Just a little ditty put together for some testing.  Investigating the how the specular highlights look on a low resolution dynamic dataset.

We’re releasing a simple tool today to help you reduce noise in ’09. We develop many 3D filtering tools at AT, but this one is a good candidate for release because it’s useful for video compositing.

Download Median In Time 1.0

MedianInTime performs a median filter over time for each pixel. The median filter kernel can be selected from sizes 3,5,7 or 9 (indicating the total number of frames in the sort). The tool calculates the median based either on the luminance or the RGB channels separately. This operation will generally reduce noise, but is also great for removing things that appear for just one or two frames such as rain drops, film artifacts, and subliminal advertising.

I rendered two examples to demonstrate the technique. The first video shows how objects moving quickly in relation to other content can be removed with the median filter. In this example the stars moving in this time lapse footage are removed (as well as the odd shooting star).

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Ok, so this one was just to see if I could make a fuse that was faster than the tool it was replacing, in this case Bol.

Download Invert fuse 1.5

It scales better than Bol does, so on small images, they run at about the same speed, but on really large images, the fuse runs several times faster.

It’s not all about speed, though.  Having a tool called “Invert” that inverts just makes sense to me.  What I loved about Shake was that the tools did so little; each was a little atomic thingy, like IAdd, SetAlpha, IMax, etc.  It made it very easy to “read” a comp just by looking at the flow.  With Fusion, I just see ChannelBool…,  ChannelBool…, ChannelBool…, etc.  Who can read that?

Duiker Research must have had a similar thing in mind when they made their drUtilSuite for Fusion.

Here is another quick productivity script for your rendering enjoyment. The script finds all of the savers in the current flow and allows you to enable/disable each of them with a checkbox. This is helpful if you want to compare the renders of multiple branches without hunting through that rats nest you call a comp.

Download Normalize Fuse 1.1

Here’s a fuse I made to normalize an image from one range to another.  The math is simple, but it gave me a chance to try out ColorMatrix() for the processing as well as SetSource() for the UI elements. It’s pretty fast, but Matt might take a crack at converting it to a C++ plugin just to see what is involved in the conversion process and see how useful fuses are for prototyping.

For the Simbiont:Fusion plugin we added the ability use an image source as the texture coordinate for the Darktree. In this simple tutorial, I’ll show you how to use the UVW input to retexture a image sequence from 3D render passes. And I’ve provided the files so you can try it out yourself.

Simbiont:Fusion UVW Tutorial

Case Study

In this example we are showing how renders from a 3d software package can be used in conjunction with Simbiont:Fusion. I’ll only cover usage as diffuse color, but certainly other techniques can be employed. This example won’t be using any of the 3d tools in Fusion, only image sequences.

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