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Lucas Digital Releases OpenEXR Format
frankie writes "Although George Lucas may have gone over to the dark side, at least some of his staff prefer Freedom and light. ILM has released OpenEXR, a graphics file format and related utilities, under a BSD-style license. Among other things, it supports the same 16 bit format used by Nvidia CG and the Geforce FX. OpenEXR runs on Linux, Jaguar, and Irix; other platforms are likely to work with a little help from the community."
Jar Jar in my own home! Thanks Lucasfilm!
Always nice to see more platforms getting development for graphics..
The net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. -- John Gilmore
Now everybody will be able to create Jar-Jar Binks models and insert them into substandard movies!
topreacher@signature.slashdot.org 1% rm -rf sig
it's www.openexr.com, not 'www.openexr'. Sigh.
And I would doubt he played any role whatsoever in the decision.
But its great that now we can all remaster his original films and add our own awkward, out-of-place looking robots, aliens and spaceships.
I'll have Jar Jar and Indiana Jones doing the hoochie-coo on the roof of a car in American Graffiti.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Looks like we could well see a nice improvement in editing software for all those with DV cams in the near future.
Thank you very much ILM
Economic Left/Right: -0.62
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -3.69
Well, the Jaguar *was* a 64-bit console...
If all goes as planned all the great OSS software will be written to output this format in no time.
That's a bummer. Lightwave loves HDRI imagery.
Out of curiosity, has anybody used HDRI images for textures? I'm curious if the floating point data makes a difference. I could see it being particularly useful for the diffuse and lumination channels. What about color?
Rendering a movie of Gollum choking Jar-Jar to death, I'd pay to see that.
Quit wasting time with this crap and release the real Star Wars on DVD. And while you are at it, get the Indiana Jones triligy out on DVD too.
Take a moment to be both amazed and amused that the first post was actually something related to the topic, and all the mooks missed out.
it's www.openexr.com [openexr.com], not 'www.openexr'. Sigh.
Great.. you just ruined the S.E.P. on that hyperlink!
SEP stands for Slashdot-Effect Protection
Copyright (c) 2002, Industrial Light & Magic, a division of Lucas Digital Ltd. LLC All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:
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I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Leaving Windows development to their community is a bad idea.
How long before we step in and port the Linux version?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Before you spend a half-hour downloading any packages, please note that shared libraries aren't supported yet for Mac OS X version 10.2.
Well, to rephrase this, you can build them, but Lucasfilm have't gotten them to link due to undefined symbols and are probably
doing something wrong in the Makefile system.
The test suite will automatically try to link shared libraries if you've built them, so 'make check' will fail. To run the confidence tests, tell configure not to build shared libraries ("./configure --enable-shared=no").
More details are available in the README document.
Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate. Ex-O'Reilly/MIT employee, now a full-time Google employee.
Hey dudes,
.HDR format (similar to OpenEXR, I imagine) in Lightwave's various texture channels and have gotten interesting results. (Especially the diffuse channel.) It strikes me that you could lose the diffuse channel all together in favor of a floating point color channel. In english, that means that you have one texture that responds properly to light, as opposed to having to assign the color of the surface in one channel and it's light reflectance in a seperate one.
I was just curious if anybody out there uses HDR imagery (like the OpenEXR format) for anything besides global illumination?
I've been fiddling with the
That's seriously cool, but I'm in my infancy here with regards to these floating point formats. I'm just curious, who's using HDR in ways besides global lighting? It seems like there's a whole new door opening here.
"Derp de derp."
What the hell are you talking about? Everything you wrote was a full sentence. But at no time did you ever acctually say anything. Did you have a point in your own head? Some people are now acutally dumber after reading your post.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
Of course ILM is doing this for selfish reasons, but that's why they are called a "business". So maybe they're not open-sourcing all of the in-house tools that they spent many, many $$ developing, but at least they are opening up their file format. Isn't that better than keeping all of their file formats proprietary?...
If your so upset about George's greed, why don't you build a sweet tool that uses his file format, then charge him to license the tool from you, thus causing you to profit from the deal.
I love free - ok, relatively free - enterprise.
They release an extensible file format, some libraries, and it is teh best thing in the world?
Anybody having to manage picture in more than 16**3 color will think of something simlar. And the extensibility remind me of tiff (TAGGED image file format). In fact, I'm not sure they would not have be able to store all what they want in tiff. So what?
On the bright side, the "dark side" link has /.'ed MPAA.com.
Hmm, I wonder how they'll turn this into a DMCA violation?
But have you watched any movies with ILM effects lately? The dynamic range sucks! Episode II was basically characters jumping between matte paintings and each painting looked like it had been painted with an 8 bit paint package. Unless you actually bother to collect data on set that is high dynamic range having the file format is as good as useless.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
I wish there was some there was some way that I could be outside playing basketball, in the rain, and not get wet.
Kickstart
Maybe they decided to hire rusty of K5 fame as a consultant. He "fixed" them up good.
Bite my yammer.
