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."

Comments

Now I can render...

[gpinzone]

Jar Jar in my own home! Thanks Lucasfilm!

Incorrect link in article..

[Anonymous Coward]

it's www.openexr.com, not 'www.openexr'. Sigh.

ILM isn't Lucas

[stratjakt]

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.

Re:ILM isn't Lucas

[dhess]

Actually, he did, since this is the first time that ILM or any other Lucas Digital company has released source code for free.

It was a group of developers who first floated the idea, but ultimately it was George's call whether or not to do it, and he gave the OK, which is pretty cool, I think.

So they would like you to write tools for them

[jj_johny]

Get it folks. They designed a format and have some tools but have decided that they want to tap into the great pool of OSS talent. Who says this is not a dark side ploy?

If all goes as planned all the great OSS software will be written to output this format in no time.

Re:So they would like you to write tools for them

[BFaucet]

Who cares?

This means everyone (including you, me, and yes ILM) can benefit from this.

The thing I'd be suspisious (sp?) of is them releasing this format so everyone will start using it, then releasing their tools (for gobs of cash) that'll be better than most other software using the format.

Re:So they would like you to write tools for them

[fritter]

If all goes as planned all the great OSS software will be written to output this format in no time.

Actually, if all goes as planned in six and a half years there will be great OSS software at Milestone 15 able to render a sphere in only ten hours.

Re:So they would like you to write tools for them

[JanneM]

Um, to me that sounds like a good plan for everyone. It's one of the points of open source that while you release your stuff, you can make money on your own extensive knowledge of said stuff. After all, since the format and basic tools are open you do not need to use their (hypothetical) proprietary versions if you do not want to.

Just imagine....

[Anonymous Coward]

Rendering a movie of Gollum choking Jar-Jar to death, I'd pay to see that.

You are not supposed to do THAT!

[Dman33]

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

Re:You are not supposed to do THAT!

[TheCaptain]

Great.. you just ruined the S.E.P. on that hyperlink!

Isn't that prohibited under the DMCA? Oooooo...Someone's in trouble. :)

The license, /.-ed but interesting clauses:

[stratjakt]

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:

- Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

- Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.

- Neither the name of Industrial Light & Magic nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. STAR TREK IS STUPID. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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Attention Apple Users

[Amsterdam Vallon]

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.

It's cool that they have the file format

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

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.

Umm this means nothing.

[Anonymous Coward]

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 doesn't look like it's tiled

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

Movie making required heavy duty image processing. Often thousands of layers need to be processed together with very complex operations. In order to do this at film res you need to break the image up into tiles. A package like Apple's shake works with 128x128 or 256x256 tiles I can't remember exactly. For maximum efficiency the image files need to be stored as tiles too. So popular file formats used such as Kodak's DPX/Cineon or TIFF support tiling. Without tiling you end up with major cache thrashing as the entire image needs to be read in any time a single tile gets dropped from the cache. (I'm talking about the application cache - not the CPU or memory cache.) Even if you do low quality work at low res (eg. ILM do much of their work at hi def resolution) you can still suffer from this.

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.

Not off topic.

[Anonvmous Coward]

"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?"

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 .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.

Re:Is there a tool to paint in this format?

[dhess]

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.

Tiling is irrelevant

[Namarrgon]

Thousands of layers? The most complex composition I've seen personally was the Swordfish Ventura Bank explosion, and that required somewhat over 500 layers (at 4K). Definitely qualifies as heavy duty, but still a far cry from "thousands" of layers. "Often" would be less than 100 layers, in my experience.

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.