is a backlit with low opacity.   These were then additively composited together.

I also did some tests on this dataset with clipping.

Chameleon culled with spherical gizmo

Chameleon culled with box

The box culling was an accident, but I thought it looked like a cut of meat that had been chewed on by mice.

Just a little ditty put together for some testing.  Investigating the how the specular highlights look on a low resolution dynamic dataset.

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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