Spin Wave Website Header

A Spin Wave, Artists Impression

All Work done in Blender, finished 10/12/12

Dr. Kozhanov, my research mentor for the internship I did this summer, asked me to make a website header image for his research group's website.  It'll soon be displayed here: http://www.phy-astr.gsu.edu/kozhanov/

This is supposed to be an image abstraction of the magnetic spin wave, with the colors and directions of the helix 'spins' representing the wave itself.  (The faint jets of light represent the direction of the spin).

This was my first time rendering with Blender Cycles, and i was very satisfied with the results it gave!  The image you see here has around 350,000 triangles for each overlay: its made by combining a cycles render of the solid objects, and then a Blender render of the glow and atmospheric effects (sadly, cycles has no support for volumetric lighting at the moment...  for more information on creating volumetric effects with cycles, i would reccommend this tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuzDtirK2qk)

See Below for Production Eye Candy and Workflow!

Post-Processing

I came to realize that when working with 3d renders, often modeling and shaders only make up a part of the final image: its in the post processing that the final render really comes to life.  I reflected that in this image: unable to achieve fog or any glow with cycles, i rendered the lights and fog separately, then combined them along with glare, shine and all sorts of eye candy. The flow chart speaks for itself!

Lighting with Blender Render

Making satisfactory 'jets of light' was quite difficult to achieve, probably because they don't readily exist in nature!  The lights you see here were achieved with 4 spot lights and 2 point lights at the center of each helix, with a volume material to refract the light surrounding everything! (the helixes are set to a negative z value so the image can be overlaid).

Materials and Render with Cycles

A view of the final setup : a couple massive area lights for reflections, and a plane for the watery reflections underneath everything.

I was playing around with the watery reflective surface, and i came up with this on accident: it  looks like streaks of water on a window pane! I thought it was cute.

The basic materials applied to all helixes.  Looks a bit bland, but it'll get better!

A brief explanation of how the interior 'glow' is created: all it is is an emissive sphere which is set to only be visible to 'refracted' rays.  The helix is given a nice glassy texture mixed with an emissive one.  When overlaid with the light jets created with the blender render, you get a result like the one on the right!

Modelling:

I started with two helixes, rotated 90 degrees to make the general shape (Left).  It wasn't perfectly spherical, so I shrinkwrapped the helix to a sphere (center and right).  Finally the shape is done! Next, i applied a subdivision modifier to smooth out the shape.