Best way to approach recreating this cool image?

I would like to recreate something similar to this image so that I can use the static image in a project. I’ve used NME a little bit now. I was thinking of trying to reproduce the image in a playground and use materials I make in NME. I am curious if anyone had any advice either way on whether this was a smart approach or if there’s a better one? Perhaps I might be able to do 99% of the work in NME?

I would normally do a model with emissive color, add bloom/glow and depthOfField to it as it sounds simpler than ray tracing it in a shader but I ll follow up closely what you come up with :slight_smile:

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The blur is very specific. It’s lens blur. Maybe a bokeh effect. Then use IBL for the reflections. Best to use a PBR material

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This is how far I’ve got: https://playground.babylonjs.com/#AGFZIB#2 Looking pretty darn good (BabylonJS is amazing of course!)

Struggling with:

It seems to make the glowing “nodes” a bit “misshapen” / “ragged”. And when the edges are meant to be in focus, they are still blurry.

I will keep playing around with the parameters until it looks a bit better. To anyone who wants to play with it / tweak it: you might want to change the width constant at the top from 30 to 10 to speed up rendering.

– edit - 2021-07-19 –

For now I manually added some blur using GIMP.

Lighter background:

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This could be a nice interactive webGL background on a webpage! :+1:t4:

It made me want to give a quick try using Blender, 'still needs some tweaks but also fun to do:


(blend file)

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