Missing features

[straaljager]

Hi @paulmelis ,

integrating OSPRay in Blender is a fantastic idea! I was wondering which of the features on your missing features list you plan to add first? (Having the first two on the list below would be amazing for scientific artists/media designers).

• Interactive preview render
• Material editing
• Volume transfer function editing
• Motion blur (which is not supported by OSPRay itself)
• Parallel rendering mode through MPI

Thanks for sharing this!

[paulmelis]

Hi @straaljager (that sounds Dutch ;-)), thanks for the reaction. As far as features goes the preview render is high on my list to get done, preferably before the upcoming BCON. Material editing is somewhat there, TF editing not quite. I'm basing the current version on the upcoming OSPRay 2.0 and have some API updates to do as they got changed in the past week or two.

[straaljager]

I'm actually Flemish :) The progress on those features sounds awesome.

I'm interested in blospray because we are developing a visualization framework based on OSPRay as well which includes a JavaScript and Python interface (https://github.com/BlueBrain/Brayns). It's mainly for Python-savvy scientific users, but having OSPRay available from inside Blender can open it up for media designers and artists as well. Btw, three of us will attend BCON as well.

[paulmelis]

@straaljager Ah, I remember the BlueBrain viz talk from last year's BCON. That's very nice data to visualize, looked great!

There's a Scientific Visualization Panel slot at BCON19 (you've probably already noticed it), in which I have a short presentation on BLOSPRAY. I managed to get a bit further with the features and intend to update the repo just before BCON (or directly after if I don't manage).

I'm actually Flemish :)

Could be worse ;-)

[straaljager]

Thanks! Actually, there will be someone from our viz team on that panel as a speaker (Marwan) and two other colleagues of mine will attend the session (Caitlin and Fabien). I will tell them to keep an eye out for your BLOSPRAY talk (since we're using both Ospray and Blender in the team here).

Looking forward to see the real-time rendering :)

[paulmelis]

Looking forward to see the real-time rendering :)

Unfortunately, there won't be much time for a demo, as the slot is targeted as a panel with only short talks, but with discussions...

[BruceCherniak]

Hey @paulmelis ,

Just wanted to let you know that I’ve been able to repro your results internally. BLOSPRAY looks amazing!

Cheers,
Bruce

[paulmelis]

Hi @BruceCherniak, great! Be warned though that it's easy to hit a dark/buggy corner in the code, but even to myself it already proves quite useful in thinking about different ways of doing sciviz using Blender and ways OSPRay can help there. By the way, OSPRay usage currently isn't optimal (not using shared data, C instead of C++ API, some workarounds due to bugs, etc). But OSPRay is quite an amazing library to use, the API is really comprehensive.

Let me know what you think if you end playing around with it some more!