Saturday 27 November 2010

Visualisation Techniques : Cells (Continued)

Continuing my experimentation with how my cells could look (first post here), here are three more examples which all use a spherical soft-body as a starting point. These examples also show a change in colour - something relevant to the mathematical data I am working with.


The first example combines previous render techniques, and uses a Cloud shader applied to the particles. Unfortuantely this gave the cell a glowing appearance, and had no distinct shape or outline.


The second example instead uses particles which are invisible, using a Blinn shader applied to the soft-body surface directly (the particles are used solely to drive the animation of the cell). A 2D fractal was used as a bump-map, ensuring that the surface was not too smooth and plain.


The third and final example builds on the second, using the same Blinn shader, also applied to the surface. The difference is that the surface material is created using a Layered Shader, which uses the original Blinn (made almost transparent) and a second copy which uses a Ramp Shader to adjust the transparency based on the object's facing ratio (making the shader less transparent towards the object edges). Although there are two shaders layered here, it gives a more interesting look - a transparent looking cell with a clearly defined outline.

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