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Perceptual Tone Mapping

Lightworks has just released a new version of their Author suite, Lightworks Author 2011, which includes the usual bugfixes and little improvements. But this one has 2 big new features: Perceptual Tone Mapping and Image Based Lighting.

Perceptual Tone Mapping is a new tone map shader from Lightworks that closely mimics the action of the human eye in converting the real-world luminance levels calculated by Lightworks Global Illumination to those which can be displayed and viewed on a computer display or printer. The Perceptual Tone Mapper has a complex Lightworks developed auto setup algorithm, designed to produce an image with a balanced luminance range. If the image requires minor adjustment, the Perceptual Tone Mapper allows simple control of the ‘exposure’ and ‘contrast’ of the image, as well as other refining controls.

The Image Based Lighting feature is another welcome addition, bringing a new degree of realism and subtle lighting effects to their photorealistic rendering suite.

Available for both PC & Mac at their site.

via Latest Release – Lightworks 2011.

Graphics lightworks, software

The Female Character Flowchart | Overthinking It.

infographics

The Wall Street Journal published the recipients of their annual Innovation Awards, and there are quite a few visualization-oriented winners.

The one most people are talking about is Unity’s win in the Software category:

San Francisco-based Unity Technologies won in this category for a set of game-development tools that make it cheap and easy to create three-dimensional interactive content, including games, training simulations and medical visualizations, for a range of devices from cellphones to game systems.

The software for creating 3D online universes typically requires teams of engineers who spend years creating and refining these tools. As a result, they’re often too complex and expensive for small-scale or amateur game developers.

Unity’s software simplifies the process of building 3D games and other programs. It includes an easy-to-use editor that can take prefabricated components—rain or falling crates, for example—and combine them with other features to create full game environments.

But they’re not the only ones.  Some others to see:

Consumer Electronics, Runners up:

NanoLumens Inc., U.S.: Lightweight digital displays that are flexible, thin and energy efficient. The first product, a 112-inch display, weighs less than 90 pounds, is less than an inch thick and consumes less energy than five light bulbs.

Ford Motor Co., U.S.: MyFord Touch, an instrument panel for cars that replaces traditional buttons, knobs and gauges with voice commands, customizable LCD screens and five-way controls on the steering wheel similar to those on cellphones and MP3 players.

Nokia Corp., Finland: An “augmented reality” browser for mobile devices, called Point & Find, that lets users get information about real-life objects by pointing a camera phone at the object.

Medical Devices Winner:

Zoom Focus Eyewear LLC, winner of the overall Silver award, won in this category. (See “ A Different Kind of Eyeglasses “)

Network/Broadband Winner:

Vidyo Inc., based in Hackensack, N.J., won in this category with its technology for delivering high-quality videoconferencing over the Internet or cellular networks at a fraction of the cost of dedicated “telepresence” systems.

and Runnerup:

Microsoft Corp., U.S.: An experimental Internet application, called Pivot, designed to help users to explore, organize and visualize collections of data quickly by showing relationships between the information.

The WSJ Technology Innovation Award Winners, Category by Category – WSJ.com.

Science award, unity, wsj

Last month we published our wrap-up of NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference. VizWorld covered the opening keynote speech from Jen-Hsun Huang, the announcement of the iray Realtime Raytracer for 3dsMax, the announcement of CUDA-x86, and especially the new NVIDIA Roadmap for Kepler and Maxwell. If you want to see our full list of articles, you can click on the gtc tag below.

Similarly, AnandTech has posted their NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference wrap-up on their site, and it is worth reading as well.

Today we’re wrapping up our coverage of last month’s NVIDIA GPU Technology Conference, including the show’s exhibit hall. We came to GTC to get a better grasp on just where things are for NVIDIA’s still-fledging GPU compute efforts along with the wider industry as a whole, and we didn’t leave disappointed. Besides seeing some interesting demos – including the closest thing you’ll see to a holodeck in 2010 – we had a chance to talk to Adobe, Microsoft, Cyberlink, and others about where they see GPU computing going in the next couple of years. The GPU-centric future as NVIDIA envisioned it may be taking a bit longer than we hoped, but it looks like we may finally be turning the corner on when GPU computing breaks in to more than just the High Performance Computing space.

via NVIDIA GTC 2010 Wrapup @ AnandTech

Hardware gtc, nvidia

NVIDIA is launching the GeForce GT 430, and there are several sites with reviews that are available. The NVIDIA GeForce GT 430 is meant to be a sub-$100 graphics card. From the price, you can easily guess that it is not meant to be a powerful gaming card. Instead this graphics card is meant for some gaming, but is really for home theater, 3-D Blu-Ray support, and multi-monitor support. One feature that is lacking on NVIDIA’s GeForce GT 430 graphics card is that it does not support SLI. [H]ard|OCP gives a nice succinct overview of the GeForce GT 430:

The GeForce GT 430 is powered by the Fermi GF104 GPU and fully supports DX11. It features 585 million transistors built on a 40nm process, with a thermal design profile of 49 Watts. There are 96 CUDA cores, 16 texture units, and 4 ROP units. The memory bus consists of two 64-bit controllers with 1024MB of GDDR3 attached, for a theoretical maximum of 28.8GB/sec of memory bandwidth. The GPUs bilinear texture filtering rate is 11.2 billion texels per second.

