I haven't had much of a chance of late to work on my projects. Mum hasn't been well. So my time is going into other things at the moment. But when I get a spare minute, I open up something just to fiddle about with. If nothing else, it helps take my mind off things.
This weekend, I tackled some first steps of getting colour into the Hyperion render engine. I'm pleased to say, while very basic, I have managed to achieve this.
In Cinema4D, you can set a basic object colour without applying any materials. I've started off by accessing these properties and using it to colour the surface hits in Hyperion. If the option is not set, I revert to my default marble white. Below is a render I let go while visiting mum in the hospital.
Though nothing fancy, the image above shows that the engine can now do some surface colouring. The colours are a bit saturated, but this was partly deliberate on my part.
Some may have spotted also that there's no shadows being cast by the objects onto other surfaces. This is something I'm in the process of working through. The code I've written isn't showing these shadows (the problem!), and it may be what's causing the slower rendering times (even though it's not working!). But there is self-shadowing, so that part is working at least!
If you're wondering what the object is, it's something I'm in the process of designing and building to use for camera tracking and scene reconstruction. I'll post more about this when I can show an example of it in practice.