COLOR

  • Types of Film Lights and their efficiency – CRI, Color Temperature and Luminous Efficacy

    nofilmschool.com/types-of-film-lights

     

    “Not every light performs the same way. Lights and lighting are tricky to handle. You have to plan for every circumstance. But the good news is, lighting can be adjusted. Let’s look at different factors that affect lighting in every scene you shoot. ”

    Use CRI, Luminous Efficacy and color temperature controls to match your needs.

     

    Color Temperature
    Color temperature describes the “color” of white light by a light source radiated by a perfect black body at a given temperature measured in degrees Kelvin

     

    https://www.pixelsham.com/2019/10/18/color-temperature/

     

    CRI
    “The Color Rendering Index is a measurement of how faithfully a light source reveals the colors of whatever it illuminates, it describes the ability of a light source to reveal the color of an object, as compared to the color a natural light source would provide. The highest possible CRI is 100. A CRI of 100 generally refers to a perfect black body, like a tungsten light source or the sun. ”

     

    https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/what-is-color-rendering-index/

     

     

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

     

    Light source CCT (K) CRI
    Low-pressure sodium (LPS/SOX) 1800 −44
    Clear mercury-vapor 6410 17
    High-pressure sodium (HPS/SON) 2100 24
    Coated mercury-vapor 3600 49
    Halophosphate warm-white fluorescent 2940 51
    Halophosphate cool-white fluorescent 4230 64
    Tri-phosphor warm-white fluorescent 2940 73
    Halophosphate cool-daylight fluorescent 6430 76
    “White” SON 2700 82
    Standard LED Lamp 2700–5000 83
    Quartz metal halide 4200 85
    Tri-phosphor cool-white fluorescent 4080 89
    High-CRI LED lamp (blue LED) 2700–5000 95
    Ceramic discharge metal-halide lamp 5400 96
    Ultra-high-CRI LED lamp (violet LED) 2700–5000 99
    Incandescent/halogen bulb 3200 100

     

    Luminous Efficacy
    Luminous efficacy is a measure of how well a light source produces visible light, watts out versus watts in, measured in lumens per watt. In other words it is a measurement that indicates the ability of a light source to emit visible light using a given amount of power. It is a ratio of the visible energy to the power that goes into the bulb.

     

    FILM LIGHT TYPES

    https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/video-lighting-kits/?utm_campaign=Weekly_Newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_source=sendgrid&utm_term=production-lighting&utm_content=production-lighting

     

     

     

    Consumer light types

     

    https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Emission-spectra-of-different-light-sources-a-incandescent-tungsten-light-bulb-b_fig1_312320039

     

    http://dev.informationdisplay.org/IDArchive/2015/NovemberDecember/FrontlineTechnologyCandleLikeEmission.aspx

     

     

    Tungsten Lights
    Light interiors and match domestic places or office locations. Daylight.

    Advantages of Tungsten Lights
    Almost perfect color rendition
    Low cost
    Does not use mercury like CFLs (fluorescent) or mercury vapor lights
    Better color temperature than standard tungsten
    Longer life than a conventional incandescent
    Instant on to full brightness, no warm-up time, and it is dimmable

    Disadvantages of Tungsten Lights
    Extremely hot
    High power requirement
    The lamp is sensitive to oils and cannot be touched
    The bulb is capable of blowing and sending hot glass shards outward. A screen or layer of glass on the outside of the lamp can protect users.

     

     

    Hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide lights
    HMI’s are used when high output is required. They are also used to recreate sun shining through windows or to fake additional sun while shooting exteriors. HMIs can light huge areas at once.

    Advantages of HMI lights
    High light output
    Higher efficiency
    High color temperature

    Disadvantages of HMI lights:
    High cost
    High power requirement
    Dims only to about 50%
    the color temperature increases with dimming
    HMI bulbs will explode is dropped and release toxic chemicals

     

     

    Fluorescent
    Fluorescent film lighting is achieved by laying multiple tubes next to each other, combining as many as you want for the desired brightness. The good news is you can choose your bulbs to either be warm or cool depending on the scenario you’re shooting. You want to get these bulbs close to the subject because they’re not great at opening up spaces. Fluorescent lighting is used to light interiors and is more compact and cooler than tungsten or HMI lighting.

