Internet Visualization. Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios Here is a movie created for Pixar’s RenderMan Courseware that visualizes internet connectivity across the world. It was were created using Python and Pixar’s RenderMan software. The Courseware includes a comprehensive “making of” tutorial walking through all the steps involved in creating and rendering this animation. To control the appearance and incandescence of the curves over time I wrote a custom surface shader that reads a “start time” primitive variable off each curve and ramps opacity along the length of the curve during creation. Once created the shader fades off the incandescence to give a subtle cooling effect (all this is viewed better in the original HD). The top image shows the western hemisphere, notice the volumes of connectivity from the US to Europe and on to Asia (off the map to the right). Also interesting is the relative lack of internet infrastructure in South America and Africa.
Dynamic Procedural Displacement – Raindrops on Glass. Custom Displacement Shading – Tracks in the Snow. Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios Here is another video I developed for Pixar’s RenderMan Courseware, this one demonstrates an interesting techniques that can be achieved with a fairly simple custom displacement shader that relies mostly on an understanding of the fundamentals of computer graphics. Specifically, the technique uses a sequence of depth maps (shadow maps) rendered from beneath the surface capturing the distance from the shadow camera to each point on the displacement-mapped spheres. Each point can then be transformed… …into world space and used as an exact displacement amount for an object pressing into a surface. Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios And of course, to achieve persistence, you need to accumulate the depth maps per-frame and use the running total to displacement the current frame.
Programmable Raytracing in RenderMan. Here are a couple experiments put together for Pixar’s RenderMan Courseware which demonstrate programmable raytracing in RenderMan. Custom Gather Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios The is an example of using the gather() construct in an unusual fashion to create an interesting visual effect. The gather() call fires a hemisphere of rays above each shading point on the ground plane, and instead of tracing the usual diffuse or specular reflections (what raytracing is most often used for), the rays return their length (i.e. the distance to) each hit object, in this case the spheres.
Visualizing Ray Depth This example, also from the Courseware, is a visualization of ray depth. S RenderMan® Just getting started? RenderMan for Maya The perfect tool for the Maya artist who wants to painlessly integrate RenderMan into their work. Read more Advanced tools for TDs RenderMan Studio Includes the "Pro" version of RenderMan for Maya and a suite of proven production tools. Read more Server-side rendering RenderMan Pro Server Turns any server or artist desktop into a renderer. TM & © 1986 - 2013 Pixar.