Stream: brlcad

Topic: Example Renderings

Sean (May 31 2019 at 19:14):

Here's a thread for sharing renderings that people make involving either BRL-CAD geometry models or BRL-CAD rendering. Feel free to post your own pictures.

Sean (May 31 2019 at 19:14):

To kick things off, here's a rendering I made a few months back: t62.png

Sean (May 31 2019 at 19:20):

I don't remember exactly, but this image has pretty much all the knobs turned all the way up, so it was computationally intensive and rendered at a ridiculous resolution for a huge poster printing. I believe it was 16384x16384 with hypersampling (don't recall exact setting but probably -H3), shadow rays (300 sample rays per hit if I recall correctly), and ambient occlusion (forget how many samples, but it was a lot too!). Basically, in the "trillions of rays" ballpark. I should calculate the actual. Regardless, rendering with remrt took something like 4-8 hours using over 300 cores. The poster looks amazing. ;)

Sean (Aug 27 2020 at 04:47):

Really need to get ambient working with rt's cutting plane option... Screen-Shot-2020-08-27-at-12.46.23-AM.png

Sean (Aug 27 2020 at 04:48):

This building render turned out pretty nice, though. Wow, this is an oldie! building_1024.png

Sumagna Das (Aug 27 2020 at 06:32):

the building looks cool

Sumagna Das (Aug 27 2020 at 06:43):

Did you make it in BRL-CAD?

Sean (Aug 27 2020 at 18:43):

@Sumagna Das yes, that's a pure BRL-CAD model made from scratch

Sean (Aug 27 2020 at 18:45):

that was 14 years ago though, and my memory of who all worked on it is fuzzy. I remember directing and coordinating a lot, but I think there was a summer student or two involved in taking measurements and creating the geometry. I put the scene together, created and textured the ground, and rendered it.

Sean (Apr 05 2022 at 02:53):

Preview of a new model from Chris McGregor Screen-Shot-2022-04-04-at-10.19.15-PM.png

Sean (May 11 2022 at 20:03):

aet.png

Sean (May 15 2022 at 04:38):

jeep_1024.gif

Sean (Feb 12 2024 at 06:20):

powerplant_2048.png

Sean (Feb 14 2024 at 18:23):

Nefertiti.mp4

Sean (Feb 28 2024 at 15:13):

Improved ambient occlusion support for cut planes.. before and after:
Screenshot-2024-02-28-at-10.12.14-AM.png

Sean (Mar 01 2024 at 20:02):

surfpoints.png

Sean (Mar 01 2024 at 20:03):

10k random points and lines to center
10k_moss_samples.png

Sean (Mar 02 2024 at 18:52):

Cool. This sampling method converges to a very precise surface area metric in a fraction of a second:
sphvalidation.png

Sean (Mar 02 2024 at 21:49):

Somewhat better view of what's going on...
Screenshot-2024-03-02-at-2.14.00-PM.png

Sean (Sep 11 2024 at 16:54):

Testing out three different methods for visualizing a model's exploded complexity in a collage format:
image.png

Sean (Sep 11 2024 at 16:55):

(All three are incomplete, still running as those are just previews -- full res is print-quality)

starseeker (Sep 11 2024 at 18:22):

Hah - wacky cool

Sean (Sep 11 2024 at 21:56):

There was a really cool collage I saw at Siggraph that gave me the idea. Still have to pad the images better and probably cull out negative cuts, but idea is to spread it all out in one image.

starseeker (Sep 12 2024 at 13:30):

Reminds me of that old "exploded views" paper from siggraph years ago

starseeker (Sep 12 2024 at 13:31):

I think it was this... https://grail.cs.washington.edu/projects/exview3D/

Sean (Aug 18 2026 at 19:58):

Sean (Aug 19 2026 at 04:06):

and baseline fixed..

Sean (Aug 19 2026 at 22:04):

final result in ibrt

Pavel Jansa (Aug 20 2026 at 07:34):

3D scans of oak logs with visible toolmarks. Break of bronze and iron age in central Europe. Assembled in GIMP.

Sean (Aug 21 2026 at 18:16):

@Pavel Jansa that's pretty cool - you might want to run "gist" on one of them and see what you think of the output...

Sean (Aug 21 2026 at 18:17):

If you set its material, you could even get it to report mass properties.

Sean (Aug 25 2026 at 00:58):

ADRT master-slave rendering! Been probably 10+ years since this was last tested working.

starseeker (Aug 27 2026 at 03:30):

Fun with TOR - the previously impossible Y-only scaling operation, both wireframe and raytraced.

Sean (Aug 27 2026 at 20:03):

how you doing the implicit?

starseeker (Aug 27 2026 at 22:54):

https://github.com/BRL-CAD/brlcad/compare/main...nonuniform

starseeker (Aug 27 2026 at 22:55):

I don't know that it will actually be mergeable in its current form, but I was curious to see if it was possible.

starseeker (Aug 27 2026 at 23:05):

Basically stashing the matrix on the primitive as an attribute and teaching the loading codes to read and apply it

Sean (Aug 28 2026 at 08:16):

oh, of course it's possible. always have known that, issue is really just that there's no clean way to do it without breaking format. it needs the affine matrix at shot time, but it's only available at export time. only hack is to hang it off an attribute during export, which is exactly what it did there. that was one of the motivations for binary attributes a few years back, but still considered it an egregious hack and entirely backwards incompatible.

looking at the change, rather fugly that it introduced a whole new callback to lookup and apply the affine transformation AND manually injected code all over the place to go through it. that seems entirely unnecessary to me. just needed a static helper for prep/tess/plot.

interesting to consider the implications in more detail. with some cleanup and changes, might be something there.

Sean (Aug 28 2026 at 08:51):

dynamic secondary render cell plot overlay:

starseeker (Aug 29 2026 at 01:59):

How is it backwards incompatible? Not arguing for merging it in, but in the absence of code to process the attribute it'll handle the shapes in question the same way it currently does, correct? Just ignore the attribute and raytrace as it would now - no wronger than it's ever been... The new rendering code would just be more correct than older code.

Sean (Sep 05 2026 at 23:14):

preliminary progress on a full OSM-spec-conformant building generator

starseeker (Sep 06 2026 at 20:24):

Normals are a bit wonky, but this is a non-trivial IGES import of https://grabcad.com/library/battleship-hms-dreadnought-update-3-1

starseeker (Sep 06 2026 at 22:49):

dm set lighting 2 helps quite a bit for this one.

starseeker (Sep 07 2026 at 00:25):

That's probably where I'll leave it for this round - color is per-face, and if we make individual breps for open shells rather than forcing associated faces into a single brep container we can show some of the colors, but longer term the drawing layer and data storage need some sort of per-face-color capability to do this right.

Last updated: Sep 08 2026 at 02:02 UTC