Using the built-in volumetric material in Blender and a microCT 3D dataset provided by Daniele Panetta of the Institute of Clinical Physiology at CNR Pisa, I was able to come up with this rendering.
Voxel data is 490 x 410 x 1425 @ 8bit (~300 MB)
Too bad there isn’t a way to visualize medical images like these in realtime in Blender just yet.
For me any skeleton looks like a dinosaur, fascinating :) Great work Mike
cool! how long did it take to cook the render?
Less than 10 seconds @ 1k resolution. But it’s all done on the CPU. With a decent GPU implementation, I can totally see this work at realtime.
Well, at this point I’d like to ask what configuration you use, I’m looking on your website for some more info about that…
By ‘decent GPU’ what do you mean? which graphic card would you recommend?
That’s crazy-cool. And after seeing what SmallLuxGPU can do, I can see rendering that skeleton real-time.
@Marco, the current Blender rendering engine does not use the graphic card at all. So unless someone explicitly writes code for the GPU, GPU performance only matters in the 3Dviewport and the game engine, not in rendering. I was referring to hopes that someday we can have a way to see volumetric data inside Blender in realtime. The smoke sim already does this, so I imagine it won’t be too hard to do this with other datasets.
That said, I’d pick Nvidia Geforce over AMD Radeon right now since Nvidia card supports both CUDA and OpenCL, the two languages of GPU-computing. Radeons only supports OpenCL, which is a bummer since CUDA seems to be getting a lot of attention lately. For example, Adobe CS5 is CUDA accelerated on Nvidia only.
@Mike, yeah GPU is definitely the way to go. Too bad they consume way too much power right now. (But then 3x more power than the CPU, while delivering 30x the performance isn’t bad)
Where is those 28nm chips TSMC promised at the beginning of the year??
Cooool. Ever played with Osirix before?
http://www.osirix-viewer.com/
No Oscar, too bad it’s Mac only. I really want to try it out.
Mike, this looks great!
Check out Matt Ebb’s real-time GSLS volumetric blender work on Visual Human data on Vimeo (search)– If he can load 4Gb of data, surely you could do this!
BTW, I believe Cuda has now also Mac version– consider coding there? Or are you on Linux?
Hi Craig, I took a look at your website and understood your dilema on using CG as the main method for generating medical illustrations. It’s very difficult to make something by hand that is ‘accurate enough’ for medical purposes. Which is why I think using realworld data (such as scans like these) is the way to go.
Very impressive imaging. I’ve played with Osirix and I am enthused to see Blender able to render the same. Are there any resources, tutorials in blender-land you can point me to re. volumetric materials and how you implemented it?
Yes you can do this in realtime :
http://vimeo.com/4310269
Thanks Mark. Blender 2.5 has native support for volumetric rendering and it can load 8bit voxel data natively. There is no custom coding or script to be done. Email me if you want to know the details.
Matt Ebb also did something similar: http://mke3.net/weblog/category/blender-user-interface/