The Cornell Box Syndrome

James Bowman recently released version 1.0 of its python bindings for OpenEXR.

Online docs are available here.

OpenImageIO is a library for reading and writing images, and a bunch of related classes, utilities, and applications. Main features include:

• Extremely simple but powerful ImageInput and ImageOutput APIs for reading and writing 2D images that is format agnostic — that is, a “client app” doesn’t need to know the details about any particular image file formats. Specific formats are implemented by DLL/DSO plugins.

• Format plugins for TIFF, JPEG/JFIF, OpenEXR, PNG, HDR/RGBE, and ICO formats. More coming! The plugins are really good at understanding all the strange corners of the image formats, and are very careful about preserving image metadata (including Exif, GPS, and IPTC data).

• An ImageCache class that transparently manages a cache so that it can access truly vast amounts of image data (thousands of image files totaling tens of GB) very efficiently using only a tiny amount (tens of megabytes at most) of runtime memory. Additionally, a TextureSystem class provides filtered MIP-map texture lookups, atop the nice caching behavior of ImageCache.

• Several image tools based on these classes, including iinfo (print detailed info about images), iconvert (convert among formats, data types, or modify metadata), idiff (compare images), igrep (search images for matching metadata). Because these tools are based on ImageInput/ImageOutput, they work with any image formats for which ImageIO plugins are available.

• A really nice image viewer, iv, also based on OpenImageIO classes (and so will work with any formats for which plugins are available).

• Supported on Linux and OS X, with Windows support coming (volunteers would be helpful!).

• All available under the BSD license, so you may modify it and use it in both open source or proprietary apps.

Why do you care ?

Well, the mastermind behind it is Larry Gritz (BMRT, Pixar, ExLuna, Gelato, and now Sony Imageworks). This guy knows a thing or two about APIs and performance.

I have been following the developper list for a few days, and it looks like this is going to be very helpful soon. I am especially interested in the texture cache…

Not only Siggraph, but also Eurographics and a lot of more specialized conferences.

I already found a number of interesting rendering-related papers. Nice !

http://kesen.huang.googlepages.com/

A really nice talk where you get to know how a handful of people got to invent everything we use…

I recently came accros an interesting site while researching different sorting methods.

Searching-Algorithms allows you to visually experience the performances of the most common algorithms. Depending on the size of your data set and the initial condition (random, nearly sorted, etc) you will be able to make better choices. Naturally, the site also contains descriptions of the algorithms.

Very neat use of Java.

James Bowman just released a first version of this potentially very useful thingy on the excamera site.
Check it out here.

pfstools is an open-source suite of command-line utilities to process hdr images.
Version 1.6 features a new mathlab binding, improved image readers/writers and a new opengl-based image viewer.
Also worth noting is qtpfsgui, a front-end to some of the pfstools.

My esteemed colleague Andrew Chapman started a new open-source initiative : cortex.
Not much to see yet, but wait and see…

Update: The project is now hosted here on Google Code.

pyshake is a new open-source project coming from Rising Sun Pictures.
It comes in two parts :

• A python plugin for shake.
• A shake module for python.

This sounds like a really interesting project as both shake and python are two critical components in a lot of production pipelines.
It is still in its infancy, but you can get the source from their subversion repository and compile it yourself. So far it only supports Linux, but OSX support should follow.

Also worth noting is the fact that more companies start to understand the value of open-source software…

Just in case you didn’t know, Pixar has been maintaining a public archive of siggraph / technical papers they published over the years.
It goes from the latest ones all the way to some seminal publications, like the cook-torrance shading model, or antialiased shadow maps. An occasion to remember that they invented pretty much all the stuff we use everyday…

Sometimes a bit sluggish, but very easy to use.
http://www.cppreference.com/

New domain, new site, new blog…. cool.