Category: software
Intel Open Image open source Denoiser
Intel Open Image Denoise is an open source library of high-performance, high-quality denoising filters for images rendered with ray tracing. Intel Open Image Denoise is part of the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit and is released under the permissive Apache 2.0 license.
The purpose of Intel Open Image Denoise is to provide an open, high-quality, efficient, and easy-to-use denoising library that allows one to significantly reduce rendering times in ray tracing based rendering applications. It filters out the Monte Carlo noise inherent to stochastic ray tracing methods like path tracing, reducing the amount of necessary samples per pixel by even multiple orders of magnitude (depending on the desired closeness to the ground truth). A simple but flexible C/C++ API ensures that the library can be easily integrated into most existing or new rendering solutions.
At the heart of the Intel Open Image Denoise library is a collection of efficient deep learning based denoising filters, which were trained to handle a wide range of samples per pixel (spp), from 1 spp to almost fully converged. Thus it is suitable for both preview and final-frame rendering. The filters can denoise images either using only the noisy color (beauty) buffer, or, to preserve as much detail as possible, can optionally utilize auxiliary feature buffers as well (e.g. albedo, normal). Such buffers are supported by most renderers as arbitrary output variables (AOVs) or can be usually implemented with little effort.
HuggingFave ai-comic-factory – a FREE AI Comic Book Creator
https://huggingface.co/spaces/jbilcke-hf/ai-comic-factory
this is the epic story of a group of talented digital artists trying to overcame daily technical challenges to achieve incredibly photorealistic projects of monsters and aliens
Blackmagic Camera Introducing Digital Film for iPhone!
https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/ca/products/blackmagiccamera
You can adjust settings such as frame rate, shutter angle, white balance and ISO all in a single tap. Or, record directly to Blackmagic Cloud in industry standard 10-bit Apple ProRes files up to 4K! Recording to Blackmagic Cloud Storage lets you collaborate on DaVinci Resolve projects with editors anywhere in the world, all at the same time!
Getting Started With 3D Gaussian Splatting for Windows (Beginner Tutorial)
https://www.reshot.ai/3d-gaussian-splatting
what are 3D Gaussians? They are a generalization of 1D Gaussians (the bell curve) to 3D. Essentially they are ellipsoids in 3D space, with a center, a scale, a rotation, and “softened edges”.
Each 3D Gaussian is optimized along with a (viewdependant) color and opacity. When blended together, here’s the visualization of the full model, rendered from ANY angle. As you can see, 3D Gaussian Splatting captures extremely well the fuzzy and soft nature of the plush toy, something that photogrammetry-based methods struggle to do.
Pika Labs – generate AI videos from stills with embedded text messages
https://discord.com/invite/pika
generate AI videos with encrypted text message using this amazing new mind-blowing feature from Pika Labs !
- command: /encrypt_text
- message: The text to encrypt
- prompt: The theme of the video, previous parameters still apply
- image (optional): A reference image for the video theme.
- font (optional): you can choose from 5 available font styles
- -w: A weight factor for the embedded message
- -size: The size of the embedded text
Unity3D – open letter on runtime fees
https://blog.unity.com/news/open-letter-on-runtime-fee
To our community:
I’m Marc Whitten, and I lead Unity Create which includes the Unity engine and editor teams.
I want to start with this: I am sorry.
We should have spoken with more of you and we should have incorporated more of your feedback before announcing our new Runtime Fee policy. Our goal with this policy is to ensure we can continue to support you today and tomorrow, and keep deeply investing in our game engine.
You are what makes Unity great, and we know we need to listen, and work hard to earn your trust. We have heard your concerns, and we are making changes in the policy we announced to address them.
Our Unity Personal plan will remain free and there will be no Runtime Fee for games built on Unity Personal. We will be increasing the cap from $100,000 to $200,000 and we will remove the requirement to use the Made with Unity splash screen.
No game with less than $1 million in trailing 12-month revenue will be subject to the fee.
For those creators on Unity Pro and Unity Enterprise, we are also making changes based on your feedback.
The Runtime Fee policy will only apply beginning with the next LTS version of Unity shipping in 2024 and beyond. Your games that are currently shipped and the projects you are currently working on will not be included – unless you choose to upgrade them to this new version of Unity.
