Blender example setups for generating renderings from Virtual Unfolding.
In all these test files we've set up an orthographic camera with an isometric projection.
We render out all our animations from Blender as pngs and then create a video from that with ffmpeg. The files are typically output from Blender in the form XXXX.png where X is a number. We use the following ffmpeg settings to write these sequential pngs to mp4:
ffmpeg -r 30 -i PATH_TO_FRAMES/%4d.png -c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22 -pix_fmt yuv420p -an OUTPUT_DIRECTORY/animation.mp4-r 30sets the framerate to 30 fps-i PATH_TO_FRAMES/%4d.pngspecifies the input file name with 4 number in sequence.-c:v libx264 -preset slow -crf 22encodes as h.264 with better compression settings-pix_fmt yuv420pmakes it compatible with the web browser.-ancreates a video with no audio.- you can optionally specify
-s 640x640to control the output size of the video.
We like using ezgif to convert the resulting video to an optimized gif (under the hood it is also using ffmpeg).
This example file lets you create an unfolding animation using the data produced by our unfold_obj script.
This is not quite ready yet, but will be updated soon!
This example file that lets you create a volumetric rendering from CT data. First, you will need to create a .raw file to import your data into blender. Find more info about this using the TOMtoRAW script.
IMPORTANT: The newest version of Blender (2.91.2 at the time of writing this) does not support voxel data textures in either of Eevee or Cycles rendering engines. We rolled back to Blender 2.79 on MacOS to do these, as volumetric texture rendering will not work on a version >2.8.
A really nice tutorial about setting up these types of renders is given in Voxel Datacubes for 3D Visualization in Blender by Matías Gárate.
When you add your own .raw file to this blender template, you'll need to tell blender the resolution of your data under Cube>Texture>Voxel Data - mine happened to be a 58x58x58 voxel cube:
Be sure to also change the dimensions of the cube to match the aspect ratio of your data. By scaling up the size of the cube, you can increase the resolution of the resulting render. Adjust the material's Density Scale to change the density/transparency of the volumetric data in the render.
We've already keyframed a spinning animation in the timeline, so you can try rendering an animation to see that effect.
This file is the same as above, but we've added some faux paper coloring to the voxel texture and included some extra lights and ambient occlusion to make the depth pop a bit more. We had to use some slower settings to get this to render without nasty artifacts, so the rendering takes about 8x longer than the settings above.
IMPORTANT: The newest version of Blender (2.91.2 at the time of writing this) does not support voxel data textures in either of Eevee or Cycles rendering engines. We rolled back to Blender 2.79 on MacOS to do these, as volumetric texture rendering will not work on a version >2.8.