Jul 152008
 

Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios

This sketch was developed for Pixar’s RenderMan Univeristy and demonstrates using procedural displacement mapping to achieve an interesting visual effect. The setup, covered in fine detail in the Courseware, uses on a particles system that writes primitive variables (primvars) onto the table top each time there is a collision event. The table top has a custom displacement shader that uses these privars to locate the ripples both spatially and temporally. From there, the rest of the displacement shader handles the pattern generation for the concentric rings. A movie of just the ripple pattern is shown below. This was output as an AOV (arbitrary output variable), a framebuffer separate from the final render, and was subsequently used to composite the final result.

Copyright © Pixar Animation Studios