> They just openly defined the file format, not the tools to create graphics.
Even if you were correct, that's no problem. Wherever open formats go, open code follows.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The submitter doesn't even understand what ILS is offering, 'uses the same 16 bit format as...', no, it uses a special datatype that CG has, and FX will natively support (pssst CG is dead too, thanks to both MS and the OpenGL consortium endrunning them by implementing their own high level shader language)
the only thing I see this library even offers is the 'capability to store' HDR' (High Definition Rendering) information, which offers better lighting techniques and edge detection.. *free* code to do the exact same thing is available at ATI, nVidia, SIGGRAPH, Usenet, any number of graphic books, etc.
This story is useless. This code is useless. HDR relies on the rendering technique, not the 'file format'.
"Your honor, my client did not consent to the terms, for he was nor informed of them. After all, the terms were clearly shouted right in his face, in bold, underlined, and blinking. There's no way he could have seen that."
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
It's not a show-stopper but tiling really ought to be there. This format doesn't really add much to already existing formats and subtracts something important.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Does anyone know?
"Out of curiosity, has anybody used HDRI images for textures? I'm curious if the floating point data makes a difference. I could see it being particularly useful for the diffuse and lumination channels. What about color?"
.PNG or .JPG format, it's a more accurate way of storing information about light, and us people that work in 3D have a lot to be excited about. Since it's just recently become involved in the major 3D Apps out there, the capabilities of it are still in their infancy and I'm curious what people have discovered about it.
Okay, somebody modded me down as 'Off-Topic'. I'm just going to assume he/she/but probably he didn't understand what I was talking about here.
OpenEXR is a format for High Dynamic Range Imagery. What this essentially means is that instead of describing a pixel by having 3 channels @ 8-bits per channel (which has a maximum value of 255), you get a floating point 16-bit value per channel which is a measure of intensity. The result? Instead of having just color data there, you have color data & intensity data. The sky's blue, right? If you take a 24-bit picture of the sky, you get blue pixels. Is that enough data? No. Try looking up at the sky without squinting your eyes. Can't do it, can ya? The sky is *very* bright. With the HDRI format, you can store that luminosity as well as the color. That's why they use it for global illumination. You're capturing light sources, intensities, and color at the same time.
Thing is though, a floating point format has uses in other areas of 3D such as texture mapping. It means you can create/capture textures that deal in intensity as well (just like real life), thus you get a much more realistic response from lights in the scene.
I have no idea if I'm making any sense here or not, but the main point I'm trying to make here is that I am nowhere near off-topic. That's the reaason this format is interesting. It's not another
I wonder.
How long before someone claims IP rights on the technologies herein?
zWhat would an EWOULDBLOCK block, if an EWOULDBLOCK could block would? -- me
Everything you wrote was a full sentence. But at no time did you ever actually say anything.
Welcome to Slashdot, I hope you enjoy your stay. It seems you already understand how things work around here...
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Yes, I understand the irony of this post.
(By the way, there is no charge for the spelling correction)
Note that if this does not get modded as "Funny," then it is likely a pointless, meaningless post, and potential moderators are now dumber after reading it. My apologies to them, and to any posts they may review henceforth.
I saw a rare interview/profile of Lucas just before AOTC was released, and they pointed out that Lucas is intimately involved in the important decisions for all of his businesses (and he has lots of them). While he might allow small decisions to be made by subordinates, Lucas pretty much nearly micromanages his empire. Can't argue with his management style because it's clearly worked for him. Come to think of it, I wonder if the folks at Pixar would have preferred to stay with Lucas vs. going to work for Steve "Reality Distortion Field" Jobs.
I wasn't saying that winshit coders are incompetent, but rather that most talented winshit programmers have either sold their soul to a company or are developing shareware/freeware. Very few release their source.
While I like cygwin, it is nothing in comparison to the real thing. While I believe in the OS movement, I understand that some people and especially companies and groups can't just release the code.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
So by posting the link to frankie as http:///~frankie is chrisd trying to save Slashdot from itself?
Half, a C++ class for manipulating half values as if they were a built-in C++ datatype
As I see it, this helps not only them by having the OSS peeps write software that may indirectly help them, but also us because now we have a class so we can write to the Nvidia video cards even if we aren't using the ILM format.
"Dogs and cats, living together...it's mass hysteria!"
Is there a 16 bit floating point camera? Does Povray generate 16 bit floating point renders? Are TV stations going to start broadcasting 16 bit floating point? It looks like the only way to do it is to spend a few months in front of Maya creating a scene from scratch and render a few hundred variations in brightness.
OpenEXR runs on Linux, Jaguar , and Irix
I'm glad someone is finally releasing software for the Atari Jaguar, it was such an unloved system.
Bad jokes aside, too many damn codenames that mean the same thing. Sometimes i realize why folks make stupid names like Itanium and Infinium.... no one else will be stupid enough to use them.
