A heartbeat, some books, and an IDE

Ouch! My last post has almost been 5 months ago! Realizing this, I had two options: to feign my own death until the next update, or to give some sign of (what for me passes as) life. Let’s go with the second option and see if there’s anything useful I can pass on anyway. Not…

Slice-based volume rendering using Pixel Bender

After a futile exploration of sparse voxel octree ray casting using Alchemy (which was fun but hopeless), I turned towards another technique for volume rendering, using view-aligned slices. The approach is not much different from the rendering of this older experiment, in which the slices were aligned to the object itself. Again, we’re using the same…

3D smoke: taking Pixel Bender to the next dimension

One final thing I wanted to achieve with smoke effects is to port the 2D simulation to 3D. Early results in pure AS3 were pretty disappointing, so again I turned to Pixel Bender and its speedy goodness. Still, the main obstacle was of course performance. The first step was to optimize the original 2D version…