BREAKING NEWS
LATEST POSTS
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Vulkan Gaussian Splatting – Real-Time GPU-Accelerated Gaussian Splatting with NVIDIA DesignWorks Sample vk_gaussian_splatting
https://github.com/nvpro-samples/vk_gaussian_splatting
vk_gaussian_splatting is a new Vulkan-based sample that demonstrates real-time Gaussian splatting, a cutting-edge volume rendering technique that enables highly efficient representations of radiance fields. It is the latest addition to the NVIDIA DesignWorks Samples.
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Foundry Nuke W_hotbox – A fully customisable ‘favourites menu’
https://www.nukepedia.com/python/ui/w_hotbox
W_hotbox is basically a fully customisable ‘favourites menu’ that pops up for as long as you press the shortcut and disappears as soon as you release. The buttons that make up the menu represent python scripts and change depending on you selection. The ‘Hotbox Manager’ offers you an user friendly interface which allows you to add new buttons on the fly. Those buttons are directly accessible via buttons that appear in the menu under your cursor.
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Yasuharu YOSHIZAWA – Comparison of sRGB vs ACREScg in Nuke
Answering the question that is often asked, “Do I need to use ACEScg to display an sRGB monitor in the end?” (Demonstration shown at an in-house seminar)
Comparison of scanlineRender output with extreme color lights on color charts with sRGB/ACREScg in color – OCIO -working space in NukeDownload the Nuke script:
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TED 2025 Rob Bredow – Artist-Driven Innovation in the Age of AI
https://robbredow.com/2025/05/ted-artist-driven-innovation/
https://www.ted.com/talks/rob_bredow_star_wars_changed_visual_effects_ai_is_doing_it_again
Rob Bredow speaks at SESSION 3 at TED 2025: Humanity Reimagined. April 7-11, 2025, Vancouver, BC. Photo: Gilberto Tadday / TED -
Chongqing the world’s largest city in pictures
https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2025/apr/27/chongqing-the-worlds-largest-city-in-pictures
The largest city in the world is as big as Austria, but few people have ever heard of it. The megacity of 34 million people in central of China is the emblem of the fastest urban revolution on the planet.
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Fluent 4.0 released for Blender hard surface modeler
Beyond the boolean support, this add-on also provides cloth panel, grid, head screw, wire and pipe tool.
https://cgthoughts.gumroad.com/
https://superhivemarket.com/creators/cg-thoughts?ref=82
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Arto T. – A workflow for creating photorealistic, equirectangular 360° panoramas in ComfyUI using Flux
https://civitai.com/models/735980/flux-equirectangular-360-panorama
https://civitai.com/models/745010?modelVersionId=833115
The trigger phrase is “equirectangular 360 degree panorama”. I would avoid saying “spherical projection” since that tends to result in non-equirectangular spherical images.
Image resolution should always be a 2:1 aspect ratio. 1024 x 512 or 1408 x 704 work quite well and were used in the training data. 2048 x 1024 also works.
I suggest using a weight of 0.5 – 1.5. If you are having issues with the image generating too flat instead of having the necessary spherical distortion, try increasing the weight above 1, though this could negatively impact small details of the image. For Flux guidance, I recommend a value of about 2.5 for realistic scenes.
8-bit output at the moment
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Scientists claim to have discovered ‘new colour’ no one has seen before: Olo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyq0n3em41o
By stimulating specific cells in the retina, the participants claim to have witnessed a blue-green colour that scientists have called “olo”, but some experts have said the existence of a new colour is “open to argument”.
The findings, published in the journal Science Advances on Friday, have been described by the study’s co-author, Prof Ren Ng from the University of California, as “remarkable”.
(A) System inputs. (i) Retina map of 103 cone cells preclassified by spectral type (7). (ii) Target visual percept (here, a video of a child, see movie S1 at 1:04). (iii) Infrared cellular-scale imaging of the retina with 60-frames-per-second rolling shutter. Fixational eye movement is visible over the three frames shown.
(B) System outputs. (iv) Real-time per-cone target activation levels to reproduce the target percept, computed by: extracting eye motion from the input video relative to the retina map; identifying the spectral type of every cone in the field of view; computing the per-cone activation the target percept would have produced. (v) Intensities of visible-wavelength 488-nm laser microdoses at each cone required to achieve its target activation level.