NVIDIA’s reference GPU specification calls for the graphics processor to be clocked at 700MHz. The shader core’s clock speed is bound to the GPU core’s clock with a 2:1 ratio, brining the CUDA cores to 1.4GHz. The memory on the GeForce GT 430 comes with a reference speed of 900MHz, or 1.8GHz DDR.

GT 430 has one dual-link DVI-I port, an HDMI 1.4a port, and a 15-pin analog VGA port. It does not require an auxiliary power supply connector. HDMI 1.4a support is important, as it is version 1.4a which added 3D support to the HDMI standard. Any video card with an HDMI port of a version earlier than 1.4a will not support 3D HD video content, such as Blu-Ray 3D. There is support for 24-bit multi-channel audio up to 192 KHz, and lossless DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD as well.

Some of the sites that have posted reviews of the GeForce GT 430 are:

Hardware nvidia

So much work goes into adding virtual objects into real space with Augmented Reality, but what about removing unwanted objects? This impressive research work from folks at the Ilmenau University of Technology shows editing of video in real-time to remove unwanted objects using something similar to CS5′s Content Aware Fill.

The most recent research project in the area of Diminished Reality by Jan Herling and Wolfgang Broll, Ilmenau University of Technology, Department of Virtual Worlds / Digital Games, 2010.

It works by degrading the image into a low-resolution luminance version, and removing the object there (much simpler).  It then resamples the image back to near-original quality, and uses it as a mask/composite with the original.  And it does it all in 41ms, although the hardware used is unspecified. (CPU? GPU? FPGA? Who knows).

There are a few artifacts in some of the scenes, but the effect is amazingly good.  I am curious to see what would happen if you turn the camera completely away from the object.  Would it mistakenly remove something else?

It really does remind me of some of the hacks in Ghost In The Shell tho, hacking people’s vision to make people (thieves) invisible.

Science algorithm

One interesting tidbit making the rounds over the weekend is a technical paper to appear at SIGGRAPH Asia on dynamic reshaping of human anatomy in video to change their physical attributes.  I seem to recall seeing this at SIGGRAPH previously, and the results are impressive.

We present a system for quick and easy manipulation of the body shape and proportions of a human actor in arbitrary video footage. The approach is based on a morphable model of 3D human shape and pose that was learned from laser scans of real people. The algorithm commences by spatio-temporally fitting the pose and shape of this model to the actor in either single-view or multi-view video footage. Once the model has been fitted, semantically meaningful attributes of body shape, such as height, weight or waist girth, can be interactively modified by the user. The changed proportions of the virtual human model are then applied to the actor in all video frames by performing an image-based warping. By this means, we can now conveniently perform spatio-temporal reshaping of human actors in video footage which we show on a variety of video sequences.

They’ve already posted the paper (download, view online) and a demonstration video (below).  If you look closely you can see some deformation of the environment when doing some rather extreme deformations, but for the occasional pound or muscle tone, it could be useful.  Although it does bring the old “Dove Evolution” video to mind.

via MovieReshape: Tracking and Reshaping of Humans in Videos.

Science siggraph

Prime Focus is having a big year this year, and expects another 15-20% jump in revenue in FY11.  With all the bad press the VFX industry has been getting over labor problems with folks like VFXSoldier exposing the poor working conditions and low wages, and smaller companies folding left and right and typically leaving employees unpaid, how is Prime Focus doing so well?

“There is a lot of traction from the U.S. markets for 2-D to 3-D conversion,” Chief Financial Officer Nishant Fadia told Reuters. “We are talking to all the studios there and it looks good.” To make the most of the overflowing demand, Prime Focus has earmarked about $2 million to $3 million to set up additional facilities in India, Fadia said.

I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how long the 2D to 3D conversion market lasts.  If it stays big, then no doubt there might be a lot of money to be made in converting back catalogs of material, but somehow I don’t think “A Fish Called Wanda” or “The Evil Dead” trilogy will really change much in 3D.

via Prime Focus sees 15-20% revenue jump in FY11 – The Economic Times.

Graphics prime focus

ESRI is demonstrating an impressive little Silverlight powered widget that rendering terrain data in 3D with full interactivity.  They support 2D and 3D Views, with full manipulation controls.

The imagery, street and topography base maps are sourced directly from Esri’s ArcGIS Online portal for geospatial services, data, applications and communities.

Elevation data is sourced from SRTM, GTOPO30 and GEBCO bathymetry via a new service published yesterday. The service was developed as a custom Server Object Extension for ArcGIS Server.

You can play with the app yourself at this link.

via Applications Prototype Lab Blog : 3D Terrain Mapping in a Browser.

Science esri, geospatial, interactive, silverlight

MPC was involved in the latest Drench commercial that showed a man with the unfortunate affliction of a rubik’s cube style head, trying to drink his favorite beverage while correcting his head.  The work was a combination of compositing and motion tracking, a good mix of both physical and CG space.

The moves for the cubehead were carefully choreographed and the actor was then shot in the matching positions to capture his facial expressions – including his head hanging upside down drinking Drench! MPC’s 2D team led by Matthew Unwin was responsible for integrating all the elements to create a realistic head. The puzzle head model was shot in the different combinations and MPC tracked and composited the eyes, mouth, chin and other moving parts using Flame, Nuke and Shake. Skin details were added for more realism and reflections were composited to the walls.

You can see videos of the various stages of the project at FXGuide.

via fxguide quick takes » MPC’s Head Turner : Drench.

Graphics commercial, makingof, mpc, vfx