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
Why would you use this? Memory savings, mostly. An alpha-only image takes 1/4 the RAM of an RGBA image. For scalar data operations, or masks, or any time where you don’t need vectors, you can store more data in cache and thus make everything fast and smooth.
The latest builds of Fusion also support mono-channel textures in 3D, so in cases where your video card doesn’t have a lot of memory, this can be even more useful.
Why not just use a Bmp to convert to mono? Well, it’s a different class output, so it keeps trying to connect to mask inputs. And you can’t set a Bmp to passthrough and get color data out. You get nothing. Furthermore, having Bmp’s littered around your flow is ugly.
Converting from mono back to color could be done by masking off a BG set to white, right? But you’d have to keep making that BG be the same size, depth, etc as your incoming mask, and that’s not convenient. And it uglies up your flow, too.
