Are Boxes too Square for Sunflow?

Mikael Christensen — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 21:13:54 +0000

Structure Synth is now able to export boxes to Sunflow. That was actually a lot harder than spheres.

Boxicity (Sunflow render).

Sunflow has some amazing global illumination lightning, but why doesn’t it have a ‘box’ primitive in its scene graph language? I mean, it has Banchoff Surfaces, tori and teapots, but not a simple box?

By the way, for those who really dig boxes, check out the Flickr Boxclub (a few Structure Synth creations may also be spotted there).

Structure Synth Rendering Templates

Mikael Christensen — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 21:12:49 +0000

Creating a reasonable way of exporting Structure Synth objects to other renderers, like Sunflow and POV-Ray turned out to be more difficult than I expected. Not because they have complicated scene description languages – they don’t – but because there are a lot of settings and parameters, and I do not want to wrap and support every single one of them.

Example Sunflow rendering with Global Illuminated Ambient Occlusion.

The approach I came up with is quite simple – it is now possible to define a number of rendering templates which are XML-files containing a number of text fragments, one for each of the primitives (box, sphere, …) and a ’start’ and ‘end’ fragment.

For instance, a fragment (for a Sunflow exporter) for the ’sphere’ primitive could look like this:

object {
  shader "s05"
  type sphere
  c {cx} {cy} {cz}
  r {rad}
}

where the center and radius parameters would be substituted for each instance of the primitive.

Syntopia » Sunflow

Are Boxes too Square for Sunflow?

Structure Synth Rendering Templates