Visible Progress At Last

After months of being neck-deep in code, I finally have an image to put to all of my text. For those of you who have a vague idea of what I've been up to, here's the down-lo: I've been working hard on writing my own smokey haze atmospheric for our senior film Butchered Meats. Seems simple enough, but I have never worked with the RenderMan Shading Language (RSL) before, nor traversed through a scene via code, so it was a huge learning experience.

I also took a lot of time to add a number of optimal features to my script. I wanted to give our director (and the lighters) as much control as possible over the troublesome substance. The user can adjust the density, the haze color, the areas where the haze will be more and less dense, where the haze starts and stops accumulating, which objects will be excluded from the haze, and so forth. I also added a switch that allows the user to jump between smokey looks and plain 'ol atmospheric fog. The point of the whole script is to provide our boxing gym with the smokey haze seen in those pugilist films we love. I'm super stoked to say that the image rendered below does just that!

It's not very visually impressive, but actually getting to see some sort of finished product come out of all my effort is awesome! I was so excited to see it working that I just had to share (even if it is in a temp shot with really crappy lighting--done by me :) ). Go forth and appreciate! I will be doing another post soon with a shot from the actual film (and maybe even an animation of the smoke moving).