The port was fairly straightforward: Back when I was rewriting Normality for version 3.0 I’d designed a portable wrapper around the After Effects-specific parts of the code, so it would be easy to separate the graphics algorithms from the GUI side. My plug-ins also share many libraries with my 3D shaders, which were already designed to be cross-platform and 64-bit capable.
So this strict separation paid off for me as it made porting the software to the OpenFX format quite painless.

What's this OpenFX business?

The OpenFX (OFX) format is, as the name suggests, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins.
For me as a developer there are a number of technical benefits as the API is open, reasonably modern and far more accessible than the proprietary, aging and convoluted After Effects API my plug-ins were originally written for.

The really great thing for developers and users alike is that OFX is supported by a growing number of compositing applications including Nuke, Fusion, Shake and Toxic/Maya Compositor. (Notice a prominent compositor missing from that list…?)
Anyway, that means the next time a software developer decides to arbitrarily end support for your platform of choice, you can at least take your collection of plug-ins with you.

Normality for OpenFX?

Currently not, unfortunately… as much as I like the OFX API, it does have some limitations which make a faithful port of Normality impossible.

I do have a solution in mind but it’ll take some time to design and implement. Without revealing too much at this point, I’ve been considering freeing Normality from the shackles of a host application altogether for quite some time now…

Legend of the Guardians

“Guardians of Ga’hoole”… ahem… “Legend of the Guardians” is based on the series of novels by Kathryn Lasky and is directed by Zack Snyder of 300 and Watchmen fame.
I’m working on this film as a Look Dev TD mostly developing RenderMan shaders and other tools for use by our team of lighting artists.

Please enjoy the Legend of the Guardians trailer!
* All images copyright Warner Bros.

Generator is designed to run in cooperation with the free Normality re-lighting solution to create shading and lighting effects for text and arbitrary shapes without the need for pre-rendered 3D normal passes.

Usage

When using Normality to add lighting and shading effects to motion graphics, sometimes you’d wish there was a quick and easy way to create a normal map from text or shapes instead of relying on a complex 3D renderer… that’s where Generator comes in!
Just drop this plug-in on your text, shape or any other layer with a clean alpha channel and you will instantly see a normal map based on the layer’s shape. Generator is kept intentionally simple with very few options and hence little room for error — in fact, there is only a single parameter to adjust.

The automatically generated normal map can be used by Normality to add shading and lighting effects even without a pre-rendered 3D normal pass.
Note: Due to a bug in Normality, you must pre-compose your generated normal map before applying Normality.

Download Generator Beta 0.2

Download
Generator for After Effects is a free download for Microsoft Windows.

Download Generator

Download

Generator is a free After Effects plug-in for Microsoft Windows.

Donations

Devel­op­ing free soft­ware costs time and money. If you appre­ci­ate my work and use it in pro­duc­tion, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.

Donations

Developing free software costs time and money. If you appreciate my work and use it in production, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.

Being more of a summer-than-winter-guy, I am also happy to skip the harsh European winter this year and head straight back into a warm summer Down Under. Last Christmas I spent a couple of great weeks touring Australia and I cannot think of a better place to be.

Sunset near Mildura, Victoria

What this means...

For Studio Lampion

Not much, really. In fact my partners will continue to run the studio I helped build up without me. They are very supportive of my decision and I’m leaving on amicable terms.

For my plug-ins and shaders

I will probably have less time to spend working on them than I did in the past months. Expect updates and new releases from me to slow down.

For myself

Personally, I am super-happy to be moving to Australia along with my girl! Our visas have already been approved and flights are booked… nothing can stop us now :)

The one remaining bug I’ve come across is the broken Reinhard ’05 mapping — please let me know if you find anything else broken or behaving unexpected!

Download the newest version of Atlas.

Grab the latest version!

This release is Windows only for now… however, the full source code is included, which means that anyone with more time on their hands than me can feel free to compile a Mac version. I didn’t try it myself, but there’s no reason why it shouldn’t run on Mac OS X.

To compile the code you will need to download and link with the After Effects SDK. For legal reasons I unfortunately cannot distribute these files with Atlas. The required pfstmo libraries are included with the download, however.

The code is not yet well documented, but the plug-in itself is just about as simple as it gets, so you should find your way around easily if you’re familiar with the SDK.

