We’ve been working on a stereoscopic production, and we’ve been coming up with helpful tricks to make things just a tiny bit easier.  Here’s an example comp that shows a couple of them.

Position Pass and Camera Metadata Screengrab

Read the rest of this entry »

A sizable segment of the population suffers from color blindness, enough so that it’s worth considering the implications on color palettes and usability.  This tool allows you to simulate the ways that various color vision deficiencies will affect you imagery.  I’ve noticed that some of the images we create probably won’t read very well to some people, and this easily lets us check if we’ve created something that could be ambiguous.

ColorBlind fuse

Read the rest of this entry »

Fusion 6 added a Color Matrix tool that lets you enter your own matrix by hand, but the biggest problem with it is the lack of any methods to modify it with.  You can’t even assign controllers to it.

Fuses, however,  let you use handy methods to modify a matrix.  I’ve used some of them to create an RGB equivalent of the 3D Transform tool.  It has a similar UI, just as 3TT does, but this modifies RGB, not XYZ or UVW.

Color Matrix Transform fuse

Read the rest of this entry »

Two more Fuses, this time some really simple ones that convert multi-channel images to mono-channel and back again.   Color is overrated, in general, and I find myself getting a lot of use out of these.

Color to Mono

Mono to Color

Read the rest of this entry »

The latest builds of Fusion (>475) allow fuses to work with canvas color and ROIDS.  I thought I’d try that out on my Invert fuse, and it seems to work just fine.  You now have the option of whether or not to invert the canvas color.  The ROIDS support makes what was a pretty fast fuse into something even faster under most situations, and it won’t break a nice DoD-managed comp.

As time permits, I’ll go through my other fuses and add similar functionality.

Absolute Value

I’m often trying to find the magnitude of something, regardless of sign.  Commonly done for things like normals or velocity or distance.  You would expect there to be a built in tool for that sort of thing, but there isn’t.

Previously,  I did it with a CT or a Fuse operating on a per-pixel basis.  An f.Color.rgb = abs(f.Color.rgb) sort of thing, which is pretty slow in Fusion as a CT or Fuse, but is plenty fast in Cg.  More on that later.

Today I had an idea on how to do it with a matrix.   The basic idea is to scale the the image by .5, and by -.5 and find the difference of the two.  So |x| = (.5*x)-(-.5*x)

This method is much faster.  The resulting Fuse runs about 40% faster than a CT, and several times faster than the old Fuse I had made which operated pixel by pixel.  Unfortunately, ROI isn’t supported yet for Fuses, so if you have a tiny ROI, the CT or the CMx’s will both run faster.   EDIT: ROIDS can be supported in Fuses…  I’ll need to add it to the Fuses I’ve posted so far.  Stay tuned…

So here’s the Fuse, a Cg ViewShader that lets you view the absolute value in a Viewer, and an example comp showing the CT, Fuse, and CMx methods, as well as the ViewShader.

Download FAbsolute Fuse 1.05

Download Absolute Value Viewshader 1.01

Download Example Comp (Absolute Fuse) A01

It would be interesting to see if the disparity between the speeds  of processing the matrix vs per-pixel goes away when you compile a c++ plugin…

The Proxy features of Fusion work great for their simplicity, but sometimes you need a bit more control.  We’re all about the control…

Cropped compare of anisotropic proxy of a 4k plate

Along those lines, we’ve taken to using an inline proxy setup that provides some benefits over the built-in proxy.  It’s based around the assumption that tools take into account the pixel aspect ratios, which differs from the code branching that occurs with proxy, so you may not get correct results, but it’s also shows when tools are improperly handling pixel aspect ratios.

Read the rest of this entry »

The end is near...

I’m on my way home now.  Ben and I got to see a lot of really nice presentations, and we had some good discussions with researchers and suppliers.

Texmoca

Texmoca is a very unique demonstration of natural occurrences of Voroni type packing.  Small heating elements burn oil which spreads out, cools, and falls in beautiful convection currents.  Best coffee table of the show, but the heat it gives off makes it bad for drinks, good for fondue.

Ground Substance, from LabStudio

The Generative Fabrication exhibit was really nice.  Particularly the contributions by LabStudio.

Field3D

Sony Pictures Image works is working on an open source voxel storage format, Field3D.  You can check out the project or the programmer’s guide.

GPU Illumination

Went to the course titled Advanced Illumination Techniques for GPU Volume Raycasting, fortunately it wasn’t a rehash of the 2006 book, but had mostly new work, including some really nice ambient occlusion, scattering, and shadowing techniques.  Also showed some of Voreen.  Really nice bunch of guys.

Ok, I’m off to see a panel discussion with Jenny Sabin of LabStudio.

We’ve seen some pretty cool things at SIGGraph so far…

Gel Sight

Gel Sight is a retrographic surface imaging technique that was wonderfully elegant in it’s simplicity and effectiveness.  They also gave out free samples…

Cuda raycasting 13GB of cryomacrotome goodness (in stereo)

Nvidia had a stereographic interactive realtime rendering of the full 13GB Visible Human dataset being rendered in CUDA on 3 Quadroplexi.  Very impressive.  The glasses used were the new Nvidia active shutter glasses, and were very effective.

Resistive multitouch in many form factors

A new startup out of NYU showed a novel resistive multitouch device.  Very effective, low cost, and suitable to many applications.

VLC madness courtesy 2 Fusion-io cards

Fusion-io showed their new “budget” nonvolatile storage adapter, the ioXtreme.   $900 gets you 80GB, with a read speed o 700MB/s.  The IO’s aren’t very high, much less their enterprise solutions, but that doesn’t matter if you are reading sequential data.  The booth was pretty crazy, too, one of the better live hardware demos I’ve seen in a while.  I’ll get some pictures tomorrow.  VLC never looked so impressive…