While I disagree with Kickstart70's comment (clearly the new format has advantages that PNG does not have), his comment is obviously on topic. Whatever moderator marked it offtopic should have a bite taken out of his/her karma.
It allows gamma correction on steroids, as seen in their sample section - they clearly emphasize the many-stops gamma adjustments they can achieve, especially in the very bright or dark areas of the picture.
Just curious if there was a Photoshop plugin or Gimp feature or something where one could paint using the 16-bit format?
I'd like to paint textures this way, it's a lot more natural than today's 24-bit formats. Kinda sad, really. Since HDRI (high dynamic range imagery) came along, 24-bit seems so limited! So I'm hoping that something like Photoshop comes along soon and supports it.
Today what you have to do is make a sequence of images (3 or 4) that represent the image at different intensities so that a program can analyze them and develop a luminance curve. Which is fine, but it's a bit tricky to paint a texture that way. (works fine with photographs, though...)
Just curious about what kinds of tools are out there. I'm only recently developing an interest in this format.
..does it support the display of Squant?
Anyway, tiling as you describe is rarely used in motion picture image processing work, regardless of the number of layers. Breaking down a large (4000x3000 or larger) image does improve memory usage (sometimes at a cost in efficiency for certain algorithms), but when this is done, it's usually broken into scanlines or groups of scanlines, not square tiles. This works just as well and fits better with how images are processed, stored, displayed etc. The number of layers to be composited does not affect this at all.
DPX and Cineon do not support tiled image packing. TIFF does, but I've never seen a post-production app actually output a tiled image - it just complicates things unnecessarily.
And it's rarely necessary to re-read an entire image if you just want a subrectangle of it - many formats make it relatively easy to read a limited region. Compression can complicate things, but you can usually limit your reading to just the scanlines involved.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I've been reading over the code - anyone who wants to study good C++ style should definitely check this out, even if you aren't interested in graphics! The ILM libraries make good use of templates, exceptions, operator overloading, and iostreams - in ways that are clear and easy to understand (as opposed to many other C++ libraries I've seen...). You'll have to look hard to find a more appropriate application of C++ features.
Congratulations to Florian Kainz and Rod Bogart!
I never thought I'd see the day when ILM would publically release source code and specifications, particularly for such things as image file formats like PIZ. To all my friends at ILM, is Prime Friday still in effect?
The times they are a changin'.
rob
Proud former ILM employee, 1995-1999.
The Lucas will. :)
FRA: STFU GTFO
ILM has a need for an image format which allows for high dynamic range and lossy compression.
The EXR compression schemes (there are three) are lossless.
However, your general point is valid.
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
Getting off topic here.....
Well, with rockets they might go, like, 1000 scale miles per hour.
Divide speed by scale. Let's say a 1:8 scale radio controlled car can make 80 km/h (ca. 50 mi/h), quite possible if it has a combustion engine. Then it makes 640 scale km/h! (ca. 400 mi/h)
Irene KHAAAAAAN!
Don't jump to the wrong conclusion here, Cowards!
He's the maintainer. When he says "I meant" he means what he wrote in the readme. He's not the asshat troll that posted that first pile of crap/fud (that should be mod'd down, for god's sake).
- I am made of meat.
They are not profitable. In fact, they are funded by venture capital. The problem with Slashdot users is that they confuse the economics of Capitalism with free hand-outs. Zope is surviving on a free hand out. That does not mean they're profitable.
http://www.zope.com/News/PressReleases/FundingN
[sarcasm]
Gosh, thanks for setting me straight on that one. Capitalism certainly has nothing to do with venture capital. A company that did a funding round two years ago in order to enable more rapid growth can't possibly have become profitable since then. I guess all of the major projects I worked on as a Zope employee were imaginary, and the ones they've announced completion of since then are lies. Even if they were real, they were only little bitty contracts with unknowns like the Navy, AARP, Viacom, and SGI.
[/sarcasm]
Just to clarify, there is a seperate floating-point intensity for each color (rgb). The above description implies there is a seperate color and intensity.
Though this is practical if you use a linear space like XYZ so little software uses this that it is probably much more useful to store rgb. Don't even think about trying to store "hue" or store non-linear values like CIE xyz or any of that color-management stuff, non of it is defined well enough for cgi.
In fact tiles are a complete hinderance to modern programs that want to access arbitrary rectangles of the image and not obey some predefined cutting into tiles. For these programs, "tiles" like in tiff files require reading the entire image into memory before any of it can be returned, completely inverting the entire purpose of tiles. In the software I am writing our tiff reader refuses any tiled tiffs (ie it only accepts files that are one big tile) and we have yet to encounter any tiff that is not just one big tile.
Many modern programs "tile" the image by cutting it into scan lines or groups of scan lines, which you could consider long narrow tiles. But this requires no special support by the file other than storing the pixels in horizontal order.
i got em. they look like dubs of the laser disk, but they're better than VHS by a long shot. check it out: http://www.getvcds.com/dvd/search.shtml?field=titl e&searchtext=star+wars&type=dvd
can be found here