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Category: production
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ZAppLink – a plugin that allows you to seamlessly integrate your favorite image editing software — such as Adobe Photoshop — into your ZBrush workflow
While in ZBrush, call up your image editing package and use it to modify the active ZBrush document or tool, then go straight back into ZBrush.
ZAppLink can work on different saved points of view for your model. What you paint in your image editor is then projected to the model’s PolyPaint or texture for more creative freedom.
With ZAppLink you can combine ZBrush’s powerful capabilities with all the painting power of the PSD-capable 2D editor of your choice, making it easy to create stunning textures.
ZAppLink features
- Send your document view to the PSD file editor of your choice for texture creation and modification: Photoshop, Gimp and more!
- Projections in orthogonal or perspective mode.
- Multiple view support: With a single click, send your front, back, left, right, top, bottom and two custom views in dedicated layers to your 2D editor. When your painting is done, automatically reproject all the views back in ZBrush!
- Create character sheets based on your saved views with a single click.
- ZAppLink works with PolyPaint, Textures based on UV’s and canvas pixols.
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Mamba and MicroMamba – A free, open source general software package managers for any kind of software and all operating systems
https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user_guide/micromamba.html
https://mamba.readthedocs.io/en/latest/installation/micromamba-installation.html
https://micro.mamba.pm/api/micromamba/win-64/latest
https://prefix.dev/docs/mamba/overview
With mamba, it’s easy to set up
software environments. A software environment is simply a set of different libraries, applications and their dependencies. The power of environments is that they can co-exist: you can easily have an environment called py27 for Python 2.7 and one called py310 for Python 3.10, so that multiple of your projects with different requirements have their dedicated environments. This is similar to “containers” and images. However, mamba makes it easy to add, update or remove software from the environments.
To create a python environment under Windows:
micromamba create -n myenv python=3.10
This will create a myenv allocation under:
C:\Users\<USERNAME>\AppData\Roaming\mamba\envs\myenv
Once the environment is created, activate it with:
micromamba activate myenv
Or to execute a single command in this environment, use:
micromamba run -n myenv mycommandTo add a Windows shortcut to launching the micromamba environment:
cmd.exe /K micromamba activate myenv -
NVidia Physical AI – Collection of commercial-grade datasets for physical AI developers
https://huggingface.co/collections/nvidia/physical-ai-67c643edbb024053dcbcd6d8
🔹 15TB of high-quality, standardized synthetic data
🔹 320,000+ trajectories for robotics training
🔹 1,000+ OpenUSD assets, including a SimReady collection
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WSL – Windows Subsystem for Linux
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
The Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) is a feature of the Windows operating system that enables you to run a Linux file system, along with Linux command-line tools and GUI apps, directly on Windows, alongside your traditional Windows desktop and apps.
https://ubuntu.com/desktop/wsl
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Sony tests AI-powered Playstation characters
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/ai-playstation-characters-sony-ps5-chatgpt-b2712813.html
A demo video, first reported by The Verge, showed an AI version of the character Aloy from the Playstation game Horizon Forbidden West conversing through voice prompts during gameplay on the PS5 console.
The character’s facial expressions are also powered by Sony’s advanced AI software Mockingbird, while the speech artificially replicates the voice of the actor Ashly Burch.
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Walter Murch – “In the Blink of an Eye” – A perspective on cut editing
https://www.amazon.ca/Blink-Eye-Revised-2nd/dp/1879505622
Celebrated film editor Walter Murch’s vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with the most basic editing question — Why do cuts work? — Murch takes the reader on a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of cutting film. Along the way, he offers unique insights on such subjects as continuity and discontinuity in editing, dreaming, and reality; criteria for a good cut; the blink of the eye as an emotional cue; digital editing; and much more. In this second edition, Murch revises his popular first edition’s lengthy meditation on digital editing in light of technological changes. Francis Ford Coppola says about this book: “Nothing is as fascinating as spending hours listening to Walter’s theories of life, cinema and the countless tidbits of wisdom that he leaves behind like Hansel and Gretel’s trail of breadcrumbs…….”
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VES Cinematic Color – Motion-Picture Color Management
This paper presents an introduction to the color pipelines behind modern feature-film visual-effects and animation.
Authored by Jeremy Selan, and reviewed by the members of the VES Technology Committee including Rob Bredow, Dan Candela, Nick Cannon, Paul Debevec, Ray Feeney, Andy Hendrickson, Gautham Krishnamurti, Sam Richards, Jordan Soles, and Sebastian Sylwan.