Hints on usage

If you’re not familiar with the concept of tone mapping, Wikipedia has a good introduction that should give you an idea of the use and functionality of this versatile technique.
Please note that for obvious reasons the effect is most useful in 32-bit color mode with 32-bit source images. It will work in lower modes but the resulting effect might not be what you expect.

Please go ahead and download Atlas and then let me know in the comments if you come across any bugs or have other suggestions!

Tone Mapping

So what’s tone mapping you ask? According to Wikipedia:

Tone mapping is a technique used in image processing and computer graphics to map a set of colours to another; often to approximate the appearance of high dynamic range images in media with a more limited dynamic range.

The technique is particularly useful if you have high dynamic range images, such as rendered CG-imagery in floating point color-depth (OpenEXR) or HDR photographs, and you want to bring their broad spectrum into a range more suitable for display on a computer monitor or television screen.

There exist numerous tone mapping operators that approach this problem from different angles and achieve varying results.

Supported tone mapping operators
Drago
Ashikhmin
Reinhard ’02
Reinhard ’05
Mantiuk
Durand
Pattanaik
Fattal

Lately, the effect has also become something of a fad in photographer’s circles, as a quick Flickr Search will show.
Still tone mapping is a very versatile technique that can be used for photorealistic as well as artistic effects.

Download Atlas 0.3 (Beta)

Download
Sorry, Windows only for now. The included source code may be used to compile a release for Mac OS X by someone with more time on their hands than me.
If you want to play with the code you will also need to install the After Effects SDK, which I cannot include for legal reasons.

Usage Notes

Atlas is designed to work exclusively in 32-bit floating point color-space. Applying Atlas in 8-bit or 16-bit projects will yield unpredictable and/or possibly unbelievably gross and ugly results. Don’t say I didn’t warn you…

Donations

Developing free software costs time and money. If you appreciate my work and use it in production, please donate.
I will be more inclined to release cool stuff in the future if I see that my work is appreciated.

So far only 13 (!) of the roughly 55.000 downloaders have contributed to say thanks and to support continued development of the software. Alas, that’s less than 0.1% of all downloaders.
Now I never expected to get rich by releasing a donationware After Effects plug-in… but it would definitely be nice to at least be able to offset my hosting costs.

Maintaining and supporting free software costs time and money that I am no longer able or willing to put in at this rate.

I simply refuse to waste any more time dealing with Microsoft’s issues. They broke it, they can fix it. minning.de looks fine in all modern browsers and that’s good enough as far as I’m concerned.
So people tell me to give IE8 a try because it’s apparently much improved — no. I don’t care. I’ve had enough of Microsoft’s failure to comply with 10-year-old standards and I’m not interested in whether they have finally caught up with the rest of the pack.

Same thing with Windows 7. After the hideous, bloated mess that is Vista, I am not giving a Microsoft OS another chance. They clearly have other priorities than what I am looking for in an operating system.
The main thing that bothered me about Vista was that it looked like they let a bunch of amateur WindowBlinds themers run wild with the interface. How am I supposed to perform accurate color corrections when I’m blinded by the flashy GUI? I quite intentionally didn’t set up my workplace to be a translucent, turquoise Fisher-Price environment and I’d prefer my computer desktop to reflect that choice. Just stay out of my way, OS!

In the eternal words of Weird Al Yankovic: “Poke out my eyes, man!”

Apparently Microsoft has a vastly different opinion there as they somehow inexplicably managed to make the interface look even more garish and tacky in Windows 7. Words fail me.

Now I’m definitely not a huge Apple fan — in fact the only time I turn on my Mac is to compile software. But I must hand it to them: At least their stuff looks professional and not like it’s aiming to woo preschoolers.

Now, after subtracting the thousands of “illegitimate” downloads during an attack on my site in September, I can proudly announce that Normality has officially reached 50.000 downloads!

Normality Downloads by OS

The chart shows  the distribution between the Windows and OS X versions, leaving the Mac all the way down at just 10%.

Normality Downloads by Region

And, because I’m a fiend for statistics, here’s the breakdown by region. A couple of surprises there in my opinion!

Anyway, this means there are (potentially) 50.000 users of my plug-in out there! I would definitely like to hear from you all about your experiences with the software and the cool projects you are using it on.

“Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign”

Instead of starting from scratch I built upon the existing design’s code and look, taking the good advice from A List Apart about realigning instead of redesigning; the foundation was quite solid, after all.

If you’ve visited my site before, you should feel right at home:

• The main navigation remains the same with an extra bit of polish.
• All links should still work.
• I’ve implemented a proper caching mechanism that should not only speed up page loads significantly, but will also prevent the site from stalling whenever Video Copilot links here.
• The cool AJAX page loading turned out to be a not so great idea overall, so that’s gone.
• Comments were a bit of an afterthought in the last iteration… this time they are fully integrated into the site’s concept.

Please bear with me while I iron out the last issues and enjoy the refined minning.de!

Early concept art of the magnificient bell tower

Brainstorming for story concepts we came up with more than half a dozen plots in just as many different settings but soon realized they all had one thing in common: They were too complex! So we took a step back and critically analyzed all the concepts we had come up with and whether there was anything that could be simplified so much as to be realistic within our modest means.
After much back and forth we eventually decided to go with the medieval theme as this undertaking seemed reasonable after eliminating any dispensable characters, settings and subplots. Moreover, we felt a strong connection to the main character and had a vivid image in our minds of what the resulting film should look like. We were aiming to portray a painterly, traditional cartoon feel and wanted to avoid the somewhat sterile look displayed by many modern 3D productions.
Armed with a set of proprietary tools that would help us in achieving this goal and years of production experience in all areas of 2D and 3D film-making, we finally got underway with our short film A Night at the Cathedral.

At this point in the process we had concepts for the characters, the setting and a basic plot, which boiled down to “Our birdbrained protagonist Belze is on a quest to steal the golden statue of the Holy Mazioles from a medieval cathedral and, of course, fails miserably.“

We traveled to Cologne Cathedral to gather reference photos and inspiration

With the story’s plot taking shape we decided to get a feel for the film’s atmosphere and surroundings and did a lot of research on medieval art and history. Unfortunately, only few medieval structures remain in our town of Berlin, so we took some time to travel to historic and inspiring places such as the Cologne Cathedral, Notre Dame de Paris, Lyon and to visit castles on the Rhine river. There we took hundreds of reference photos, many of which we later reused as textures or details in our background mattes.

Concept Art of Clara playing the organ

The various impressions gathered during these research trips were incorporated into our concept art, which we drew, painted, modeled and rendered in 3D to visualize our ideas and to help define the look of the film.
Around the same time we started sketching out ideas for the protagonist Belze, our evil but not exactly brilliant thief. Belze represents the archetype of the comedic villain: He is sinister and wicked but yet clumsy and totally useless. In designing this character we were inspired by classic Disney villains and also took some cues from the Monkey Island series.
His antagonist is Clara, a young lady playing the organ during the night our story unfolds. She is a somewhat one-dimensional plot-device in that she doesn’t have any motives of her own and is only there to react to whatever Belze is up to.

Storyboard: Belze fleeing from the Cathedral

日本語ページ

A user with the IP address 208.95.112.198 found it necessary or fun to download Normality 44.712 times in one night… that’s simply unacceptable and unfortunately actions had to be taken to prevent continued abuse of my limited resources.

I apologize for the inconvenience and hope to reinstate downloads once the traffic has returned to a more reasonable level.

Most of the blend modes are pretty straight-forward to implement, but one of my favorites has so far eluded me as the information published by various sources never seemed quite right.

After spending an evening trying to match my image blending code to various test-scenarios I set up in After Effects, I think I’ve nailed it!
For anyone interested, here’s my version of the Photoshop Soft Light blend mode that proved to be 99% accurate in my tests:

// Not optimized!
Color cx = ((16 * ColorB - 12) * ColorB + 4);
if (ColorA <= 0.5 )
ColorSoft = ColorB - (1 - 2 * ColorA) * ColorB * (1 - ColorB);
else if (ColorA > 0.5 && cx <= 0.25)
ColorSoft = ColorB + (2 * ColorA - 1) * ((cx * ColorB) - ColorB);
else
ColorSoft = ColorB + (2 * ColorA - 1) * (sqrt(ColorB) - ColorB);

I hope this helps… figuring it out was quite a pain as there are many different implementations floating around the net and most of them aren’t even close to Photoshop’s original Soft Blend mode.

