Fooling around in Houdini with the intersect VOP today, made a little raytracer inside SOPs. I’m sure its not the first time somebody’s done this, but it was a bit of fun while passing time.
It’s tracing rays from each grid point, doing (soft) shadowed diffuse lighting from a point light, with an optional specular reflection layer with fake fresnel blending.
haha that’s so freakin cool!! I love houdinis flexibility. Could you share the setup? I’d love to examine/play with it!
oh no… you’ve become one of THEM…. one of those super freaky clever houdinicks…. ew…
😉
hehe not realy .. that’s why I’m asking for the setup 😉
Actually I’m more interested in the raytracer and looking at a working version in a node editor and being able to tweak/change things and see how they affect the result is alot easier to grasp and more entertaining than reading a paper /sourcecode 🙂
Oh hi!
Other matt: Is that you, Estela? 😉
Sascha: Well, that file is probably not a good way to learn about ray tracing so much, I did things in a bit of a weird way in order to coerce it to work inside VOPs. But I’ve just updated it to a newer version, and while it’s still not exactly as you’d find it in code, it’s probably a bit simpler to grasp inside the file (attached on the vimeo page). cheers