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The VFX Reference Platform
The VFX Reference Platform is a set of tool and library versions to be used as a common target platform for building software for the VFX industry. Its purpose is to minimise incompatibilities between different software packages, ease the support burden for integrated pipelines and encourage further adoption of Linux by both studios and software vendors. The Reference Platform is updated annually by a group of software vendors in collaboration with the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee.
Each annual reference platform is designated by the calendar year in which major product releases should be targeting that particular reference.
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Deep Compositing in Nuke – a walkthrough
Depth Map: A depth map is a representation of the distance or depth information for each pixel in a scene. It is typically a two-dimensional array where each pixel contains a value that represents the distance from the camera to the corresponding point in the scene. The depth values are usually represented in metric units, such as meters. A depth map provides a continuous representation of the scene’s depth information.
For example, in Arnold this is achieved through a Z AOV, this collects depth of the shading points as seen from the camera.
(more…)
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_user_guide_ac_output_aovs_ac_aovs_html
https://help.autodesk.com/view/ARNOL/ENU/?guid=arnold_for_3ds_max_ax_aov_tutorials_ax_zdepth_aov_html -
Camera Metadata Toolkit (camdkit) for Virtual Production
https://github.com/SMPTE/ris-osvp-metadata-camdkit
Today
camdkitsupports mapping (or importing, if you will) of metadata from five popular digital cinema cameras into a canonical form; it also supports a mapping of the metadata defined in the F4 protocol used by tracking system components from Mo-Sys.
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OpenTrackIO – free and open-source protocol designed to improve interoperability in Virtual Production
OpenTrackIO defines the schema of JSON samples that contain a wide range of metadata about the device, its transform(s), associated camera and lens. The full schema is given below and can be downloaded here.
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Conda – an open source management system for installing multiple versions of software packages and their dependencies into a virtual environment
https://anaconda.org/anaconda/conda
https://docs.conda.io/projects/conda/en/latest/user-guide/getting-started.html
NOTE The company recently changed their TOS and this service now incurs into costs for teams above a threshold.
Use MicroMamba instead.
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QNTM – Developer Philosophy
- Avoid, at all costs, arriving at a scenario where the ground-up rewrite starts to look attractive
- Aim to be 90% done in 50% of the available time
- Automate good practice
- Think about pathological data
- There is usually a simpler way to write it
- Write code to be testable
- It is insufficient for code to be provably correct; it should be obviously, visibly, trivially correct
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Gaussian Splatting OFX plugin for Nuke
https://radiancefields.com/gaussian-splatting-in-nuke
https://aescripts.com/gaussian-splatting-for-nuke
Features
- Import .ply files in Nuke.
- Support Compressed .ply files from SuperSplat
- Crop with Spherical or Box shape.
- Crop with Y Plane.
- Combine up to 10 models in the scene.
- Colorize with Ramp using Spherical or Box shape.
- Reveal model with Opacity Ramp.
- Animate Splat Scale with Spherical or Box shape.
- Each model can be distorted with Noise.
- Render Depth Pass for 3D compose.
- Color correction for each model.
- Real-time with GPU
- Export scene
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Emmanuel Tsekleves – Writing Research Papers
Here’s the journey of crafting a compelling paper:
1️. ABSTRACT
This is your elevator pitch.
Give a methodology overview.
Paint the problem you’re solving.
Highlight key findings and their impact.
2️. INTRODUCTION
Start with what we know.
Set the stage for our current understanding.
Hook your reader with the relevance of your work.
3️. LITERATURE REVIEW
Identify what’s unknown.
Spot the gaps in current knowledge.
Your job in the next sections is to fill this gap.
4️. METHODOLOGY
What did you do?
Outline how you’ll fill that gap.
Be transparent about your approach.
Make it reproducible so others can follow.
5️. RESULTS
Let the data speak for itself.
Present your findings clearly.
Keep it concise and focused.
6️. DISCUSSION
Now, connect the dots.
Discuss implications and significance.
How do your findings bridge the knowledge gap?
7️. CONCLUSION
Wrap it up with future directions.
What does this mean for us moving forward?
Leave the reader with a call to action or reflection.
8️. REFERENCES
Acknowledge the giants whose shoulders you stand on.
A robust reference list shows the depth of your research.
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RawTherapee – a free, open source, cross-platform raw image and HDRi processing program
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Advanced Computer Vision with Python OpenCV and Mediapipe
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Generative AI Glossary / AI Dictionary / AI Terminology
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Photography basics: Exposure Value vs Photographic Exposure vs Il/Luminance vs Pixel luminance measurements
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NVidia – High-Fidelity 3D Mesh Generation at Scale with Meshtron
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PixelSham – Introduction to Python 2022
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Photography basics: Solid Angle measures
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Black Body color aka the Planckian Locus curve for white point eye perception
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