On Stranger Tides
Pirates 4 is in cinemas. I’ve worked on a couple of shots including a sequence of 3 shots at the climatic end of the movie. Unfortunately, the credits of our crew of about 20 artists had to be reduced to a single line of “additional vfx” to make room for the 200 Hawaiian drivers that were employed on set. Bummer.
What about the movie? Well, boring most of the time. The stereo 3D in the first half, where a lot of fast-paced sword fighting happens, is annoying and blurry. The glasses really dim the picture as well. Gorgeous matte paintings every once in a while but no properly motivated characters or dialogue to give them a reason for being in the movie. A good laugh every 20 minutes but Johnny Depp’s queer routine got old in part 2 already, and in “Stranger Tides” he seems to have realized it himself.
The movie is great for people who get excited by the mere image of pirates doing pirate-y stuff. Most of us leave that stage behind at age 14.
Piwik Visitor Tracking
Let me introduce you to the great piece of open-source software that is tracking your every click around here. The traffic statistics of comp-fu, bildfehler and pfotenbild are created by Piwik, a free and transparent replacement for google analytics. I’ve been running it for a year now and it has matured considerably during the past few months. Right now, it doesn’t just show you which search engine and keywords have led visitors to your site, it also does this in real-time. The user interface is pretty and straight-forward and of course it will exclude your own visits from the statistics.
I don’t even use all of its features (it could also be used to set goals and track pre-defined paths across your site), but just the basic feature set is valuable enough. It allowed me to decide on the minimum screen resolution for my websites, whether to dive into the topic of iPad and iPhone-optimized CSS rules (result: not quite yet) and showed me useful keywords for the google adwords campaign that Pfotenbild is running. And it was easily integrated with WordPress and zenPhoto.
Cube Map to Equirectangular (LatLong Map)
Now and then you need to touch up matte paintings or sky domes that have been stitched from photos and thus are in a panoramic format like the equirectangular – also called latlong – format.
Let's remove the hole in the floor. Example panorama from HDRLabs.com's sIBL archive.
In these cases a useful workflow involves rendering an undistorted view using a camera with an angle of view of 90 degrees and a square film back. If you did this 6 times along each axis it would be called a cube map, but usually you only need one face of the cube for retouching and it doesn’t have to face exactly in the same direction as an axis.
The advantage of these cube maps is that straight lines stay straight, which means you can easily use Photoshop’s vanishing point tool on walls and floors. The problem is the inverse transformation, that takes you back to a distorted, equirectangular panorama. Nuke has a nice tool called “SphericalTransform”, but Fusion users had to rely on 3rd party plugins or software like Hugin or HDR Shop.
The modified cube map tile is transformed back into a latlong map.
Well, not anymore. This Fuse, called CubeToLatLong, will do the inverse transformation for you. The formulas I’ve used can be found here.
Download CubeToLatLong_v1_0.Fuse or read more about it on Vfxpedia.
Soviet Photo Manipulation
Wired Magazine has an interesting article about doctored photographs of the Soviet-era space program. Some pictures have been edited amazingly skillfully to remove failed or deceased cosmonauts or high-ranking military personnel.
But don’t look down on the Soviets. You don’t have to google much to find reports of similar manipulation when it comes to modern photo journalism.
Headache
Great comic by xkcd, especially since I’m working on a stereoscopic project right now 😀
Click the image for a 3D version (fortunately just an April fool’s joke)
Lightning for Fusion
I’ve finally finished the lightning plugin for Fusion. It’s based on ActionScript code by Dan Florio. I don’t provide GUI controls for all variables though to keep things simple but there are some additions to make the plugin more useful for VFX shots.
For example, you can animate the lightning in a looping “wiggle” or crawling motion in addition to just randomizing the whole shape. Also, the direction of the lightning’s branches is biased towards the target point.
Download Lightning_v1_1.Fuse here or head over to Vfxpedia.
Here’s a short clip of what it looks like:
