CloudLigth: 3D Surface Relighting Nuke Plugin. ( open source ).

[hassanvfx]

READ THE TECHINCAL PAPER : CLOUDLIGHT

This weekend i put my hands on the Nuke Development Kit. I remember that i few time ago some friend show me an amazing video from vfxguidetv showing a mate from image engine , that was using a plugin developed around "district 9" to allow point-cloud 3D relighting on nuke.

http://media.fxguide.com/fxguidetv/fxguidetv-ep071.mov

I did a quick research and i found around some techniques using GL_POINTS to create the cloud points, but unable to render on scanline for the same reason.

As far as i can notice, scanline render works as a surface shader, and is unable to handle hardware like attributes like GL_POINTS .
So im not sure about how the guys of image engine did it, but i came with the idea of instancing little 3D pixels, or cubes instead of points.

It works very well, but quickly turns a bit hard to handle on non high-end computers. So i did some optimizations, like avoid handling non-alpha pixels, and allowing user to select wich faces of the pixel-cube ( aka:cloudlet ) want to have visible.

With this approach is posible to use standar lights and render through scanline.

For further development i need some of your support.

1. I did the plugin open source ( just remember to mention hassanvfx when you use it ) get in my github and fork on it :

https://github.com/randominteractive/cloudLight

2. I need another images to built an all-in-one cool shader around this :
(images im currently working on comes from http://www.pxfactory.eu/ )
so please ! share me :
A 2K EXR image ( preferable a character ) in:
color pass
point pass
specular pass
diffuse pass
reflection pass
bump pass


3. Please some LINUX and UNIX friend wants to compile the source on that platforms.
(or at least go to your Nuke6/Documentation folder and send me the "Makefile*" file in there to try to compile it on my mac )

Download:
Tecnical paper cloudLight
OSX VERSION + EXAMPLES

[boomji]

Put it up here as well.

http://www.nukepedia.com/

b

[pingking]

nice you can do this.

in nuke you have a native plugin called "position to points" which does the presentation of the WPP (world position pass) in the 3d view, i think its also renderable

if i rember correctly, the District 9 gyus did use something like this to represent the image in 3d space and used for relighting some more "traditional" methods. they used the representation in the 3d view to set the lights and referenced the positon of the light to there relight tools (or even the nuke build in "relight" node). i think its no need to do it in 3d view and through the scanline renderer.

but its a a great thing to sshow your skills as a TD!!

[hassanvfx]

Hi folks !

Well, i think that exporting the 3D camera and aligning with the 3D cloud, rendering new lighting stages could be useful as a separate pass.

Yesterday i worked updating the plugin, it some times don't plot the z chaneel, using the standar point pass, now its working fine.

If someone could share me a multipass frame to keep researching it could be very nice.

As a final update i added a function that allow to take a grayscale image, as a depth map. so you can do relighting using the 3D cloud version as you can see in this example. ( also it could work een better rendering in orthographic mode )





By the way, not the main intention, but you could achieve the FX in this video "The Time" from Black Eyed Peas.



Depending on your footage, you could use it in lumma mode as the example above, or if it doen't work, modelling the characters copying the animation and then rendering point passes and using cloudlight animating the Resolution slider. -> look.

The download link is still the same but with the updated plugins, examples and media.

Tecnical paper cloudLight
OSX VERSION v1.2 + EXAMPLES