how are these rendered...

[jeremybirn]

I think there's another trick at work too - making the surface more transparent when they directly face the viewer, less transparent as they face away. (As you could do in Maya for example by linking the facing ratio from a sampler info node to the transparency.)

-jeremy

[Anteru]

I did something similiar with Aqsis.
You can achieve this effect by doing 2 passes:
First, render the wireframe, without color etc. Then apply a glow in PS to it. Or blur and set blend mode to additive.
Next, render as described above with fresnel opacity, i.e. the transparency depends on the angle of the normal to the camera. In RenderMan SL, there is a special fresnel() call. I would do the both passes without colors, and colorize it later in PS. You should know that in production use, nearly each and every frame is composited.

[sebakrembo]

Anteru , you are right about the ps phase, but it will work only for a single frame render... what about animation ? a 150 frame animation can not go through ps....
i would try with some special falloff map for the wireframe and glow together...... but i am not sure it will do

[JamesDeschenes]

Well you can still do the animation in multiple passes.. you just need to composite all the frames. These is easily done with AfterFX or a similar compositor... but if you don't got a compositor handy you can just setup a batch action in Photoshop to composite all the images in a sequence for you.

[PhantomDesign]

He, he...nubies :)

I'm joking

Just use a falloff map in the transparency slot.

I use fall off maps on my reflection slot quite often for various more realistic reflections.

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