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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.
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.
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
I'm sure somebody will port it to Windows in time. The libraries themselves are pretty vanilla code, so it should be easy to port. We don't really use Windows for effects work here so it hasn't been a priority for us.
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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.
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.
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'.
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
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"?
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.