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.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Make sure to right-click on the player and select “Go Fullscreen”.

Example XML:

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.

For best performance you should use Google Chrome. It supports WebGL as well as rendering to floating point textures. Firefox should provide the same visual results, but it is considerably slower since we basically have to render twice to achieve the same precision. If you are using Internet Explorer, you are out of luck. Detailed information on how to get WebGL working on different systems can be found here.

Select the head or chameleon dataset to start the demo. If WebGL is enabled and your graphics card is able to compile the necessary shaders, you will see the rendered model within just a few seconds. You can adjust the number of sampling steps along the rays or turn on linear filtering (HiQ) to influence the frame rate and rendering quality. If you experience any problems, please leave a comment below.

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.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Stay tuned for a Stereoscopic 3D Susan coming soon…

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.

The glomerulus is a twisted section of capillaries where blood is filtered, surrounded by a capsule that collects the waste as urine for transportation via the tubules. There are roughly 1 million glomeruli in each of your kidneys!

Note: This download is ~9MB, so please be patient. Drag left/right to rotate. Drag vertically to adjust the blending.

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

Notes:

• You need the free, lightweight Unity web player plugin available here.
• The Lazy Susan download is about 4MB.
• Click and drag horizontally to rotate the chameleon. Dragging vertically will blend between the skin and skeleton of the beast.
• If you have an old graphics card, you might not see anything below. Let us know in the comments if this happens to you!

Please view the full post to see the Unity content.

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.

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…

3D Vectorscope Fun!

Stuart at Eyeon gave me the inspiration to try a particle approach this morning after a comment he made regarding my wish for more resolution for the 3D Histogram SubV in Fusion.  Basically, he asked if the size of the cubes was important.  Did I need to know the clustering or not?   Would a 3D Vectorscope be useful?

Oftentimes, just knowing what is or isn’t in the image is enough, and I don’t need to know the distribution.

Took about 20 minutes to get it working, but took a bit longer to make it all pretty and fast and blog worthy.    Bit like the earlier centroid post.

On top is the result, below is the source.   The camera is tracking the result automatically.  It should be possible to use the min and max values to also set the zoom of the camera as well as it’s position to enclose the bounding region and set the camera perpendicular to the longest axis.

3d_particle_vectorscope_c_a07_.comp

(I’ve updated the comp to A07, which adds in a SubV!)

With 256^2 samples, it runs at ~10 Hz on my computer.  1280^2 samples runs at ~0.5 Hz.   Not terrible, but proxy helps a lot.

Couple neat things…  You can clearly visualize the effect of color depth on an image.  8int vs float is quite dramatic.   And you can see how some tools operate very plainly.   Look at a BrightnessContrast for example, and you can see why it’s really an AddScale.   The sample “footage” in the comp is a merge between a Plasma and a BG gradient.  The Plasma makes a ring, while the BG makes a saddle, but together, they make some crazy swirling thing.

You can render the results, too.