“It converts simple text instructions into captivating videos, in seconds.
The story behind this AI is fascinating: A team of four engineers, led by Demi Guo and Chenlin Meng, was born with a clear vision: to transform video creation.
After raising $55 million, Pika Labs initially focused on Japanese anime-style animations before expanding into 3D animation”
“a simple yet effective technique to estimate lighting in a single input image. Current techniques rely heavily on HDR panorama datasets to train neural networks to regress an input with limited field-of-view to a full environment map. However, these approaches often struggle with real-world, uncontrolled settings due to the limited diversity and size of their datasets. To address this problem, we leverage diffusion models trained on billions of standard images to render a chrome ball into the input image. Despite its simplicity, this task remains challenging: the diffusion models often insert incorrect or inconsistent objects and cannot readily generate images in HDR format. Our research uncovers a surprising relationship between the appearance of chrome balls and the initial diffusion noise map, which we utilize to consistently generate high-quality chrome balls. We further fine-tune an LDR difusion model (Stable Diffusion XL) with LoRA, enabling it to perform exposure bracketing for HDR light estimation. Our method produces convincing light estimates across diverse settings and demonstrates superior generalization to in-the-wild scenarios.”
🔸 Gaussian Splats: imagine throwing thousands of tiny ellipsoidal paint drops. They overlap, blend, and create a smooth, photorealistic look. Fast, great for visualization, but less structured for measurements.
🔸 Point Clouds: every dot is a measured hit. LiDAR or photogrammetry gives us millions of them forming a constellation of reality. Amazing for accuracy, but they don’t connect the dots out of the box.
🔸 Meshes: take those points, connect them into triangles, and you get very realistic surfaces. Strong for 3D analysis, simulation as continues watertight models.
“The list should be helpful for every material artist who work on PBR materials as it contains over 200 color values measured with PCE-RGB2 1002 Color Spectrometer device and presented in linear and sRGB (2.2) gamma space.
All color values, HUE and Saturation in this list come from measurements taken with PCE-RGB2 1002 Color Spectrometer device and are presented in linear and sRGB (2.2) gamma space (more info at the end of this video) I calculated Relative Luminance and Luminance values based on captured color using my own equation which takes color based luminance perception into consideration. Bare in mind that there is no ‘one’ color per substance as nothing in nature is even 100% uniform and any value in +/-10% range from these should be considered as correct one. Therefore this list should be always considered as a color reference for material’s albedos, not ulitimate and absolute truth.“