We will make sure that you can stay on the terms applicable for the version of Unity editor you are using – as long as you keep using that version.
For games that are subject to the runtime fee, we are giving you a choice of either a 2.5% revenue share or the calculated amount based on the number of new people engaging with your game each month. Both of these numbers are self-reported from data you already have available. You will always be billed the lesser amount.
We want to continue to build the best engine for creators. We truly love this industry and you are the reason why.
I’d like to invite you to join me for a live fireside chat hosted by Jason Weimann today at 4:00 pm ET/1:00 pm PT, where I will do my best to answer your questions. In the meantime, here are some more details.*
Thank you for caring as deeply as you do, and thank you for giving us hard feedback.
Marc Whitten
On September 18, Unity Software held an all-hands meeting to discuss the rollout of per-install fees. The recording was reviewed by Bloomberg, which said the company is ready to backtrack on major aspects of its new pricing policy.
The changes are yet to be approved, but here are the first details:
➡ Unity plans to limit fees to 4% for games making over $1 million
➡ Instead of lifetime installs, the company intends to only count installs generated after January 1, 2024 (so the thresholds announced last week won’t be retroactive);
➡ Unity won’t reportedly track installs using its proprietary tools, instead relying on self-reported data from developers.
During the meeting on Monday, Unity CEO John Riccitiello noted that the new policy is “designed to generate more revenue from the company’s biggest customers and that more than 90% of Unity users won’t be affected.” When asked by several employees how the company would regain the trust of developers, execs said they will have to “show, not tell.”
David Helgason, founder of Unity and its former CEO (he is currently on the board), also commented on the controversy around the pricing changes. In a Facebook post (spotted by GamesBeat), he said “we f*cked up on many levels,” adding that the announcement of the new business model “missed a bunch of important “corner” cases, and in central ways ended up as the opposite of what it was supposed to be. […] Now to try again, and try harder,” Helgason wrote. “I am provisionally optimistic about the progress. So sorry about this mess.”
RESPONSES
Unilaterally removing Terms Of Services and making them retroactive is a HUGE loss of trust in Unity’s executive and management team. There is no going back there, no matter if they patch this mess. Using Unity moving forward will just be a gamble.
4% doesn’t change anything. It does not fix any of the problems that have been raised, and asked repeatedly. Install bombing still not addressed. So many “corner cases” still not addressed, especially in the mobile space.
To little to late tbh it’s a systematic problem with the ceo being so out of touch that it’s going to happen again. Remember this was a man who wanted a dollar per battlefield player revive
Mega Crit said Unity’s decision was “not only harmful in a myriad of ways” but was also “a violation of trust”, and pointed to Unity’s removal of its Terms of Service from GitHub, where changes can be easily tracked.
Simulon – a Hollywood production studio in the hands of an independent creator with access to consumer hardware
Divesh Naidoo: The video below was made with a live in-camera preview and auto-exposure matching, no camera solve, no HDRI capture and no manual compositing setup. Using the new Simulon phone app.
LDR to HDR through ML
https://simulon.typeform.com/betatest
Process example
Unity Presents New “Runtime Fees” Based on Game Installs and Revenue
https://80.lv/articles/unity-presents-new-fees-based-on-game-installs-and-revenue/
The new program is called the Unity Runtime Fee and the main principle is based on how often users install games. Unity thinks “an initial install-based fee allows creators to keep the ongoing financial gains from player engagement, unlike a revenue share”.
This is bound to kill all developers who count on free downloads but profitable venues of income like in-app purchase. Which count for a vast majority of the 30% of the market that Unity holds onto.
The extra bill will be estimated by Unity based on non-specific data.
Unity does not have a ‘known’ way to track installs. Likely due to privacy laws. Thus they will need to ‘estimate’ installs and bill clients based on that. … …. Data which is aggregated with no identifying features isn’t really prevented. Unity’s claim that they can’t distinguish between an install and reinstall or even a paid versus pirated copy actually reinforces the idea that they aren’t using any identifying information, so it would be compliant to privacy laws. … Assumption is that they will get some data from distributors like AppStore, GooglePlay, Valve, Sony, Microsoft, etc… and estimate from there.