    Advantages of Fluorescent lights
    High efficiency
    Low power requirement
    Low cost
    Long lamp life
    Cool
    Capable of soft even lighting over a large area
    Lightweight

    Disadvantages of Fluorescent lights
    Flicker
    High CRI
    Domestic tubes have low CRI & poor color rendition.

     

     

    LED
    LED’s are more and more common on film sets. You can use batteries to power them. That makes them portable and sleek – no messy cabled needed. You can rig your own panels of LED lights to fit any space necessary as well. LED’s can also power Fresnel style lamp heads such as the Arri L-series.

    Advantages of LED light
    Soft, even lighting
    Pure light without UV-artifacts
    High efficiency
    Low power consumption, can be battery powered
    Excellent dimming by means of pulse width modulation control
    Long lifespan
    Environmentally friendly
    Insensitive to shock
    No risk of explosion

    Disadvantages of LED light
    High cost.
    LED’s are currently still expensive for their total light output

    (more…)

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  • Weta Digital – Manuka Raytracer and Gazebo GPU renderers – pipeline

    https://jo.dreggn.org/home/2018_manuka.pdf

     

    http://www.fxguide.com/featured/manuka-weta-digitals-new-renderer/

     

    The Manuka rendering architecture has been designed in the spirit of the classic reyes rendering architecture. In its core, reyes is based on stochastic rasterisation of micropolygons, facilitating depth of field, motion blur, high geometric complexity,and programmable shading.

     

    This is commonly achieved with Monte Carlo path tracing, using a paradigm often called shade-on-hit, in which the renderer alternates tracing rays with running shaders on the various ray hits. The shaders take the role of generating the inputs of the local material structure which is then used bypath sampling logic to evaluate contributions and to inform what further rays to cast through the scene.

     

    Over the years, however, the expectations have risen substantially when it comes to image quality. Computing pictures which are indistinguishable from real footage requires accurate simulation of light transport, which is most often performed using some variant of Monte Carlo path tracing. Unfortunately this paradigm requires random memory accesses to the whole scene and does not lend itself well to a rasterisation approach at all.

     

    Manuka is both a uni-directional and bidirectional path tracer and encompasses multiple importance sampling (MIS). Interestingly, and importantly for production character skin work, it is the first major production renderer to incorporate spectral MIS in the form of a new ‘Hero Spectral Sampling’ technique, which was recently published at Eurographics Symposium on Rendering 2014.

     

    Manuka propose a shade-before-hit paradigm in-stead and minimise I/O strain (and some memory costs) on the system, leveraging locality of reference by running pattern generation shaders before we execute light transport simulation by path sampling, “compressing” any bvh structure as needed, and as such also limiting duplication of source data.
    The difference with reyes is that instead of baking colors into the geometry like in Reyes, manuka bakes surface closures. This means that light transport is still calculated with path tracing, but all texture lookups etc. are done up-front and baked into the geometry.

     

    The main drawback with this method is that geometry has to be tessellated to its highest, stable topology before shading can be evaluated properly. As such, the high cost to first pixel. Even a basic 4 vertices square becomes a much more complex model with this approach.

     

     

    Manuka use the RenderMan Shading Language (rsl) for programmable shading [Pixar Animation Studios 2015], but we do not invoke rsl shaders when intersecting a ray with a surface (often called shade-on-hit). Instead, we pre-tessellate and pre-shade all the input geometry in the front end of the renderer.
    This way, we can efficiently order shading computations to sup-port near-optimal texture locality, vectorisation, and parallelism. This system avoids repeated evaluation of shaders at the same surface point, and presents a minimal amount of memory to be accessed during light transport time. An added benefit is that the acceleration structure for ray tracing (abounding volume hierarchy, bvh) is built once on the final tessellated geometry, which allows us to ray trace more efficiently than multi-level bvhs and avoids costly caching of on-demand tessellated micropolygons and the associated scheduling issues.

     

    For the shading reasons above, in terms of AOVs, the studio approach is to succeed at combining complex shading with ray paths in the render rather than pass a multi-pass render to compositing.

