I had done something like this many years ago but had until just, completely forgotten about the technique
Here are some example's I've made of volume like rendering, done simply by duplicating a sphere 200 times inside itself smaller and smaller. The volume can be controlled by 3D noise shaders and gradients. And also by Proximal shader where by it shades based on distance to another object.
The following are controlled by shaders, 3D noise shaders and 3D gradients, you could also use Proximal shader to control the shading based on distance to another object.
Imagine being able to make them reflective/shiny sub surface scattered and render fast... that would require true volumetric rendering I think
Also I don't fancy trying to cast shadows or use GI on these things... it my explode and look bad to boot.
It's a bit of a tangent from the normal Vray/C4D use for sure. Someone could go to all sorts of lengths writing shaders to mask based on the volume of other objects, say in order to boolean a volume with another object, but it would boolean inside the shader volume no polygonal operation. And controls for feathering that and so on. 3D falloff/feather/blend controls... could go on and on. Just my fantasy here *drewls*
I wonder if a particle/fluid based volume rendering system like Mayas or Houdini's could be contorted to do this kind of thing, to have the same kind of controls or better. That may be the answer. It should be easier more practical to twist a real volume/fluid/particle solution into doing this, than to twist a 3D shader to do it, plus you'd then get the benefits of being able to do fluid like effects on it and have it interact with other objects in ways a 3D shader never could. I think the biggest problem with using fluid/volume renderer to do it is the resolution, they tend to be very veeeery slow at anything but the fuzziest resolution.
No Cubes here, just 200 Spheres + 3D Box Noise shader... honest
Made from light, the color becomes additive, though It's not quite right, the colors will flatten, they won't additive to white, which sucks.
Wait, no that's just me being stupid, you need the colors to be greater than 100% bright for that...
Tadda made from light take 2:
Cinemas gradients cannot go above 100% brightness, they are 8bit essentially, however you can multiply them up, by overlaying a super bright white layer and setting it to multiply.
Problem with this is, due to it being made from onion skins, the sides are not additive as they are not perpendicular to the camera, so where the edges should get brighter, they do not.
To solve this I tried rendering a few 100 planes stacked in front of each other facing the camera, and using a 3D spherical gradient to make it look like a hemisphere:
ooh, looks good, but won't work right if rendered from above:
In theory you could have the planes orinet to face the camera at all times, as the shape is entirely controlled by the shader.
Nice!
I also tried making it out of Cubes, but it was too slow and looked bad:
Link: helios.mine.nu --- Inspiration
Link: helios.mine.nu --- Reality 2.0
Finally!! found a program for creating math type art, this is awesome!
I've been looking for a program like this for years now, and it runs on Mac... woo! and is free!!! double woo!
TopMod3d is a free, open source, portable, platform independent topological mesh modeling system that allows users to create high genus 2-manifold meshes.
Link: www.topmod3d.org
And some other cool apps I found along with it:
Link: paraclouding.com --- home
Just did the following with it playing about:
Not bad for 5 minutes of playing
:-D
Ooh I'm a genius!
Finally figured a kinda hacky way of achieving a made of light volumetric look in 3D.. fast
Problem is It's not HUE additive, so where super bright RED would go from White at It's brightest down thru yellow and then end up at red... this is stuck in boring old 8bit land.. boo. I can kind of hack it by stretching the 8bit image across a 32bit range, then it will hue shift as you'd expect.
Done using Vrays Volume Fog:
Hue shift from white to cyan to blue achieved by stretching the 8 bit result into 32bit... basically by adjusting It's gamma/exposure/offset and image saturation:
This one looks especially weird as I forgot to decrease the transparency cutoff value, so it had a weird folding over effect
Inverting the red image, makes it look like It's made from light.
Ball with various thickness changes in places.
And with some photoshop modification to simulate it being made from light
Has all kinds of free brushes you can download:
Link: Qbrushes.com
So you too can follow everyone else in style and substance for that not YET dated 21st century style
You too then can paint with light!
Below was achieved using special magical powers... well, not really, go learn about 32bit, then go play with 32bit in Photoshop and think in terms of light and wavelengths instead of that old fangled 256 levels of RGB your brain has been likely used to for so long... so 19th century.
My latest animation looks like a scale model! a really photorealistic, shot with an old ass broken camera scale model... the lack of real details in the model and the large Depth of Field and vignette blurring have a lot to do with it I think.
Movie linked below:
Linear Workflow, I love you!
Before and After, difference is done in AE Post with use of color profile conversion to simulate film A realistic form of tonemapping in a way.
Details on Linear Workflow, general 32bit color ness and jazz to be found at the following link:
Good site full of info on Cinematography, Color Correction, 32bit Linear Workflow etc etc:
Link: prolost.blogspot.com
And
For tone-mapping in AE to make it look film like:
Link: fnordware.blogspot.com --- hdr-tone-mapping-using-film-profiles
