FREE software and a Technical Oscars! Why you should get a CS Degree!

[This blog was posted originally to https://blogs.msdn.com/research ]

Oh what in the heck is a Micro-Voxel and why do Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt win an Oscar for this process that, according to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences?

This work allowed for the first time, unified and efficient rendering of volumetric effects such as smoke and clouds, together with other computer graphics objects, in a micro-polygon imaging pipeline.

Still not clear about what this has to do with micro-voxels, which when you look it up seems to be connected to CT scans by GE if you do a simple search on the internet.

It appears that a microvoxel is a 3D version of micropolygon that subtends it into a 3D volume.  This means that the shading is decoupled from the image.

For more information you will need to read the short paper on ACM.ORG: Rendering Volumes With Microvoxels

So if, like me, you have a face for radio, then a CS degree can advance you into an award your mom understands, then the technical Oscars would be the one!  Ok, you don’t get on TV, but you get a really cool lunch.

If you want to read more about Oscars and the technical awards see my colleagues blog at:

You can download a version of software that uses this approach to rendering from:

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=589&Itemid=221

Check out the video and other tutorials on what appears to be an easy to use product:

 

 

Contained Fluids - Andrew Lyons from Go Procedural on Vimeo.

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ACM citation:

Andrew Clinton and Mark Elendt. 2009. Rendering volumes with microvoxels. In SIGGRAPH 2009: Talks (SIGGRAPH '09). ACM, New York, NY, USA, , Article 47 , 1 pages. DOI=10.1145/1597990.1598037 https://doi.acm.org/10.1145/1597990.1598037