(C) Infrared imaging and visible-wavelength stimulation are physically accomplished in a raster scan across the retinal region using AOSLO. By modulating the visible-wavelength beam’s intensity, the laser microdoses shown in (v) are delivered. Drawing adapted with permission [Harmening and Sincich (54)].
(D) Examples of target percepts with corresponding cone activations and laser microdoses, ranging from colored squares to complex imagery. Teal-striped regions represent the color “olo” of stimulating only M cones.
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FEATURED POSTS
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Capturing textures albedo
Building a Portable PBR Texture Scanner by Stephane Lb
http://rtgfx.com/pbr-texture-scanner/
How To Split Specular And Diffuse In Real Images, by John Hable
http://filmicworlds.com/blog/how-to-split-specular-and-diffuse-in-real-images/Capturing albedo using a Spectralon
https://www.activision.com/cdn/research/Real_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdfReal_World_Measurements_for_Call_of_Duty_Advanced_Warfare.pdf
Spectralon is a teflon-based pressed powderthat comes closest to being a pure Lambertian diffuse material that reflects 100% of all light. If we take an HDR photograph of the Spectralon alongside the material to be measured, we can derive thediffuse albedo of that material.
The process to capture diffuse reflectance is very similar to the one outlined by Hable.
1. We put a linear polarizing filter in front of the camera lens and a second linear polarizing filterin front of a modeling light or a flash such that the two filters are oriented perpendicular to eachother, i.e. cross polarized.
2. We place Spectralon close to and parallel with the material we are capturing and take brack-eted shots of the setup7. Typically, we’ll take nine photographs, from -4EV to +4EV in 1EVincrements.
3. We convert the bracketed shots to a linear HDR image. We found that many HDR packagesdo not produce an HDR image in which the pixel values are linear. PTGui is an example of apackage which does generate a linear HDR image. At this point, because of the cross polarization,the image is one of surface diffuse response.
4. We open the file in Photoshop and normalize the image by color picking the Spectralon, filling anew layer with that color and setting that layer to “Divide”. This sets the Spectralon to 1 in theimage. All other color values are relative to this so we can consider them as diffuse albedo.
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Rec-2020 – TVs new color gamut standard used by Dolby Vision?
https://www.hdrsoft.com/resources/dri.html#bit-depth
The dynamic range is a ratio between the maximum and minimum values of a physical measurement. Its definition depends on what the dynamic range refers to.
For a scene: Dynamic range is the ratio between the brightest and darkest parts of the scene.
For a camera: Dynamic range is the ratio of saturation to noise. More specifically, the ratio of the intensity that just saturates the camera to the intensity that just lifts the camera response one standard deviation above camera noise.
For a display: Dynamic range is the ratio between the maximum and minimum intensities emitted from the screen.
The Dynamic Range of real-world scenes can be quite high — ratios of 100,000:1 are common in the natural world. An HDR (High Dynamic Range) image stores pixel values that span the whole tonal range of real-world scenes. Therefore, an HDR image is encoded in a format that allows the largest range of values, e.g. floating-point values stored with 32 bits per color channel. Another characteristics of an HDR image is that it stores linear values. This means that the value of a pixel from an HDR image is proportional to the amount of light measured by the camera.
For TVs HDR is great, but it’s not the only new TV feature worth discussing.
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Python and TCL: Tips and Tricks for Foundry Nuke
www.andreageremia.it/tutorial_python_tcl.html
https://www.gatimedia.co.uk/list-of-knobs-2
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/developers/63/ndkdevguide/knobs-and-handles/knobtypes.html
http://www.andreageremia.it/tutorial_python_tcl.html
http://thoughtvfx.blogspot.com/2012/12/nuke-tcl-tips.html
Check final image quality
https://www.compositingpro.com/tech-check-compositing-shot-in-nuke/Local copy:
http://pixelsham.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/compositing_pro_tech_check_nuke_script.nkNuke tcl procedures
https://www.gatimedia.co.uk/nuke-tcl-proceduresKnobs
https://learn.foundry.com/nuke/developers/63/ndkdevguide/knobs-and-handles/knobtypes.html
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