There has been quite some discussion on WebGL recently. Here is a demo that will show you why we think it is a great technology. It contains an interactive volume renderer that makes use of the new canvas element in HTML 5. A ray marching algorithm applies your transfer function to a texture and renders the volume dataset interactively. Before trying this out, please read the following notes on the limitations concerning different web browsers and graphics cards.

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Download XML Node Delete 0.5

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We have uploaded a new version of SimbiontFusion that includes the long-awaited 64-bit support. This plugin allows you to render DarkTree procedural textures directly in Fusion. Please note that the plugin was compiled with the Fusion 6.2 SDK and that installation steps have changed for this release, so consult the readme.txt file.

Download Simbiont Fusion 1.05

This is a quick post to show another aspect of the Lazy Susan project: physics based rotation of shaded geometry. This Susan features a clamp that we modeled for a recent surgical simulation. It opens and closes when clicked (with sound!) and uses a tinted reflection map shader to add realism. As usual, click and drag with the mouse to rotate the model. Since this version is geometry-based and not a collection of pre-rendered images like earlier posts, the model can rotated about both the horizontal and vertical axes. Right click and select Go Fullscreen for a close-up view.

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We’re releasing another Fusion tool today that has been helpful in our 3D workflows. The tool applies the functionality of Fusion’s brightness contrast tool (BC) to 3D materials. Simple.

We’ve been moving large amounts of image data to the graphics card lately, so this tool allows us to tweak fragment colors without requiring a re-upload for each iteration.

Download Material Brightness Contrast 3D 1.0

Our counterparts over in the web department recently developed a Flash-based pregnancy calendar. It uses some slick ActionScript 3 and showcases visualizations that our company produced from 3D microscope and fetal micro-MRI data. It’s available for embedding on any third-party site (as we have done on this page). Check it out below.

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Last year we released a shader for Fusion that implements the lit sphere method. This low-cost shader maps the view normals of an object’s visible faces to a shaded sphere texture. We have added this type of shading to our Lazy Susan project to add flexible lighting approximation without affecting the download size or GPU demands.

The method does require that we pre-render the view normals, but once the full model texture has been streamed in it becomes simple to swap out, rotate, or blend between lit sphere textures on the client side. To improve surface detail, we also encoded the ambient occlusion into one of the channels of our rendered model texture.

Check out the Unity player below for the result. You can drag the model to spin it around or drag the lit sphere to a) adjust the rotation and b) blend between a diffuse and shiny sphere.

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Yesterday we posted a demo of an ongoing Unity project we are developing. This project’s goal is to get 3D voxel data spinning in a web browser as quickly and simply as possible. We have put together another example, this time using some interesting two-photon microscopy images of cellular kidney anatomy.

The captured image shows tubule (green) and capillary (blue) epithelial cells as well as cell nuclei (orange) that were each stained with a different dye. The microscope captures the excitation of these dyes at different wavelengths, which we can use to isolate the structures or apply a false color lookup as we have done in this example. We also applied a deconvolution filter in the z-direction to compensate for light “bleed-through” and segmented/enhanced a glomerulus contained within the dataset.

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Lately we’ve been working with Unity to produce interactive visualizations of 3D voxel data. We’re developing a pipeline that can quickly render a dataset as a rotational image stack and a front-end application that displays it as an interactive turntable. Unity’s ability to compile for smartphones, websites and standalone platforms has us dreaming up all kinds of uses for this technology.

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The signed distance operator can be quite useful when doing image/voxel data processing based on a pixel’s distance from an iso-surface. This plugin calculates just that. The plugin is implemented using Open CL, so the Open CL program should also be copied into the same directory as the Fuse plugin.

Download Signed Distance Fuse

The tool has inputs to control the position of the iso-surface (Zeropass Threshold) and the number of rasterizing passes (Number of Passes). The output can be a distance value or a 2D – vector pointing towards the closest point in the iso-surface.