     

    For the Spectral Rendering component. The light transport stage is fully spectral, using a continuously sampled wavelength which is traced with each path and used to apply the spectral camera sensitivity of the sensor. This allows for faithfully support any degree of observer metamerism as the camera footage they are intended to match as well as complex materials which require wavelength dependent phenomena such as diffraction, dispersion, interference, iridescence, or chromatic extinction and Rayleigh scattering in participating media.

     

    As opposed to the original reyes paper, we use bilinear interpolation of these bsdf inputs later when evaluating bsdfs per pathv ertex during light transport4. This improves temporal stability of geometry which moves very slowly with respect to the pixel raster

     

    In terms of the pipeline, everything rendered at Weta was already completely interwoven with their deep data pipeline. Manuka very much was written with deep data in mind. Here, Manuka not so much extends the deep capabilities, rather it fully matches the already extremely complex and powerful setup Weta Digital already enjoy with RenderMan. For example, an ape in a scene can be selected, its ID is available and a NUKE artist can then paint in 3D say a hand and part of the way up the neutral posed ape.

     

    We called our system Manuka, as a respectful nod to reyes: we had heard a story froma former ILM employee about how reyes got its name from how fond the early Pixar people were of their lunches at Point Reyes, and decided to name our system after our surrounding natural environment, too. Manuka is a kind of tea tree very common in New Zealand which has very many very small leaves, in analogy to micropolygons ina tree structure for ray tracing. It also happens to be the case that Weta Digital’s main site is on Manuka Street.

     

     

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LIGHTING

  • Is a MacBeth Colour Rendition Chart the Safest Way to Calibrate a Camera?

    www.colour-science.org/posts/the-colorchecker-considered-mostly-harmless/

     

     

    “Unless you have all the relevant spectral measurements, a colour rendition chart should not be used to perform colour-correction of camera imagery but only for white balancing and relative exposure adjustments.”

     

    “Using a colour rendition chart for colour-correction might dramatically increase error if the scene light source spectrum is different from the illuminant used to compute the colour rendition chart’s reference values.”

     

    “other factors make using a colour rendition chart unsuitable for camera calibration:

    – Uncontrolled geometry of the colour rendition chart with the incident illumination and the camera.
    – Unknown sample reflectances and ageing as the colour of the samples vary with time.
    – Low samples count.
    – Camera noise and flare.
    – Etc…

     

    “Those issues are well understood in the VFX industry, and when receiving plates, we almost exclusively use colour rendition charts to white balance and perform relative exposure adjustments, i.e. plate neutralisation.”

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  • What’s the Difference Between Ray Casting, Ray Tracing, Path Tracing and Rasterization? Physical light tracing…

    RASTERIZATION
    Rasterisation (or rasterization)
    is the task of taking the information described in a vector graphics format OR the vertices of triangles making 3D shapes and converting them into a raster image (a series of pixels, dots or lines, which, when displayed together, create the image which was represented via shapes), or in other words “rasterizing” vectors or 3D models onto a 2D plane for display on a computer screen.

    For each triangle of a 3D shape, you project the corners of the triangle on the virtual screen with some math (projective geometry). Then you have the position of the 3 corners of the triangle on the pixel screen. Those 3 points have texture coordinates, so you know where in the texture are the 3 corners. The cost is proportional to the number of triangles, and is only a little bit affected by the screen resolution.

    In computer graphics, a raster graphics or bitmap image is a dot matrix data structure that represents a generally rectangular grid of pixels (points of color), viewable via a monitor, paper, or other display medium.

    With rasterization, objects on the screen are created from a mesh of virtual triangles, or polygons, that create 3D models of objects. A lot of information is associated with each vertex, including its position in space, as well as information about color, texture and its “normal,” which is used to determine the way the surface of an object is facing.

    Computers then convert the triangles of the 3D models into pixels, or dots, on a 2D screen. Each pixel can be assigned an initial color value from the data stored in the triangle vertices.

    Further pixel processing or “shading,” including changing pixel color based on how lights in the scene hit the pixel, and applying one or more textures to the pixel, combine to generate the final color applied to a pixel.

     

    The main advantage of rasterization is its speed. However, rasterization is simply the process of computing the mapping from scene geometry to pixels and does not prescribe a particular way to compute the color of those pixels. So it cannot take shading, especially the physical light, into account and it cannot promise to get a photorealistic output. That’s a big limitation of rasterization.

