Electron Microscope for Autodesk Softimage

Do you like nanotechnologies or microscopy biology? What I really like is the look of those wonderful Electron Microscope images showing the nanoworld. There are noisy, strangely lighted, and seem to be from another world, strange and frightening…

So, I’ve made a shader compound for Autodesk Softimage 2011. The main interest of this compound is, of course, to simulate the electron microscope look, but also to show how to make it ready for passes, compositing, and easy to use.

This Shader Compound is made for Educational purpose, and it is fully commented. It’s really easy to make Electron Microscope look. It’s simply an incidence and an ambient occlusion. But to make this usable and adaptable is not so easy. That’s the goal of this compound. Have a look inside it!

You can also use it ‘as is’ if you need to make some nanopictures.

If you make some pictures with this shader compound, please, don’t forget credits and send me your results. If you have any suggestion for making this compound better, just send me an email!


Quick documentation:
Base lighting:
Light softness: how hard is the ‘lighting’ from electrons. Less softness is a more contrasted picture.
Shadowing distance: contact shadow size, or how far elements are obscuring each other.
Structured noise: Some electron microscope pictures are often noisy. From ‘very noisy’ to ‘extreme softness’, this function added structured noise to your picture, base on lighting. The less noise you have, the slower you are!

Color:
Real Electron Microscope images are black and white. Some of them are colored by post-processing. You can have this ‘colorized look’ by using this color, or switch of colorization and keep original black and white.

Bumpy Noise:
At nano scale, nothing is really flat. So this compound adds bumpy noise on object.
Disable Noise: doesn’t add noise and keep object perfectly flat.
Animated noise: if you choose a very small noise, you can animate it to have a more ‘rough’ picture effect during animation. Don’t use it with large noise!
Noise level: height of the noise. It should stay very small to keep ‘non flat’ effects.
Noise Scale: Size of features of noise. The smaller it is, the biggest are the features.

Bump: If you want to add your own bump to your objet.

Pass generation:
Here are switches for extracting one particular feature of the shader compound:
Total compound is ‘Color * Gradient * Ambient Occlusion’.
You should have just one of them switch on, or none of them. If you switch two, you’ll have to topmost one.

You can download the compound here: Electron Microscope Shader Compound

And here are some pictures and video of my nanoworlds:

Electron Microscope Shader Compound for Autodesk Softimage from François Gastaldo on Vimeo.