The updated blend modes and a couple of other fixes will be released in the upcoming Normality 3.11 — by the way, I’m not following the Windows versioning scheme… ^_~

1. Normality is not a copy of ZBornToy

   Far from it. While both plug-ins were developed at roughly the same time without knowledge of each other, the first official release of Normality was in fact published more than half a year before ZBornToy hit the scene in October 2006.

   And whereas the features may seem similar at a cursory glance, the plug-ins also serve quite different purposes and address other production needs.

2. Normality is not a free replacement for Youveelizer

   I’m not sure how this one started. Anyone taking two minutes to read the feature-lists will realize that not only do Normality and Youveelizer not do the same thing, their features don’t even overlap.

   Yes, they are both plug-ins for Adobe After Effects, but that’s where the similarity ends. (Technically Youveelizer isn’t even a plug-in: It’s a Pixel Bender script, but that may be arguing semantics.)

   Anyway, Youveelizer is designed to apply textures or decals to pre-rendered objects and I highly recommend it if that’s what you are looking to do. Normality on the other hand is used to shade and light pre-rendered objects within After Effects and does not deal with textures.
   Please don’t get the two mixed-up, they’re totally different concepts.

3. Normality can’t replace a 3D renderer…

   … and it’s not designed to, either. But that doesn’t make it useless! After making yourself familiar with Normality you can simply choose on a shot-by-shot basis whether the trade-off between quality and speed that the plug-in offers is Good Enough™ or whether your shot calls for all-out GI, FG, super-sampled ray-tracing with subsurface scattered 4K displacement maps at the cost of potentially waiting hours just to see a little preview that does not reflect the final render in any shape or form. With Normality, what you see is what you get, and that’s a plus to many users, even if it means dealing with some limitations.

   Studio Lampion’s animated short film A Night at the Cathedral was shaded entirely in Normality, showing that it is in fact a practical solution if the look you’re aiming for allows for it and you understand what you can get away with and what is better left to a true 3D renderer.

   In the end Normality is just a tool — a free one at that. Use it if you feel it’s suited for the task at hand, just don’t expect it to work miracles.

And what’s best… it comes pretty much for free!

Screen-space color bouncing (right)

The overhead is somewhere around 10–20%, which is totally acceptable when you consider that true 3D global illumination effects generally take much, much longer to render.

Having access to screen-space ambient occlusion plus color bouncing right within After Effects will certainly make for some very interesting effects and opens a whole new world of possibilities!

It usually goes a little something like this:

BatMan12: “I can haz celulights and all your shaders?”

To which I briefly but politely reply: “Celulight is not publicly available.”

BatMan12: “But iz on intarwebs, give it to me!”

(Yes, apparently many people on the internet in fact do type in lolcat.)

Now I do understand the general excitement and the craving for the software — that’s why I programmed it in the first place.
But when I browse the web and come across something interesting for which there appears to be no download link, my first thought isn’t: “Give it to me anyway.”

Apparently many people have the expectation that if it’s on the internet, they can have it — FOR FREEEE!!1!. Maybe the abundance of open source and free software has spoiled people into this pattern of thought.

So do they expect the same when an artist posts his work to his personal portfolio? Do they call up ILM and tell them to hand over their new proprietary relighting tool? I don’t know, but I’m starting to assume the answer is: Yes.

So why isn’t all of my software publicly available, you ask? Well, a couple of reasons for that, really:

• Most of my tools are developed and used in our animation studio, making it proprietary software that I simply can’t release on legal grounds.
• Other pieces of software, some shaders in particular, aren’t of release quality: That is to say they work fine for me and anyone I’ve given a brief introduction, but the average user would have a hard time producing anything worthwhile with them due to a lack of refinement and documentation rightfully expected from release software.
• The occasional piece I would in fact very much like to offer for purchase to the general public, but for personal reasons at this point in time I just cannot make it happen. Not that I believe BatMan12 would be particularly interested in purchasing any of my stuff anyway…

Now I’m happy to share Normality, a production-quality tool, with the CG community and I help out wherever I can… but seriously people, outright demanding my other stuff isn’t going to compel me to release anything at all in the future.

It’s really not that hard and I don’t think it’s just a flaw in my site’s design: Unless there is a prominent download link displayed right next to the software, it simply is not publicly available..

Now who wants to bet this rant won’t change a thing…?