Tag: graphics

GIMP sucks a little bit less


while i wasn’t looking, the GIMP turned from a paint.exe replacement into a tool with bipolar issues: as a host to amazing image processing suites like Gmic while still having the worst UI. for a while, there was seashore on the mac to paper over the UI, but development has stalled in 2011.if you work around the bugs / put in the hours, you can get pretty decent image processing for free these days.

On Autoawesome

Also, in related news, FOMO now more acute.

But I do think there is something different, possibly something portentous, going on with AutoAwesome “Smile!”: a difference in quality and kind. What is a more fundamental externalized symbol of a subtle, human feeling than a smile? The AIs in the cloud helped me out, gave me a better memory to store and share, a digestion of reality into the memory I wish had been captured. But I’m reasonably sure that if this were a photo of Obama and Putin, smiling it up together, big, simultaneously happy buddies, at a Ukraine summit press conference. Then, I think algorithms automatically creating such symbolic moments would be a concern.

Building 3D with Ikea

When IKEA started to look at creating more than product images in 3D a few years ago, they already had a set look and feel for IKEA pictures. They wanted to keep the sense of reality and the feel of a “lived in” environment when moving over to digital workflow. They didn’t want their customers to see or even more importantly feel any difference. “We understand how important the knowledge of home furnishing is. How homes look, how homes feel, and so on. The experienced photographers at IKEA have been working with the interior designers on re-creating this feel for 15-20 years, some of them. We needed to translate that knowledge over to the 3D artists who were tech-savvy but in some cases coming directly from school. We needed them to understand the kind of feel we wanted the images to convey. It was very hard at the beginning.”

how the ikea catalog became mostly rendered, rather than photographed.

Movies Within Games

Creating a tool for designing well-sculpted, appealing protagonists who fit into the same consistent art style is surprisingly complex. However, the number of people out there who want to play an AAA computer game is massive – easily enough to justify the investment in a tool capable of churning out almost infinite numbers of beautifully sculpted, world-consistent protagonists. And so, suddenly, for an independent storyteller, the projected costs of any independent animated project plummet if they’re willing to use a “Machinima” approach.

It would be possible to tell almost any low to mid-fantasy story using Skyrim or World of Warcraft, with some minor modifications. The genre of science fiction, at least in its mainstream film-friendly incarnation, is similarly well-covered by EVE Online, Half-Life 2, Dead Space and 10s of other games. (It would take some thinking, but I could probably make a fair stab at adapting any of Charlie’s SF works using one, another, or a combination of game engines.) And of course, modern-day stories are thoroughly covered by everything from The Sims to Call of Duty.

CSI style super zoom

you need high-res (40 MP) cameras, but that will be standard soon enough. the next step is to build a Scene graph out of every picture, and derive additional information from reflections, shadows cast, etc

crimes in which the victims are photographed, such as hostage taking or child sex abuse, reflections in the eyes of the photographic subject could help to identify perpetrators. Images of people retrieved from cameras seized as evidence during criminal investigations could be used to piece together networks of associates or to link individuals to particular locations. By zooming in on high-resolution passport-style photographs, researchers were able to recover bystander images that could be identified accurately by observers, despite their low resolution.