Computer Graphics, Linux and Everything…

After some tests with Arnold, we quickly realized we didn’t need Vue anymore for stuff like scattering trees on a landscape. An artist at Oblique asked me to create a compound in ICE to mimic the parameters in Vue to scatter particles with some rules. Here is the compound. It’s quickly done but it works.

FL_ScatterTool.1.3.xsicompound.zip

edit: It appears the Density_Map isn’t working. I’ll have to find some time to fix it.

I don’t remember how I stumbled on Eric Dubois’ page on how to create an optimized anaglyph while keeping the colors, but I do remember that I thought it was semi useless since I always do my anaglyphs in black and white, it just works so much better. Even the default anaglyph node in Nuke creates black and white images.

Since I’m working on IMAX projects at the moment, I often use the proxy mode and I quickly realized that the anaglyph node’s offset parameter isn’t constant when activating the proxy. So I thought I would do my own anaglyph node. And then I remembered Eric Dubois’ method which was just a color matrix in linear space. It couldn’t be simpler to implement in Nuke. After experimenting a bit with it, I must say this method is awesome. I am surprised to see nobody did a Nuke gizmo before me, or that they didn’t publish it.

Haven’t used it much yet, but I doubt there should be any problems with it. It complains when you don’t have ‘left’ and ‘right’ views, but why would you do that?

DuboisAnaglyph.gizmo.zip

I also uploaded the gizmo on nukepedia. http://www.nukepedia.com/gizmos/duboisanaglyph
At the time of this writing, it’s still waiting for moderation.

I needed to load some DEM file into Softimage and Polytrans didn’t like the DEM flavor I had in hands. I wrote my own script to import it and happily ended up with a very hires model of the Rocky Mountains to scale. One Softimage unit equals 1 kilometer.

When I get the camera very close to the geometry, the mountains look good. Their shape looks normal and the slopes feel right. However, when I frame all the geometry in the viewport, the mountains look flat and boring. I have to scale them up 5 times in Y to get them to look nice again.

I made a linear camera movement from far to close and keyframed the Y scaling parameter from 5 to 1 linearly as well to see if it would present any apparent change. To my surprise, it’s not very apparent.