Erik Winquist – The Definitive Weta Digital Guide to IBL hdri capture
www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/the-definitive-weta-digital-guide-to-ibl
Notes:
- Camera type: full frame with exposure bracketing and an 8mm circular fish eye lens.
- Bracketing: 7 exposures at 2 stops increments.
- Tripod: supporting 120 degrees locked offsets
- Camera angle: should point up 7.5 degrees for better sky or upper dome coverage.
- Camera focus: set and tape locked to manual
- Start shooting looking towards the sun direction with and without the ND3 filter; The other angles will not require the ND3 filter.
- Documenting shooting with a slate (measure distance to slate, day, location, camera info, camera temperature, camera position)
Open Source OpenVDB Version 9.0.0 Available Now and Introduces GPU Support
First introduced in 2012, nowadays OpenVDB is commonly applied in simulation tools such as Houdini, EmberGen, Blender, and used in feature film production for creating realistic volumetric images. This format, however, lacks the GPUs support and can not be applied in games due to the considerable file size (on average at least a few Gigabytes) and computational effort required to render 3D volumes.
Volumetric data has numerous important applications in computer graphics and VFX production. It’s used for volume rendering, fluid simulation, fracture simulation, modeling with implicit surfaces, etc. However, this data is not so easy to work with. In most cases volumetric data is represented on spatially uniform, regular 3D grids. Although dense regular grids are convenient for several reasons, they have one major drawback – their memory footprint grows cubically with respect to grid resolution.
OpenVDB format, developed by DreamWorksAnimation, partially solves this issue by storing voxel data in a tree-like data structure that allows the creation of sparse volumes. The beauty behind this system is that it completely ignores empty cells, which drastically decreases memory and disk usage, simultaneously making the rendering of volumes much faster.
www.aswf.io/blog/project-update-openvdb-version-9-0-0-available-now-introduces-gpu-support/
github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/openvdb/releases/tag/v9.0.0
Open source resources for down sampling point cloud meshes
MeshLab
www.heritagedoc.pt/doc/Meshlab_Tutorial_iitd.pdf
Instant Meshes
www.blendernation.com/2015/11/16/instant-meshes-a-free-qaud-based-autoretopology-program/
github.com/wjakob/instant-meshes
igl.ethz.ch/projects/instant-meshes/
Open3D
www.open3d.org/docs/release/index.html
www.open3d.org/docs/release/tutorial/geometry/pointcloud.html
Point Cloud Utils
awesomeopensource.com/project/fwilliams/point-cloud-utils
MathWorks pcdownsample
www.mathworks.com/help/vision/ref/pcdownsample.html
Not Open Source
Various software
cmacvfx.com/how-to-decimate-lidar-or-photogrammetry/
Autodesk announces acquisition of cloud-based animation pipeline software from Tangent Labs
adsknews.autodesk.com/news/acquisition-software-from-tangent-labs
Autodesk is acquiring LoUPE, the powerful cloud-based production pipeline technology for artists and studios, and the team that created it.
Tangent Labs founder Jeff Bell will be joining Autodesk with his development team.
Peter Jackson Selling Weta Digital’s VFX Tech Division to Unity for $1.625 Billion
https://www.fxguide.com/fxfeatured/unity-weta-deal/
variety.com/2021/digital/news/unity-acquires-weta-digital-1235107544/
Under the deal, Unity is obtaining the Weta Digital suite of VFX tools and technology and its team of 275 engineers, who will join Unity’s Create Solutions division.
Joe Marks, Weta’s chief technology officer, will join Unity as CTO of Weta Digital.
Weta Digital’s VFX and animation teams will continue to exist as a standalone entity, known as WetaFX, which is expected to become Unity’s largest customer in the media and entertainment space. WetaFX, with about 1,700 employees, will remain majority-owned by Jackson and led by CEO Prem Akkaraju. The proposed deal is expected to close before the end of 2021, subject to regulatory approvals.
K-Lens One – A Light Field Lens that captures RGB + Depth
www.newsshooter.com/2021/10/31/klens-one-a-light-field-lens-that-captures-rgb-depth/
A mirror system (Image Multiplier) in the K|Lens splits the light rays into 9 separate images that are mapped on the camera sensor. All 9 of these images have slightly different perspectives. The best way to picture it is if you imagine using 9 separate cameras in a narrow array at the same time.
Floating point precision and errors in 3D production
https://blog.demofox.org/2017/11/21/floating-point-precision
https://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html
The challenge with precision limits in production is tightly connected to the context of the assets, camera and procedural requirements the render scene needs to support.
For example a far away camera chasing a plane may not reveal issues that the same scene may show with a far away camera’s closeup of a displaced water drop on the plane’s windshield.
This is a rough example, but it helps putting things in perspective.
Always best testing for specific patterns or targets within a given setup.
