Download RGBtoLAB 1.03

Ok, this Fuse started off as a really tiny one.  Fusion already has a CSConvert() that does Lab.  So all I have to do is…

if mode == 0 then

out:CSConvert("RGB", "LAB")

else

out:CSConvert("LAB", "RGB")

end

Simple and fast.  But the results were a bit… unexpected. So we added a little tweak which has no basis in known color science, it just makes is so that a linear RGB input returns what I think is a linear L output.

So why doesn’t ColorSpace have an Lab button?  I don’t know.  You can see LAB color in action in the Wand tool, though.

Other options include output a LUT Image only, as if it were a Source tool.  Same as the new option on ColorMatrixTransform.  You can also choose whether to affect the canvas color or not.

Eyeon released Fusion 6.3 last week, and we’ve had a chance to look at some of the new tools and how they would fit in with our tools.

VolumeFog now includes a Schlick single-scattering lighting model.

Download Particle Voxelization for VolumeFog A01

You can render in OpenCL, or fallback to CPU if you need to render a larger volume dataset than you have memory on your OpenCL device.   It works nicely, but definitely shows the interface issues with representing 4D data as X,Y,Time,Time.  We use Quilt for 4D data, but we’ll have to see if there’s an easy way to get that translated over to VolumeFog.  Of course, getting a proper 3D fog texture can be handled nicely by Simbiont.

AlphaDivide and AlphaMultiply provide dead simple color operations, but they’re no faster than our own tool.  And unlike the new built-in tools, AlphaDivideMultiply allows you to affect the canvas color, too.

LUT Fuses allow you to analyze and apply LUT images to your footage to simplify various color operations, as well as provide simple interoperability with other applications.  They’re also operate in OpenCL if available.  We’ve updated ColorMatrixTransform to produce these images.  Just 8 pixels can represent all of the possible corrections you can apply with a Color Matrix.  We’ll be adding this to more tools soon.

This new version of Fusion also fixes some annoying bugs.  It’s now possible to create an interactive LUT macro.  Previously, interactivity was limited, you just set the LUT up once and left it.  Polylines are now able to evaluate properly at multiple image sizes without randomly evaluating the wrong reference.  And a longstanding issue with spline view redraw has apparently been fixed, making it much easier to use in real-world comps.

The signed distance operator can be quite useful when doing image/voxel data processing based on a pixel’s distance from an iso-surface. This plugin calculates just that. The plugin is implemented using Open CL, so the Open CL program should also be copied into the same directory as the Fuse plugin.

Download Signed Distance Fuse

The tool has inputs to control the position of the iso-surface (Zeropass Threshold) and the number of rasterizing passes (Number of Passes). The output can be a distance value or a 2D – vector pointing towards the closest point in the iso-surface.

Very simple fuse, this one just fills the canvas with a color.

Download Set Color Fuse

Needed this on a project where I was laying out logos and graphic elements that had to always be a specific color, and the existing workflow with many BG’s was too messy.  Normally I would have just tolerated the mess, but this Fuse is simple enough to be made in less than 5 minutes.

Look!  More shaders for the Generic Shader.

Gooch Shading courtesy of the NPR Prepass

New shaders include ColorMatrixTransform, Unit Vector, Dot Product, Half Lambert, Parallax, and NPR Prepass which returns various lighting dot products for use in making NPR effects like the Gooch shader above.

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Strange one, this…  I wrote a Fuse earlier this year that did nothing but “else”.  If the FG is there, use it, else use the BG.  So it’s a bit like using a DX for a "graceful failure", but there’s no UI to mess up, and most importantly, it preserves DoD, something DX doesn’t do.

Download Else Fuse 1.1

So what’s odd?  It didn’t work.  There was some sort of problem with it that I couldn’t fix.  The code was really simple, but for some reason, it didn’t work.  But now, four builds of Fusion later, it seems to work just fine.  So I’m going to post it, and if you happen to find out that it still fails for some reason, go ahead and let me know.

Finally took the plunge and converted one of our icky Lua Fuses into shiny OpenCL.

Download Unit Vector OpenCL Fuse

It’s a very simple function, normalizing a vector and returning that in the RGB while putting the original length into the A.  In the case of the 4D normalize, you don’t get the length.  I have no idea what took me so long to get around to this, it only took an hour or two to flesh out, but I got hung up by the fact that my video card, a Quadro 5000, does not, at this time, have OpenCL drivers that support float3.  Float4?  Fine.  Float2?  No problem.  Float3?  Fail.  So I went ahead and implemented the 3D normalize manually, and used the fast_normalize OpenCL function to make a 4D normalize.

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Stefan Ihringer pointed out something on the VFXPedia that finally got me to put together a Fuse I’ve been putting off.   Since Joe Laffey never got around to updating his plugins, it makes sense to go ahead and toss this up.

Download AlphaDivideMultiply Fuse 1.01

Just a simple RGB/A or RGB*A, plus a “Solid” and “Clear” so you don’t have to use the annoying Bol or Mat as much.   Nothing groundbreaking, but it should save a few clicks per day.

UPDATE:  I made a ViewShader for this in case you want to keep this operation in the viewer and not in the flow.

Not multum in parvo, but Maximum (or Minimum) Intensity Projection.

Download MIP Fuse 1.13

This simple Fuse just takes a range over time and generates an image with the highest or lowest pixels.  Great for normalizing.  It does so for each channel, so it can be useful for color normalization too, or for finding the bounding box of a position pass.  It can also be useful for making “summary” thumbnails of footage.

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A variation on the ColorToMono fuse, ColorSplitter outputs multiple scalars from an image. Can trivially be modified to output vectors too.  Mostly designed to reduce clutter in a flow, so you don’t have a bunch of needless Bol’s and fMon's.  Useful when you are loading an image with many packed data channels.

Download ColorSplitter Fuse 1.1

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