“It hurts because we didn’t agree to this. We used the engine because you pay up front and then ship your product. We weren’t told this was going to happen. We weren’t warned. We weren’t consulted,” explained the Facepunch Studios founder. “We have spent 10 years making Rust on Unity’s engine. We’ve paid them every year. And now they changed the rules.”
“It’s our fault. All of our faults. We sleepwalked into it. We had a ton of warnings,” they added. “We should have been pressing the eject button when Unity IPO’d in 2020. Every single thing they’ve done since then has been the exact opposite of what was good for the engine.
BVH (Bounding Volume Hierarchy) in Ray Tracing
Bounding volume hierarchies are used to support several operations on sets of geometric objects efficiently, such as in collision detection and ray tracing. A bounding volume hierarchy (BVH) is a tree structure on a set of geometric objects. All geometric objects, which form the leaf nodes of the tree, are wrapped in bounding volumes.
BVHs are often used in ray tracing to eliminate potential intersection candidates within a scene by omitting geometric objects located in bounding volumes which are not intersected by the current ray. BVH is a crucial component in ray tracing rendering engines like Arnold, as it helps accelerate ray intersection tests and reduce resource costs.
Users do not have control over RAM consumption of the BVH. Here are some tips to optimize Arnold renders when BVH is the bottleneck:
Optimize Your Scene Geometry. Simplify or optimize your 3D models and scene geometry. Complex geometry can lead to larger BVH structures and longer BVH build times. Consider using LODs (Level of Detail) or proxy objects for distant geometry to reduce the BVH complexity.
Use Arnold Stand-ins and Proxies. Arnold Stand-ins and proxies allow you to load complex geometry only when needed, reducing the BVH complexity during the initial BVH build. This can be particularly useful for scenes with a lot of high-poly assets.
Denoising. Applying denoising to your final render can help reduce the number of rays required and consequently, the BVH intersection tests.
Render in Layers. If your scene has many elements, consider rendering it in layers. This allows you to optimize each layer individually, potentially reducing BVH build times.
Distribute Rendering. If you have access to a render farm or multiple machines, distribute the rendering workload. This can significantly reduce rendering time as each machine can handle a portion of the BVH calculations.
CamP: Camera Preconditioning for NERF (Neural Radiance Fields)
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.10902.pdf
“…any errors in the camera position solve can dramatically reduce the quality of a reconstruction. “
“Introducing CamP — a method to precondition camera optimization for NeRFs to significantly improve quality. With CamP we’re able to create high quality reconstructions even when input poses are bad.
CamP is a general purpose trick that you can apply in many places. Apply CamP to prior SOTA NeRF models like Zip-NeRF, and you improve quality and establish a new SOTA. Applying CamP to existing camera optimization models, like SCNeRF, to improve their performance.” – Keunhong Park
World Creator 2023
https://www.world-creator.com/
World Creator lets you create terrains of any size. There are absolutely no limits. You can create terrains with a few meters and terrains with thousands of kilometers. On top of that, our new terrain system allows you to create terrains of any detail. From meter precision down to centimeter precision, such high details can only be achieved with World Creator.
SecretWeapons MixBox – a practical library for paint-like digital color mixing
Internally, Mixbox treats colors as real-life pigments using the Kubelka & Munk theory to predict realistic color behavior.
https://scrtwpns.com/mixbox/painter/
https://scrtwpns.com/mixbox.pdf
https://github.com/scrtwpns/mixbox
https://scrtwpns.com/mixbox/docs/
Executing Python Scripts With a Shebang
https://realpython.com/python-shebang
In this tutorial, you’ll:
- Learn what a shebang is
- Decide when to include the shebang in Python scripts
- Define the shebang in a portable way across systems
- Pass arguments to the command defined in a shebang
- Know the shebang’s limitations and some of its alternatives
- Execute scripts through a custom interpreter written in Python
In short, a shebang is a special kind of comment that you may include in your source code to tell the operating system’s shell where to find the interpreter for the rest of the file:
#!/usr/bin/python3
print("Hello, World!")
