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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!
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!!!!
If all goes as planned all the great OSS software will be written to output this format in no time.
The original poster should have given the correct operating system name, MacOS X.
# DO THE MATH! #
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
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I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
We submitted an OpenEXR plugin to the Film Gimp team, and I understand it'll show up in the next release.
Also, Idruna Software is working on OpenEXR support for their Photogenics package. It already supports creation of and painting on HDR formats.
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.
A film scanner like the ones used at VFX houses can produce material with up to 14 bits per channel of color resolution. So can Panoscan's MK1 HDR camera. For reasons outlined in another thread, there are advantages to using FP numbers rather than integers to represent these values.
The CCDs used in these devices are pretty expensive and aren't available in pro-sumer or consumer devices. For now.
Apps like Idruna's Photogenics, Paul Debevec's HDRShop, and Greg Ward's Photophile can produce HDR FP images from scans of photos of the same scene using different exposures. This works with the cheap color scanner that you bought at Fry's or Best Buy.
As for synthetic images, Renderman, Mental Ray use 32-bit FP internally. They can already produce 32-bit TIFF images. We're working on making the OpenEXR display drivers for these apps available with the rest of the OpenEXR software distribution.
Check out Paul Debevec's web site. He seems to have pioneered (correct me if I'm wrong) a lot of image-based rendering techniques. HDR images are an important part of this. He describes how to recover HDR images from photographs, how to create "light probes" (HDR environment maps), and then how to light synthetic scenes with a light probe.
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.