CloudLigt: 3D Surface Relighting Nuke Plugin. ( open source ).

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Forum: CG News
Posted By: hassanvfx
Post Time: 01-31-2012 at 03:22 AM
Text:

Hi friends, some of you may read my latest post "promising VFX / TD needs Help" http://goo.gl/mDP2i

Well,basically in that post (that in some moments turned a bit warm..) i got a lot of tips on how to pack and sell better my skills as technical artist for major studios. Super Administrator boomji give me a challenge : "You want hard sell ? Put what you do BEST in our faces." and i take it.

http://youtu.be/LJ39zm1Ehzo
READ THE TECHINCAL PAPER : CLOUDLIGHT

I quickly put some of my latest VFX technical researchs on.

Download link >
Kromath -> A complete comercial real-time 3D keyer / compositor for iPhone
Skin shading -> A research of real-time skin recognitions and shading .
CineTime Machine -> A commercial real-time VFX app allowing interpolation between B&W, Technicolor2 , Technicolor 3 & video looks.

All these is complex stuff programmed directly on objcC , C++, openGL, and GLSL, and with the major challenge of iPhone constrains, wich demands state of the art code-writing and software architecture.

Anyway i noticed that if you don't deeply read through the papers above, is easy to think that my iOS developments are minors in comparision to for example vfx software plugin development.

For this reason this weekend i put my hands on the Nuke Development Kit. I remember that i few time ago some friend show me an amazing video form vfx guide showing a mate from image engine , that was using a plugin developed around "district 9" to allow point-cloud 3D relighting on nuke.

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep071.mov

I did a quick research and i found around some techniques using GL_POINTS to create the cloud points, but unable to render on scanline for the same reason.

As far as i can notice, scanline render works as a surface shader, and is unable to handle hardware like attributes like GL_POINTS .

So im not sure about how the guys of image engine did it, but i came with the idea of instancing little 3D pixels, or cubes instead of points.

It works very well, but quickly turns a bit hard to handle on non high-end computers. So i did some optimizations, like avoid handling non-alpha pixels, and allowing user to select wich faces of the pixel-cube ( aka:cloudlet ) want to have visible.

With this approach is posible to use standar lights and render through scanline.

For further development i need some of your support.

1. I did the plugin open source ( just remember to mention hassanvfx when you use it ) get in my github and fork on it :

https://github.com/randominteractive/cloudLight

2. I need another images to built an all-in-one cool shader around this :
(images im currently working on comes from http://www.pxfactory.eu/ )
so please ! share me :
A 2K EXR image ( preferable a character ) in:
color pass
point pass
specular pass
diffuse pass
reflection pass
bump pass


3. Please some LINUX and UNIX friend wants to compile the source on that platforms.
(or at least go to your Nuke6/Documentation folder and send me the "Makefile*" file in there to try to compile it on my mac )

Download:
Tecnical paper cloudLight
OSX VERSION + EXAMPLES

Let's gonna make this an amazing plug-in ! Hands on folks !

Source