omino pixel blog

Here’s another variation on additive lighting tricks…

This one is a little experiment using After Effects’ spotlights on still images which have been rendered with similarly-located light sources.

Here’s one of the several still images.

And here’s a short movie showin a little more of the procedure, and some results.

My dad recently transferred all his (our!) old 8mm movie reels to dvd. We’re talking 1957 to 1972 for this first batch. He sent me copies, three dvd’s worth.

It was pretty painless; he used yesvideo.com, which distributes through Costco. I think the pickup and delivery was at Costco. Quality seems a bit blurry, but maybe that’s the source.

Of course, I want to reedit the content a bit, in Final Cut and After Effects and all that. Turns out it was very easy to import the DVD’s into the Mac, in a usable format, with qt_tools!

(Download my command-line qt_tools here.)

The catch is, you need the Apple MPEG-2 Import Component either for $19.99 from Apple, or installed with Final Cut.

All the video lives in a .VOB file. The biggest ones are usually the content you want; the littlest ones are usually menu loops. Using qt_tools, we convert VOB to quicktime. Well, mp4, anyway.

qt_export --dodialog VTS_01_1.VOB ~/mp4s/VTS_01_1.mp4 --savesettings=mp4_pretty_good.st

I found mp4 at about 5000 kbits/second looked ok.

This only works on personal dvd’s, of course. Unencrypted.

Lately been trying 3d apps, looking for my next toy.

Quick recap of 3d software that I’ve used or recently tried:

LightWave. Fluent. This app has everything except proper instancing. Crufty bizarro-world interface… and yet, gets the job done. Expressions and scripting available.

modo. Fluent. Smooth as silk. Clean and modern UI. Like lightwave, but from this universe, instead of the Amiga. Still lacks expressions, limited animation, and no whizbangery (no bones, particles, or dynamics). Yet.

Cinema 4D (c4d). Comes so highly recommended. Only tried it for an hour or two. Lovely modern app. I could see getting a lot done with this. Scripting and expressions. The UI is modern and responsive.

Maya. I want to like it, because I’ve seen great stuff come out of it (from people who are by far better artists than I, alas). But I feel the weight of history in it, it remains inscrutable to me. I have an expert friend who is going to sit down with me and give me a good dose of Getting-It. I hope. I love scripting, that won’t be the obstacle.

Houdini. Love at first click.

Most apps aspire to give you a clean well-lighted crafts studio, with the kiln warmed up, the tools spread out before you.

Houdini gives you a fully stocked laboratory, soldering iron (1), screwdriver (1), wirecutters (1), and a high-voltage supply rail. Go!

This means there’s a high fixed overhead to get anything done. But it sure lends itself to quirky algorithmic experiments.

The picture at the top, and the bottom, are relatively trivial Houdini documents with some stacked operators. The bottom one uses random expressions to control the height of the blocks-stacks. (The stars part is straight from a tutorial on the company site.)

Long, long ago I saw an article or talk by Paul Haeberli, of SGI. Oh, he covered many interesting and clever graphics tricks. One of them was the idea of “synthetic lighting”, or, “doing lighting in post”.

He has a page about it, here.

The idea is pretty simple. If you have images (or animations) of individual lights, you can add them together to get multiple lights. It appears to be a relatively common render feature these days, but I’d never played with it before. So here goes.

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You can color and mask them, too, to get some pretty nifty effects, all from the same source images.

The pictures above, showing my infantile modeling skills, were done in Luxology modo, using full radiosity render. This can take a while! 10 minutes per low res frame, about.

The youtube video below shows some further examples of getting liveliness out of just a few frames, using this idea of additive post-process lighting.