The Goal: Create an artist-friendly volumetric lighting tool. Based on "A Programmable System for Artistic Volumetric Lighting" -Nowrouzezahrai et al. (2011), in collaboration with Dan Knowlton.
The Solution: A Maya plug-in and a Renderman shader. The plug-in helps create the curves, manage the shaders and introduce variation with jitter controls. The shader controls the color, brightness, falloff, etc. of the generated curves. My work focused on the shading component.
The video below demonstrates the authoring, jittering, and shading of an example curve.
The shading works by taking advantage of Renderman's ability to render curves as flat, camera-oriented ribbons with convenient, normalized surface coordinates. Any curves can be used, regardless of how they are authored. The plug-in includes a tool to create additional curves parallel to an original guide with two profile curves for each end to create a sort of sheet.
The video below shows a revolution of a basic particle-path-to-curve conversion.
The video below demonstrates the ability to parameterize along the length of a curve.
In this final video, we re-create an example from the Disney paper.
