Eyeon released Fusion 6.3 last week, and we’ve had a chance to look at some of the new tools and how they would fit in with our tools.

VolumeFog now includes a Schlick single-scattering lighting model.

Download Particle Voxelization for VolumeFog A01

You can render in OpenCL, or fallback to CPU if you need to render a larger volume dataset than you have memory on your OpenCL device.   It works nicely, but definitely shows the interface issues with representing 4D data as X,Y,Time,Time.  We use Quilt for 4D data, but we’ll have to see if there’s an easy way to get that translated over to VolumeFog.  Of course, getting a proper 3D fog texture can be handled nicely by Simbiont.

AlphaDivide and AlphaMultiply provide dead simple color operations, but they’re no faster than our own tool.  And unlike the new built-in tools, AlphaDivideMultiply allows you to affect the canvas color, too.

LUT Fuses allow you to analyze and apply LUT images to your footage to simplify various color operations, as well as provide simple interoperability with other applications.  They’re also operate in OpenCL if available.  We’ve updated ColorMatrixTransform to produce these images.  Just 8 pixels can represent all of the possible corrections you can apply with a Color Matrix.  We’ll be adding this to more tools soon.

This new version of Fusion also fixes some annoying bugs.  It’s now possible to create an interactive LUT macro.  Previously, interactivity was limited, you just set the LUT up once and left it.  Polylines are now able to evaluate properly at multiple image sizes without randomly evaluating the wrong reference.  And a longstanding issue with spline view redraw has apparently been fixed, making it much easier to use in real-world comps.

This week, we present six interactive turntables for you to spin. Each one was rendered from a volumetric dataset and can be blended between two views by dragging the mouse vertically. MRI, CT, 3D microscopy and cryomacrotome imaging modalities are all represented here. Check out the bottom right corner for an aptly rendered Bruce Gooch brain.

Each turntable is defined in an XML file that is parsed at run-time to determine the render properties and image asset paths. These assets are streamed in and displayed as needed so the initial download is only about 100KB.

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There has been quite some discussion on WebGL recently. Here is a demo that will show you why we think it is a great technology. It contains an interactive volume renderer that makes use of the new canvas element in HTML 5. A ray marching algorithm applies your transfer function to a texture and renders the volume dataset interactively. Before trying this out, please read the following notes on the limitations concerning different web browsers and graphics cards.

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Last year we released a shader for Fusion that implements the lit sphere method. This low-cost shader maps the view normals of an object’s visible faces to a shaded sphere texture. We have added this type of shading to our Lazy Susan project to add flexible lighting approximation without affecting the download size or GPU demands.

The method does require that we pre-render the view normals, but once the full model texture has been streamed in it becomes simple to swap out, rotate, or blend between lit sphere textures on the client side. To improve surface detail, we also encoded the ambient occlusion into one of the channels of our rendered model texture.

Check out the Unity player below for the result. You can drag the model to spin it around or drag the lit sphere to a) adjust the rotation and b) blend between a diffuse and shiny sphere.

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Yesterday we posted a demo of an ongoing Unity project we are developing. This project’s goal is to get 3D voxel data spinning in a web browser as quickly and simply as possible. We have put together another example, this time using some interesting two-photon microscopy images of cellular kidney anatomy.

The captured image shows tubule (green) and capillary (blue) epithelial cells as well as cell nuclei (orange) that were each stained with a different dye. The microscope captures the excitation of these dyes at different wavelengths, which we can use to isolate the structures or apply a false color lookup as we have done in this example. We also applied a deconvolution filter in the z-direction to compensate for light “bleed-through” and segmented/enhanced a glomerulus contained within the dataset.

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Lately we’ve been working with Unity to produce interactive visualizations of 3D voxel data. We’re developing a pipeline that can quickly render a dataset as a rotational image stack and a front-end application that displays it as an interactive turntable. Unity’s ability to compile for smartphones, websites and standalone platforms has us dreaming up all kinds of uses for this technology.

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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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