Lucas Digital Releases OpenEXR Format 171
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."
I am your father Luke (Score:1, Interesting)
Thank you very much ILM
Not for Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Re:Not for Windows? (Score:3, Interesting)
Other uses for 16-bit formats? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:So they would like you to write tools for them (Score:2, Interesting)
This helps both them and us. win-win
It's cool that they have the file format (Score:5, Interesting)
Great, another format to be ignored (Score:2, Interesting)
Kickstart
Re:The license, /.-ed but interesting clauses: (Score:1, Interesting)
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
Your comment violated the "postercomment" compression filter. Try less whitespace and/or less repetition. Comment aborted.
Please try to keep posts on topic.
Not off topic. (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Lucas controls all (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Available for Atari? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:It doesn't look like it's tiled (Score:2, Interesting)
You can load the image in pieces using the FrameBuffer object, but it's scanline-oriented, not tiled. Dunno if apps can get away with that or not.
Does Shake actually load the original file-based image in tiles, or does it simply tile its internal representation of the image and page that out to/from disk?
Tiling is irrelevant (Score:5, Interesting)
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.