    There are also multiple problems:


    • If you have two triangles one is behind the other, you will draw twice all the pixels. you only keep the pixel from the triangle that is closer to you (Z-buffer), but you still do the work twice.



    • The borders of your triangles are jagged as it is hard to know if a pixel is in the triangle or out. You can do some smoothing on those, that is anti-aliasing.



    • You have to handle every triangles (including the ones behind you) and then see that they do not touch the screen at all. (we have techniques to mitigate this where we only look at triangles that are in the field of view)



    • Transparency is hard to handle (you can’t just do an average of the color of overlapping transparent triangles, you have to do it in the right order)


     

     

     

    RAY CASTING
    It is almost the exact reverse of rasterization: you start from the virtual screen instead of the vector or 3D shapes, and you project a ray, starting from each pixel of the screen, until it intersect with a triangle.

    The cost is directly correlated to the number of pixels in the screen and you need a really cheap way of finding the first triangle that intersect a ray. In the end, it is more expensive than rasterization but it will, by design, ignore the triangles that are out of the field of view.

    You can use it to continue after the first triangle it hit, to take a little bit of the color of the next one, etc… This is useful to handle the border of the triangle cleanly (less jagged) and to handle transparency correctly.

     

    RAYTRACING


    Same idea as ray casting except once you hit a triangle you reflect on it and go into a different direction. The number of reflection you allow is the “depth” of your ray tracing. The color of the pixel can be calculated, based off the light source and all the polygons it had to reflect off of to get to that screen pixel.

    The easiest way to think of ray tracing is to look around you, right now. The objects you’re seeing are illuminated by beams of light. Now turn that around and follow the path of those beams backwards from your eye to the objects that light interacts with. That’s ray tracing.

    Ray tracing is eye-oriented process that needs walking through each pixel looking for what object should be shown there, which is also can be described as a technique that follows a beam of light (in pixels) from a set point and simulates how it reacts when it encounters objects.

    Compared with rasterization, ray tracing is hard to be implemented in real time, since even one ray can be traced and processed without much trouble, but after one ray bounces off an object, it can turn into 10 rays, and those 10 can turn into 100, 1000…The increase is exponential, and the the calculation for all these rays will be time consuming.

    Historically, computer hardware hasn’t been fast enough to use these techniques in real time, such as in video games. Moviemakers can take as long as they like to render a single frame, so they do it offline in render farms. Video games have only a fraction of a second. As a result, most real-time graphics rely on the another technique called rasterization.

     

     

    PATH TRACING
    Path tracing can be used to solve more complex lighting situations.

    Path tracing is a type of ray tracing. When using path tracing for rendering, the rays only produce a single ray per bounce. The rays do not follow a defined line per bounce (to a light, for example), but rather shoot off in a random direction. The path tracing algorithm then takes a random sampling of all of the rays to create the final image. This results in sampling a variety of different types of lighting.

    When a ray hits a surface it doesn’t trace a path to every light source, instead it bounces the ray off the surface and keeps bouncing it until it hits a light source or exhausts some bounce limit.
    It then calculates the amount of light transferred all the way to the pixel, including any color information gathered from surfaces along the way.
    It then averages out the values calculated from all the paths that were traced into the scene to get the final pixel color value.

    It requires a ton of computing power and if you don’t send out enough rays per pixel or don’t trace the paths far enough into the scene then you end up with a very spotty image as many pixels fail to find any light sources from their rays. So when you increase the the samples per pixel, you can see the image quality becomes better and better.

    Ray tracing tends to be more efficient than path tracing. Basically, the render time of a ray tracer depends on the number of polygons in the scene. The more polygons you have, the longer it will take.
    Meanwhile, the rendering time of a path tracer can be indifferent to the number of polygons, but it is related to light situation: If you add a light, transparency, translucence, or other shader effects, the path tracer will slow down considerably.

     
     

     

    Sources:
    https://medium.com/@junyingw/future-of-gaming-rasterization-vs-ray-tracing-vs-path-tracing-32b334510f1f

     

     

    blogs.nvidia.com/blog/2018/03/19/whats-difference-between-ray-tracing-rasterization/

     

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rasterisation

     

     

    https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-difference-between-ray-tracing-and-path-tracing

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