new animation from Oscar and Antonio

Hi,

Antonio Casado and Oscar Hernandez have finished the first animation for a tech demo. You can visit the CGTalk thread here.



Watch the animation here.

I am making a small excursion into SSS shader development because I can't resist trying the level set idea. I have my raymarcher wrapped in a VRay shader now, but it's still a long way to go. And again spare time development is slow. Especially when spare time is rare :)

Best regards,
Dieter

Multimatte released

Hi all,

I am happy to announce that VRayMultimatte is now released as a free download to the public. It will be included in future releases of VRay also. For now you can get it via http://www.mackevision.de/ (browse to "Actual").

What it basically does is it generates an alpha matte based on object or Mat IDs and puts it on the RGB Channels of the Renderelement. Along with the upcoming exr writer this is a real killer tool. It allows you to render an infinite amount of antialiased alpha mattes with a single renderpass. Including dof and motion blur.

We have been using it internally since quite a while and it has become a tool that nobody wants to miss now. I used it on the cgsphere project for example to render out mattes for all objects with one pass.

I recently tried to find a way to generate uv coordinates for the ISO Surfaces and stumbled upon a nice idea for a fast sss fake. The basic idea is to use algorithms from level set methods that are often used for fluid mechanics. I want to "flow" the light into the object with a grid. I was already in contact with Vlado and he agreed that this could be doable.
I wrote a basic 2D application to test the idea of the algorithm. Here's what I got:

Not too exciting, but it shows that this could work. The algorithm is a derivate of the algorithm I wrote for the polygon preview for the Isosurfaces. Everybody who has tried the Isos knows that this algorithm runs in realtime for coarse to medium grids....

Best regards,
Dieter