We’ve been working on some new tools for automated segmentation, and more importantly, rationalization.

Matt shared with me a bit on the method he used in his thesis for finding the centroid of an image sample.   I made an attempt at producing such an effect solely with the tools built into Fusion, and managed a pretty nice result that’s not too shabby on the speed.  I suspect it will be sped up a lot when we make it into a fuse or plugin, but the effect is nice just as a comp, as it speaks visually to a concept that doesn’t sound like it would be visual at all.

In this first video, the green crosshair is finding the barycenter of the various circles, taking their size, density, and softness into account.

In the next video, the same thing is happening, this time on a particle system.  Ben thought the circle example was silly because circles are easy to solve for, and this method works per-pixel, so I wanted to show an example of that type of setup.

And here’s a comp to try out on your own.

Barycenter_Example_C’_B01

We’re releasing a simple tool today to help you reduce noise in ’09. We develop many 3D filtering tools at AT, but this one is a good candidate for release because it’s useful for video compositing.

Download Median In Time 1.0

MedianInTime performs a median filter over time for each pixel. The median filter kernel can be selected from sizes 3,5,7 or 9 (indicating the total number of frames in the sort). The tool calculates the median based either on the luminance or the RGB channels separately. This operation will generally reduce noise, but is also great for removing things that appear for just one or two frames such as rain drops, film artifacts, and subliminal advertising.

I rendered two examples to demonstrate the technique. The first video shows how objects moving quickly in relation to other content can be removed with the median filter. In this example the stars moving in this time lapse footage are removed (as well as the odd shooting star).

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So here’s my inaugural post…

SEM shaders, before and after

When I started working at Anatomical, we had a compositor (of sorts) working here who we would pass shots off to. Because a variety of reasons it wasn’t very effective, and so I pushed to have the process modified so that the people doing the 3D rendering were actively involved in the compositing workflow, and vice versa. Fast forward some years, and at this point, I comp nearly all of my own shots, and our “compositor” is pretty darn good with rendering from 3ds max.

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