Metaball volume gradients

Both transparency and diffuse textures auto-generated by Grasshopper. 400 textures in total, 256x256 pixels each. Takes about a minute and a half to generate all images (no optimization whatsoever; 2.6 billion point/pixel evaluations in total), about an hour and a half to render. The viewport capture is actually remarkably good.

How *not* to do volume rendering 101...

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Comment by David Rutten on July 24, 2014 at 1:40pm: Vicente, yeah, the way to do volume rendering is to raymarch through a voxel space. That however requires a lot of new code, albeit probably very fun code to write.

Comment by Vicente Soler on July 24, 2014 at 12:27pm: It has a frame buffer component that updates while rendering (it's a 'progressive path tracer').

Currently it's CPU only multithreaded, I'm trying to use GPGPU (Grasshopper purpose GPU) using Cudafy.NET but can't make it work in a Grasshopper component :(. I can make it work as a standalone program.

I know, the icons are awesome.

Comment by Vicente Soler on July 24, 2014 at 12:20pm: As a hobby project (not being very original) I started writing a path tracer that renders implicit surfaces using ray marching.

Very simple to code (same concept, but per ray), great for volumetric effects, extremely slow.

Here's a screenshot of an isosurface evaluated at rendertime (no previously generated mesh).

Comment by David Rutten on July 24, 2014 at 9:36am: I get about 10/15 frames per second in Rhino. Notably not smooth, but not too bad.

Comment by Daniel Hambleton on July 24, 2014 at 8:42am: Looks great! What is the fps of the Rhino viewport with these textures?

I feel like this kind of stuff is best handled as a shader (as you point out). It would be great if custom GLSL shaders could be written for Display Conduits...not sure if this going to happen, though :)

Comment by David Rutten on July 24, 2014 at 8:27am: I think it's best to create the sections perpendicular to the camera direction, I just couldn't be bothered.

Comment by David Rutten on July 24, 2014 at 8:26am: It reminded me heavily of those star-nurseries.

If you can come up with a way to compute the colour and transparency of any voxel in a space, this method can be used to generate an image. Just be ready for a long wait....