Anatomical Travelogue Research

Sony 3D display

Chad — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 18:36:13 +0000

Want. Sony showed off a new display device in the Emerging Technologies exhibit with can show 360 images in a cylindrical projection and allows for a “hand waving” interface to virtually spin the cylinder around. Expected to be on the market in 2 years.

Holy Multidimensional Visualization, Batman!

Chad — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:59:40 +0000

Some great sessions yesterday, including some research in preattentive vision memory and seeing some advances in medical dataset visualization. Two talks on bat physiology too. No time to write a full report, but here’s some links…

www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2006.44

www.neuroconstruct.org/

www.wholebraincatalog.org/

www.gensat.org/retina.jsp

cellimagelibrary.org/

smallworldexplorations.org/

And the quote of the day “The gain in the brain comes mainly from the stain.”

LAX

Chad — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 17:14:10 +0000

If you close your eyes, it’s lovely here at LAX. Weather is simply perfect, maybe a slight chill in the shade. Should be a comfortable week, too bad we’ll be inside for much of it.

Generic Shader addin: Lit Sphere

Chad — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 22:58:59 +0000

Here’s a first attempt at delivering an extra shader to the Generic Shader. In this case it is a “lit sphere” shader. ZBrush users should be familiar with the idea, a simple shaded sphere image is used to describe non-local shading over all the surfaces visible to the eye.

In order to add this shader, you just need to copy this shader into the ATGenericShader_f.cg file:

if (intShaderNumber==20) //Lit Sphere. Based on a 2D lookup texture.
{
float3 origTexCoord = f.TexCoord0;
float2 mapping = materialA.Shade(f).rg; // sampling from rg to go along with typical normal rendering. Could be trivially extended to rgb for a 3D lookup.
f.TexCoord0.x = mapping.r;
f.TexCoord0.y = mapping.g;
float4 ret = materialB.Shade(f);
f.TexCoord0 = origTexCoord;
return ret;
}

Then just restart Fusion. Here I’ve set the shader to slot 20, but you can change that to any number you want. To see the example comp you’ll just have to edit the Shader number slider in the comp. Just to play it really safe, I’ve also copied the shader string into the comments of the GenericShader tool. Neat.

Download Lit Sphere Generic Shader example comp A01

Blogging SIGGRAPH 2010

Chad — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 18:10:34 +0000

Ben an I are heading out to SIGGRAPH later this week. I’m planning on blogging during the day this year instead of doing a nightly debrief. To add to the challenge, I’ll be doing it all from my Nexus One. This post was done on the phone, so it seems plausible. In fact, I may not pack my laptop at all, leaving more room for books in my luggage.

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet up, or if you want to suggest something not to be missed.

Or just keep an eye out for us. I’ll be the guy in the SIGGRAPH t-shirt with no laptop.

Generic Shader tool for Cg prototyping in Fusion

Matt — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 00:18:41 +0000

Generic Shader 3D is a template for quick shader development and tweaking in Fusion. We created it to avoid having to generate a full Visual C++ project for every random shader idea that we dream up. The tool provides the user with a large number of Fusion inputs that are passed as Cg parameters: booleans, floats, colors, materials, gradients, lights, and a transformation matrix. The user can also switch between the numbered shaders by adjusting a slider, which is implemented as a literal parameter so that only the selected code branch is compiled.

Once a shader proves to be useful and the required inputs are more or less locked-down, we typically convert it into a full-fledged 3D Fusion tool (expect more of these posted soon, by the way).

Download GenericShader3D 1.0

Some things to note:

You must restart Fusion after changing the .cg shader file.
Make sure to set FUSION_ENABLE_CG_DEBUG_OUTPUT=TRUE. The line numbers won’t be correct, but it will provide some clues as to what is potentially wrong.
User Controls can be used to customize the UI.
Cg/OpenGL only. Fails for Software (or other) renderers.
Fragment shaders only.
Nvidia’s Cg documentation
Fusion 6.0/6.1 uses Cg 2.2.0010
There will be a delay while the Cg compiles. Depending on the number and types of shaders in your comp, and your computer, this may cause significant lag.
It can be useful to put two variations of your shader into two different slots. Makes it simple to compare the results side by side or do benchmarks, or to just keep a working backup while you mess around with a new idea.

Chad has put together a great example comp showing the Generic Shader in action (see below). Have fun with the tool and feel free to send in any delicious shaders you come up with while using it.

Download Generic Shader example comp

Help Wanted

Chad — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 13:43:01 +0000

We’re hiring!

We’ve replaced the menu link for Visualization Services with We're Hiring because, well, we’re pretty solidly booked. Maybe you could help with that?

We’re looking to immediately hire both permanent and contract developers to help us make everything from offline medical image processing and rendering tools to realtime interactive and simulation applications. We can’t go into all the details here, but if you would like to find out more, drop us a line.

Displace3D and explicit vectors

Chad — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:07:15 +0000

Fusion 6.1 adds a new mode for Displace3D, a worldspace displacement where the input RGB is converted to XYZ positions.

This makes it do to meshes what my previous setups did in particles.

3 maps used to make geometry of a colon

It’s halfway to Geometry Images, though we need to add shaders for normal mapping and a way to weld the resulting mesh. It’s an easy way to get animated geometry data into Fusion, and it has automatic LOD/Proxy functionality. Combine it with ColorMatrixTransform, and you have a means to deform a mesh pretty intuitively. The new CoordTransformPosition modifier will let you use gizmos, too.

Here’s some example comps…

Worldspace intersection (note: 94MB)
Affect Region
Gridwarping
Geometry Images (coming soon)
Bilinear / Bicubics (coming soon)
Colon Redux (note: 67MB)

Fragment fun

Chad — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 22:37:18 +0000

New shader(s) coming soon

Trials of editing the DoD

Chad — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:46:16 +0000

Today I’ve got a modifier-type Fuse and a an example comp demonstrating some techniques for working with the DoD in Fusion 6+.

We’re working on a project that really needs to leverage the DoD in Fusion for efficiency at certain scales, but we are going to be relying on tools that don’t support DoD yet. I made several attempts to create some Fuses to affect the DoD in such a way that we could control it more effectively over a comp. This one takes advantage of the SetDomain tool to do the actual manipulation of the DoD, so it’s just a modifier that sets the appropriate sliders.

Download DoD Union Finder Modifier Fuse 1.0

Download DoD Union Finder and Crop with Metadata example comp 1.0