Medical voxel data in blender 2.5

November 19th, 2010 . 4 comments

From time to time I get emails asking about voxel data/volume rendering capabilities in Blender for medical scan data (see this previous post). Today I got one asking for a simple example for using it in 2.5, so I thought I’d re-post it here. It’s using a 512 x 512 x 233 scan of a plastic skull, and the demo file is just loading it up as a density source in a simple scene with ground plane and light. To set it up from scratch, you should be able to follow the same instructions as any tutorial for rendering smoke or other volumes in blender, but change the density source.

Download the demo .blend file here.

Some extra notes:

  • The main thing to remember is that volume rendering in blender is not really intended for solids, or even medical usage at all – it’s really just a nice side effect. The volume shader in blender is intended for gas/particles like clouds or smoke. Having said that, if you crank the density of the volume right up, you can approach something more solid looking. The above example is using a Density Scale of 50.
  • This plastic skull example was quite easy because I didn’t have to isolate any kind of extra tissue etc. To do that normally you’d have to use the ramp option in the Texture’s Color panel. Here’s an example of a scan of my own head, using the ramp to isolate out the skull (right) from all the flesh (left).
  • You may notice on a dense volume like this, the shading looks a bit blocky – this is due to the Light Cache, which speeds up rendering a lot, without too much visual quality loss on most cloud/smoke kinds of volumes. The artifacts do show a bit more clearly with very dense volumes though. You can remedy this by either increasing the Light Cache resolution (using more memory) or turning it off completely (using more CPU).

§ 4 Responses to Medical voxel data in blender 2.5"

  • Sam Schad says:

    Matt-
    What are the chances you might do a full tutorial on this?

  • Manuel says:

    I just tried to render the file – and the texture doesn’t seem to be bundled with the file (packed)?!
    Or do I have to change anything?

    Thanks in advance

    Manuel

  • Manuel says:

    Whoops…sorry. I just realized the skull8bit.bin you posted here seperately. Of course it works…my bad.

  • kursad says:

    Hey Matt, it looks like the skull data is not available. I am wondering if it is possible for you to share, not sure it was copyrighted. Also what was the original format of the skull data? I am working on similar stuff and you examples and codes were helpful

    cheers

    k

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