I came up with an idea for a soap-bubble shader!

More generally speaking it does dynamic thin-film interference of hollow convex two-sided objects in a deferred rendering configuration. In two passes front and back are rendered and the ray is traced through the object. To give you a better idea I screen-captured my demo-program and uploaded it:

As before all physical parameters of the shader can be changed at runtime (as seen in the above video). Bear in mind, that the program uses OpenGL 3.2 core and runs on my late iMac 2011 – it uses a Radeon 6960M, a mobile GPU.

The cube maps are from Emil Persson and can be found at humus’s textures. The head model is copyrighted to © I-R Entertainment Ltd., taken from Morgan McGuire‘s Graphics Data.

My GLSL spectral rendering shader (here & here) is now able to do some (environmental) bump-mapping. It does physical wavelength-based thinfilm interference with sampled SPD‘s on the GPU in realtime. All parameters are adjustable at runtime. I’ve implemented five distinct “film-setups” that have different ways to interpret/change film thickness and normals of film and object surface. The setups are outlined in this sketch:

Here’s a textual description:

1. A simple film with constant thickness covers the object.
2. The surface of the object is “bumped” and the film has a constant thickness.
3. Both object and film use regular normals, but the thickness of the film varies. This is fake but looks nice:D.
4. The object remains unchanged while the film (thickness + normal) is bumped. Basically 3, but correct.
5. The object is bumped and the thickness is modulated such that the film’s surface is “flat”(like setup 1). The inverse scenario of 4.

Finally some screenshots from the same angle and same film settings: refraction index=1.09, tilm-thickness:550-1170nm, CIE D65 light, silver material. The matte utah teapot is shown on the left, the shiny teapot on the right:

(Click on image to enlarge)

I hope to be able to record a demo video soon (~ this week). While going through the sourcecode I also noticed that there’s no dispersion as the refraction index is const. This should be easily adjustable, I just need some data. 

Also, while the uffizi gallery is nice I’d like to try out some other cubemaps (m.be. from Humus) and some other models. Maybe a wobbling soapbubble?