This is only border-lining our HDR topic, but it's just too awesome to go unmentioned.




Not that any of these example clips would be impossible to create today. But they require a lot of manual work from a skilled VFX artist. In fact, the "We shot it wrong - you fix it!" category is the bread and butter of the VFX industry today. It's tedious, uninspiring, and sometimes even aggravating work. Any help from a push-button automatic is welcome. Currently Mokey is the closest production-ready tool, and at EdenFX we make extensive use of it. Mixed in with After Effects, Fusion, and some 3d reconstruction in Lightwave, we get stuff done. But it's nowhere nearly as automatic as in the video shown above.

Read more on this amazing new algorithm on the project's homepage. Especially the Spacetime Fusion technique described is a required reading for ever developer making tonemapping software - could be helpful for making After Effects plugins. (hint hint nudge nudge)

Blochi

xRez shows off giant Yosemite panorama

One thing is for sure: Their pano is bigger than yours.

The Yosemite Extreme Panoramic Imaging Project aims at nothing less than capturing the entire Yosemite valley in one massive image. 70 volunteers, capturing 45 Gigapixel of imagery, which are projected onto super-detailed geometry scans, and then rendered into one long strip in Maya. That's crazy talk.

But the two masterminds behind xRez, Greg Downing and Eric Hanson, pulled it off, and their result is shown on in the entrance hall at Siggraph. For some reason I was expecting they would wallpaper the entire outer walls of the conference center. Actually, what you see in the picture above is only one half of it, the North Rim. Eventually you'll be able to see it on a Microsoft Surface display in the National Park's Visitor Center.

More info the xRez site, the HDView Blog, and in this insanely cool movie:


But wait - there's more...

GigaPan is catching up

This is another one of these projects I was watching closely, but never got around to talk about it. The GigaPan is a robotic panohead for regular snapshot cameras, and significantly cheaper than any other robotic head around. Still, it's incredible stable and reliable, and the onboard software is a breeze to use. It was good enough for the xRez gang, so it will sure fit your needs as well.

Except, that it's still in beta. I was fortunate enough to snatch a unit (here is my puny 0.5 GPix pano), but many others were not as lucky. So the Gigapan crew is digging through a backlog of 1000+ beta applications. Well, the good news is that they have manufacturing almost sorted out, and soon to expand into a second round of beta.

More eyecandy on gigapan.org, more info on the Global Connection Project site.

AutoPano 2 splits in Pro and Giga

Alexandre Jenny, original creator of AutoPano, made a totally unexpected appearance with a booth on the main exhibition floor. Way to go, Alexandre!

He's working really hard on v2.0, to be released in December. Then Autopano will be split in 3:

• AutoPano Pro - the autopano we all learned to love.
• AutoPano Server - automatic server-sided stitching and website display, especially useful for real estate agents in the field.
• AutoPano Giga - this is where the money is in terms of HDR-support.

Let me quickly elaborate on this:
You'll be able to stitch an HDR gigapixel panorama without shooting multiple exposures for each segment. You'd rather put your camera in auto-exposure mode, so you capture most detail you can get in a best-shot-fashion. AutoPano 2 Giga will compensate for varying exposures by assigning them the proper luminance level. So the patch you shoot in a dark ground patch will have all the detail, but in the HDR it will be much darker than the patch you shot in the sky. Actually, this is already possible with the current version of AutoPanoPro, but there are severe blending issues. Well, not anymore. The resulting Gigapixel HDR will be the perfect feed for HDView.

There is lots of other goodness across the board: GPU rendering, support for RAW and the Gigapan unit.... Check out the Feature Comparison and Upgrade Path, and if you feel experimental today you can also grab the first beta version. I know I will :)

Wow, that was a hell of a long blog post. Hope you enjoyed it, still.

Blochi

Well, I'm still stuck in the office for the day, but that gives me a chance to write up some of my early discoveries.

Superimposing Dynamic Range

It was the first page of the first chapter of the Handbook, where I mentioned you could expand the dynamic range of a book when you could somehow print a patch that is brighter than the paper it's printed on. Well, smart students Bimber and Iwai from the Bauhaus-University Weimar & the Osaka University did just that.


So, what is it that we're looking at?

They snap a picture and project it back onto the image. May sound pointless, but it is a real eyecandy and could potentially have a huge impact on digital photolabs and in medical imaging. And it's also a little more sophisticated than I make it sound - there is realtime calibration going on (because camera and projector have different angles) and instead of a book they have an ePaper display hooked up as projection canvas.

Read their paper, or watch this movie (50 MB DivX).
Better even, visit them in their corner in Hall H.

HDR timelapse panoramas with hotspots

Right around the corner are INSIGHT, a non-profit organization for heritage archival. They made some amazing interactive tours of Mayan and Egyptian temple ruins. It's really fascinating to see these bright people use the newest high-tech to research the oldest structures man ever made.

Two things are specifically impressive about this. They have a novel Mac-based viewer application, that links panos with hotspots and a map, it can leech content from online sources, and even display panoramic timelapse videos. And you can pan in these videos. Totally awesome. The title is a bit misleading, because they do in fact show pre-tonemapped imagery. Not truly HDRI, but still awesome.


Just as awesome is their capturing device: They custom-built a robotic panohead with automatic exposure bracketing. Neato.
Check out the pano page from the Mayan Skies project, or the INSIGHT gallery.

Even better, go visit their booth and say hello! Both projects are in the back of the New Tech Showcase. Here's a map.

Thank you all for coming, it was a tremendous experience.

Don't forget to pick up your course notes and virtual goodie bags!

Today it's back to business as usual for me. Our client is approaching any minute and he will certainly not extend the deadline for this pilot. Which is tomorrow. Oh well, that's the price to pay for street creds: having real world visual effect shots to do. Hope to get back to Siggraph on Thursday to catch some of the newest papers at least. Computational photography looks like a really cool topic, and I've also discovered some awesome project in the back corner of the New Tech section.

I'll follow up with some reports from Siggraph in the next couple of days.
Stay tuned.

Blochi

Cheer it up for Gwynne Reddick, the code warrior who wrote the latest and greatest sIBL-Loader for modo. Hurray for Gwynne!

Now modo users can enjoy the convenience of automatic HDRI-lighting setups, just by picking a preset from the familiar preset browser. At least on Windows, modo on the Mac threw up some unforeseeable problems that will still need to be resolved.

Why don't you give it a test run with the new sIBL of the month? This time it's one of my favorites, the theatre room of the one and only Man's Chinese Theatre. And if you're still craving for more sIBL-sets, I do have a special surprise announcement at SIGGRAPH up my sleeves...

Speaking of which - don't forget to sign up for the HDRI for Artists class my friend Kirt Witte has organized. Master Zap from mental images will tell you everything about HDRI in mental ray, Gary M. Davis will demo the advantages of floating-point compositing in Toxik, and Hilmar Koch will show whatever crazy cool stuff ILM has done with HDRI for Transformers. Big names, yeah. And I will speak there, too.

So mark this date: Monday, 11 August / 8.30 - 12.15 / Room 502A !

You can't miss it - it's the very first class on opening day. Essentially, we'll proudly open the Conference. See you at Siggraph.

Blochi