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.

Download ColorToMono 1.0

Download MonoToColor 1.0

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!

What is an IFL?

IFL or “image file list” files are required for any file sequence work in 3ds Max.  Other programs, like After Effects implicitly work with sequences by name.  3ds Max creates IFLs every time you ask to use an image file and it detects a sequence.  This process happens so fast I bet most people click through the dialog without thinking about it. Here is a pic, in case you forgot.

If you open an IFL you’ll see it just contains text with a file name on each line.  They may have a full path, or a relative path, or just the filename.  Each file can be a completely different name or extension. ( There are other features of this simple format but I can’t seem to find any documentation on the spec.)  So how do we generate this list of files?

Solution

In the long long ago, you had to know some basic shell operations to do anything.  Otherwise you’d be staring at a blinking cursor until someone came over and did it for you.  Change directory, list files, change directory, list files, and then type the name of the program. Happy times! If this typing exercise got in the way of playing your games, you’d learn it real fast too.  And twenty plus years later, this inane knowledge saves the day.  I know command line isn’t for everyone but a few quick tips are worth knowing. Here is how to make the list with cmd.exe

c:\data\CustomerX\study01>dir /b *.jpg > study01.ifl

Easy, right? Let’s break it down.

c:\data\CustomerX\stud01> –this is the current path. If it’s not you’ll have to add this to the arguments of the “dir” command. So if the current path is c:\ and the files are on the network, it would be something like c:\>dir /b \\server\share\data\study01\*.jpg > \\server\share\data\study01\study01.ifl

dir – this is the command to list the contents of the directory/folder (type dir /? for help)

/b — switch to only list the bare name

*.jpg – this is the filter. in this case “all the files with extension jpg”. You could put a path here too. ie.(..\study02\new\test01\*.tiff)

> – the right bracket means redirect output in most command shells. This will send the output to a file instead of the screen.

study01.ifl  – This is the file that will be created.

Not so hard. You can also use /s to recursively list the files in subdirectories.  Now you can use this IFL in Fusion, Max, and many other packages.

Bonus: add a number after the filename. This will hold that frame that duration.

Ben Lipman
Tool Programmer/TD
Anatomical Travelogue R&D

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.

The next image shows the output from the tool, where the two high-contrast edges are visible in the image. While the polyline seems to track the edge well in the above images, the unwrapped output reveals some deviations from the ideal. A center-line guide is overlaid in blue and the yellow ticks along the top and bottom indicate the keypoint positions along the polyline.

Increasing unwrap parameters. (a) Sampling factor - normal (b) Sampling factor - spline (c) Number of samples.

The diagram on the right shows some of the parameters of the unwrapping that we can adjust. If we increase the sampling factor in the normal direction, we see the effect in (a), which will accent deviations from the ideal edge. Diagram (b) shows the effect of increasing the sampling factor in the “spline direction”. This increases the width the output image as more columns are sampled along the polyline. Increasing the number of samples produces the effect illustrated in (c), where sampling lines increase in length with a corresponding increase in the height of the output image.

Another feature of the tool is interactive keypoint adjustment. Clicking and dragging on the output image vertically moves the corresponding keypoint along the polyline’s normal at that point. The image below shows this process, where a keypoint is moved to match the image edge, bringing the unwrapped image closer to the ideal.

We’ll be talking more about (and releasing) this tool in the near future. Chad is also preparing a quick video demo as well to post later in the week.

Click-drag the unwrap tool ouput to tweak a polyline into correct position.

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.

Path_to_Clipboard.eyeonscript

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.

For the search-and-modify types, customizing the wizard to your development environment should be fairly painless. Most of what you need to change will be in the templates/1033/root.vcproj file. You can also modify the project settings manually after creating the skeleton code, but that does partly defeat the purpose of the template. This project wizard is designed to work with the Fusion 5.3 SDK and will set up includes, linking, win32/x64 platforms, post-build copying into your plugins folder and a flashy tile icon.

The Visual Studio “Custom Wizard” template can also be used to make wizard screens if you need to customize parameters on a project-by-project basis. Get in touch with us if you’re compiling with VS 2003 and we can dig up the older project wizard. If you find the wizard useful, feedback is always appreciated!

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