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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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We’ve been adding CUDA support to many of our custom tools lately and finding speed-ups of 40x in some cases. This tool is an example of an idea that would be totally impractical (hence the krazy) without a highly parallel GPU-based approach. The algorithm takes each pixel in the input image, and finds the shortest distance (in RGB space) from it to the pixels in the “selection” image. This requires an every-pixel-to-every-pixel distance calculation, with the final shortest distance value compared to a threshold to determine whether or not to mask the pixel.

Download KrazyKey 1.0

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You never know what files you are going to get from customers.  After several phone calls talking through using FTP or shipping a hard drive, confirming compression usage, acceptable file formats there is still the possibility weird naming schemes.

This is example of a schema that came through last week.

I was about to whip out my favorite file renaming software, but I wanted to retain the original names for communication with the customer.  The solution is pretty easy so I thought I’d share it.  There might be a tool that does this already but its good to know how to do this on any machine without any special tool installed.  We’re going to fix this problem with CMD.exe. muahahaha!

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Oh look, another post where we do something off the wall using nothing but Fusion’s standard toolset!

In this case, I had an idea for a plugin and needed a way to explain the concept to Ben and Matt.  Basically, I wanted to find the largest “object” in an image, and this is the comp I came up with.

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