- Minimal Color Grading Tools As you have probably noticed, there are a lot of color correction algorithms out there. It can be a bit daunting to figure out the best combination of tools to use on a given project. I’ve personally gone through many iterations of trying different things in different orders and over time I’ve settled on a few key features.
- Filmic Tonemapping with Piecewise Power Curves It’s been a long while since the original posts on Filmic Tonemapping, and it is time for an update. For newcomers, the basic premise of Filmic Tonemapping is to simulate the tone curve of film in our images, with a shoulder and a toe. In the image above, the left side is a pure linear tonemap and the right side uses a filmic curve.
- Cheating Physically Based Light Intensity (IRL) One question that I struggle with in PBR is: How physically accurate should we be? In general, I’m a PBR beliver in that we should try to model CG surfaces to behave like real surfaces and we should try to model lights to act like real lights. But what about the times when an artist comes to you asking to do something that is not physically realistic in order to make it look artistically better? As luck would have it, I got a chance to look at film set for a big budget TV show recently. Or rather, the film set came to me.
- A new year, a new server. Happy new year to everyone. As you might have noticed, I’ve gotten an early start on my new year’s resolution of overhauling my web page.
- A perfect display needs 4x the resolution of Visual Acuity (maybe) In discussing what a “perfect” display would be, the common view could be said like this:
- Visual Acuity is not "What the eye can see" What resolution does a display need to have before you can not perceive aliasing? The discussion usually goes something like this:
- The Uncanny Valley as FFA Rejection Why does the Uncanny Valley exist? Why is it so difficult to cross? Why is it that all the tricks we use for making CG things like rocks, houses, and cars do not work for faces? The usual answer is something along the lines of “Faces are hard” or “As human being we are experts at understanding faces”. That just tells us the symptom, not the cause. What is the real, physiological reason why the Uncanny Valley exists?
- Combined Approximation of Fresnel/Visibility One of the problems that has been bothering me for several years is that it seems like there should be a way to speed up the Fresnel and Visibility functions by combining them together. In particular, Schlick-Fresnel and the Schlick-Smith Visibility term have a similar shape so I’ve done some experiments to combine them together. The results are above with the reference version on the left and the approximation on the right.
- The Uncanny Valley should be respected, not feared. The Uncanny Valley is something that we have all dealt with and/or thought about in computer graphics. It has become a sort of bogeyman used to scare CG artists and graphics programmers in the same way that monsters under the bed scare little children. “Don’t do that or the Uncanny Valley will get you!!!!” Like all things that we are irrationally scared of, we can put that fear to ease by really analyzing what it is, where we are, and what we can do about it. The TL/DR version of this post: Solving the Uncanny Valley will not be easy, but we shouldn’t be scared of trying.
- Specular GI Reference Recently, I was sitting in an office and I noticed some really cool light shafts that seemed to be dancing on the ceiling. Here’s a picture.
