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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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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This week we’re talking about a tool that helps you position polyline masks more accurately.  The following diagram shows the idea we are exploring. Basically, perpendicular lines of interpolated samples are obtained at intervals along the length of the polyline, which then become the columns of the output image.

Sampling along polyline to generate output image

When isolating a object with a definite edge, the ideal output is a horizontal line at the exact center of the image, dividing the interior and exterior textures. The next three images show the tool in action on an image of Morning Glory Pool at Yellowstone National Park. This image has a high-contrast yellow-to-green edge along the bottom of the polyline (foreground of the image) and a yellow-to-gray edge along the top.

The next image shows what is happening conceptually. Interpolated samples are obtained along lines that are perpendicular to the polyline. The number of samples between key points is consistent, so the sampling is finer when the key points are closer to one another.

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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!

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Tiny tool script that takes the path from a LD or SV and puts it into the clipboard so you can paste it into another LD/SV or a bin, or into your CMS or an IM or whatever.   I have a hard time selecting the path when it’s really long and doesn’t fit into the space provided by the UI; this helps.

Path_to_Clipboard.eyeonscript

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.

When starting a new plugin project with Visual Studio, developers usually take one of three approaches:

1. Start a project from scratch using a standard type and customize.
2. Copy an earlier/sample plugin project and modify.
3. Use a wizard to setup include, linking, configuration, build settings and skeleton code.

The first two approaches are time-consuming and error-prone. #3 is certainly the better approach, but may only be worth your time if you will be producing a large number of plugins. If your application has a large enough community, there’s a good chance that a custom wizard is already available somewhere.

After getting tired of manually configuring Visual Studio Projects for every random plugin idea we’ve tried, I adapted the standard MFC DLL wizard to produce a Fusion 5 template. Microsoft’s Javascript-based wizard engine is definitely not the clearest collection of code that I’ve wandered through, but a little time invested here can save you repetitive overhead for every future project.

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This tool is the first release in a series of small productivity scripts for Fusion. The script allows you to quickly load the target of a Windows shortcut file for review in Fusion. To use the tool, simply drag any number of .LNK files into the Fusion flow and then activate this script. The path of all the loaders added while you were dragging and dropping will be replaced with the shortcut target.

UPDATE 2-Dec-2008: In order for Fusion to recognize windows shortcut (.LNK) files when you drag them into the flow, you need to add the following loader plugin to your Fusion installation. The plugin will allow you to have LNK “dummy loaders” that will be converted to their target media when the Convert all shortcut loaders script is run:

Windows Shortcut Dummy Loader v1.0