Here’s a little attempt at making a 3D vectorscope using particles.  It’s cute like the centroid comp, elegant and simple with no plugins or fuses needed.   Nothing wrong with fuses or plugins, it’s just neat to be able to have something that works for any using Fusion 5.2 or later without anything else, and lets you see what Fusion can do out of the box.

3D Vectorscope Fun!

Stuart at Eyeon gave me the inspiration to try a particle approach this morning after a comment he made regarding my wish for more resolution for the 3D Histogram SubV in Fusion.  Basically, he asked if the size of the cubes was important.  Did I need to know the clustering or not?   Would a 3D Vectorscope be useful?

Oftentimes, just knowing what is or isn’t in the image is enough, and I don’t need to know the distribution.

Took about 20 minutes to get it working, but took a bit longer to make it all pretty and fast and blog worthy.    Bit like the earlier centroid post.

On top is the result, below is the source.   The camera is tracking the result automatically.  It should be possible to use the min and max values to also set the zoom of the camera as well as it’s position to enclose the bounding region and set the camera perpendicular to the longest axis.

3d_particle_vectorscope_c_a07_.comp

(I’ve updated the comp to A07, which adds in a SubV!)

With 256^2 samples, it runs at ~10 Hz on my computer.  1280^2 samples runs at ~0.5 Hz.   Not terrible, but proxy helps a lot.

Couple neat things…  You can clearly visualize the effect of color depth on an image.  8int vs float is quite dramatic.   And you can see how some tools operate very plainly.   Look at a BrightnessContrast for example, and you can see why it’s really an AddScale.   The sample “footage” in the comp is a merge between a Plasma and a BG gradient.  The Plasma makes a ring, while the BG makes a saddle, but together, they make some crazy swirling thing.

You can render the results, too.