geneome » Sunflow

Image Planes Part 4 (Object IDs)

Eugene — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 04:00:25 +0000

Didn’t think the image plane series was complete enough so I tacked on this little diddy. I covers how to get object (or primitive) ids using image planes in Houdini and what you can do with them in the compositor using the lumakey COP. The compositor part I learned from SYmek, who I feel is an integral part of the Houdini community (and who I had an argument with about points on the Sunflow forum a while back ).

Sunflow Wiki

Eugene — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 17:46:04 +0000

Yes, I made one. I made one despite a poll that showed a pdf manual would have been preferred. I just found using a wiki so much easier to update and way faster than sourceforge when I want to remember some code block, grab a janino shader, or recall a tip someone mentioned in a post 8 months ago. I consider it totally unofficial and I’m not going to advertise it’s out there by mentioning it all the time but I will add a link on my site and I’ll point to it in my signature on the Sunflow forums. Hopefully, a new Sunflow user/developer will stumble upon it and find it useful.

What’s amusing is the addictiveness that comes with creating a wiki. I find myself constantly adding to it or tweaking it here and there. The truly daunting task will be to do the new Sunflow .sca format. Since it’s not yet finalized I’m not going to start on it, but when the next version hits I’ll scramble to get all the .sc info moved to the .sca section.

P.S. I’ve been off and on with a WIP, but I put an early version of it in the gallery.

Sunflow Shader Writing

Eugene — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 18:32:26 +0000

I’m sure it’s apparent that I’m into Sunflow. I enjoy it thoroughly. I’ve also gotten into the source code enough that I am grasping even more. Case in point: I’ve produced my second janino shader. The first was just stripping the diffuse component out of the phong shader leaving only the specular – nothing fancy. The second is a little more than a standard shader stripped down to the wires (though still not on the level that Don is at). What makes it special to me is that it actually does something I can use and it looks like I intended: implementation of a reflection map on one of the shaders. I’m finding that the real power of Sunflow is the integration of Janino so that you can access everything in the source. Not only is it a great deal of fun to have access to everything the renderer has, but you can create things beyond what is there now. Plus, it helps me strengthen my use of Java.

Sunflow Distributed Rendering Now Housed Here!

Eugene — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 19:08:28 +0000

Earlier this year, Szabolcs Pota used a Jini based grid system called JGrid and hooked Sunflow to it. Needless to say this was a cool thing since it is entirely open source – no CPU limits here! – and it gave Sunflow real distributed rendering capability. It seems that the site that had all the files on it was no longer functioning, but luckily I collect files, so I had everything but I was concerned that Sunflow users wouldn’t have access to it. A quick e-mail to Szabolcs, and an offer to house it all on my site brings us to the title of this post. The site is as it was at its new location. So now all Sunflow users can once again have access to this amazing tool!

Iterated Fractals, Meet Sunflow

Eugene — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:28:28 +0000

Thanks to Sunflow user and fractal enthusiast Don Casteel, we now have a pretty cool fractal method. Don is no stranger to fractals (1, 2) and once he found Sunflow he started creating some really cool stuff. Of course he did a teapot fractal, so I thought I would “represent” by doing a Suzanne fractal. Take a look at my results in the gallery. I like it so much I made my header of the site from one of them.

Blender Hair To Sunflow Hair

Eugene — Tue, 01 May 2007 02:47:35 +0000

In my upgrading of the official Sunflow exporter, I endevoured to access some of Sunflow’s more unique attributes, such as the Sunflow hair object. Yes, Sunflow has hair. You can even control the width of the hairs over their length in the SVN. So it certainly took some effort to try to get the data from Blender exported in the right format. Luckily, with some help from some other Python users, I was able to get it done right. You can see a test image in the inset. Sunflow’s hair definitely has a lot of potential. Here’s another with thicker strands:

In my ever increasing interest in Sunflow, I’ve also picked up a book on Java, mainly to get into writing shaders for it, but also to see if I can’t really do cool stuff with the source…. and who knows, maybe even do something worth being added.

Sunflow Test Animations

Eugene — Tue, 10 Apr 2007 19:21:02 +0000

Given my propensity to test things with the most mundane of settings, I give you two test animations made in Blender, and then rendered in Sunflow. The first one I did was just to make sure I had coded the Sunflow exporter correctly so that caustics and global illumination settings were added to the right place in the right file. I could test that by looking at the exported files, but I decided to render the animation just to prove that it worked. The second was me trying to see how long glass rigid bodies and caustucs in an animation would take to render… it turns out it’s a long time. Even after completing the render I still don’t think it looks right since the glass sparkles. I should have increased the AA (which resolved the same issue in the first animation). Anyways you can find them both linked in the gallery.

What I’ve Been Up Too

Eugene — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 01:00:23 +0000

I thought I would do a post since some folks might be wondering why there hasn’t been a video posted recently – especially the walk cycle video that a lot of people have asked for… It’ll happen.

There’s an ongoing push to update the Sunflow Blender exporter which I’ve been an active participant in and I figured I would point people to it. Currently, it’s not on the main Sunflow site (the old exporter is), but the latest upgrade can be found in the Sunflow SVN and you can find it here. You might find it gives you renewed interest in Sunflow. It is a huge leap forward when compared to the original with a lot of people contributing on the Sunflow forums (myself included), which is what I’ve been up to, along with immersing myself in Sunflow and the distributing rendering project happening on the forums. I’ve also volunteered to be the one who uploads any enhancements to the script to the Sunflow SVN, so it should be updated regularly. Additionally, the Sunflow forums have a thread for tutorials which is a great start in doing more interesting things with renders.

Also, talk on the Blender committers list indicates that the Blender source is going from CVS to SVN, so as soon as that happens, I’ll update the build tutorial.