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Make Your Renders Unnecessarily Complicated by Modeling a Film Camera in Blender [video]
- mozman 3y agoVery interesting but wow does this remind me of how little I know. I understood exactly zero of this.
- warent 3y agoThe only thing I knew was that when light goes through a pinhole in a box just right, for some reason it creates a large upside down projection on the opposite side haha Everything in this video is just a flurry of mad genius and gobbledygook jargon. Loved every second of it
- EA-3167 3y agoThe nice thing about pinhole cameras is that you can explain it all with simple geometry: https://www.alternativephotography.com/how-a-pinhole-camera-works/ https://www.alternativephotography.com/how-a-pinhole-camera-...
- rektide 3y agoWhy stop there? There was a great project that I keep forgetting the name of / link to... It simulated the chemical process of developing film. I keep wanting to dig it up & play with it. Such a neat effort.
- belugacat 3y agoPerhaps https://filmulator.org https://filmulator.org
- WastingMyTime89 3y agoThis project is simulating film. That’s the part about having three planes. There even is an explanation of tweaking each plane colour sensitivity.
- kmoser 3y agoTrue, but film is more than just three color planes. Different types of film capture and display colors differently. Grain is very different depending on the film sensitivity. And b/w uses different chemistry than color (silver vs dye), which also affects how an image is captured. Not to mention different emulsions. I'd like to see his virtual camera incorporate the ability to specify different types of films, not to mention lighting (daylight vs. indoor). Theoretically you could even zoom in enough on his virtual images that you could see the actual (simulated) grain, once you got to a high enough zoom level where there were more than a few pixels to render individual grains.
- rektide 3y agoI'd also (re-)add: film is just one part of a transmission process. Film has to be developed into something. And that's a chemical process, which is non-linear. Developer, the bath you put film in to activate the still blank but exposed reel, to turn the grains into actual "developed" photo, is a complex and local analog process. "Developer" is expended while developing film & becomes less effective at developing, creating a much stronger local contrast across pictures in a natural chemical way. There's a pretty complex Shannon Information Theory system going on here, which I'm not certain how to model. There's maybe a information->transmit->medium->receive->information model between the scene and the film. Then an entirely separate information->transmit->medium->recieve->information model between the undeveloped scene and what actually shows up when you "develop" the film. As you say, there are quite a variety of film types with different behaviors. https://github.com/t3mujin/t3mujinpack https://github.com/t3mujin/t3mujinpack is set of Darktable presets to emulate various types of film. But the behavior of the film is still only half of the process. As I said in my previous post, developing the film is a complex chemical process, with lots of local effects for different parts of the image. There's enormous power here. https://filmulator.org/ https://filmulator.org/ is an epic project, that, in my view, is incredibly applicable to almost all modern digital photography, that could help us so much, to move beyond raw data & help us appreciate scenes more naturally. It's not "correct" but my personal view is the aesthetic is much better, and it somewhat represents what the human eye does anyways, with it's incredible ability to comprehend & view dynamic range.
- jancsika 3y agoI misunderstood title as "Modeling a Film Camera inside a Blender that is Plugged In and Running." Somehow the actual video was more interesting than that. :) Still, I need a UML diagram to understand what is meant by "fake camera inside the real fake camera."
- NoahKAndrews 3y agoI think it was "the [Blender concept of 'camera'] inside the [camera I modeled in Blender]".
- lostdog 3y agoThis simulated camera projects the image onto an internal film plane. But blender cannot read an image off a plane directly, so you need to point a blender camera at the film plane to capture the film to the blender output.
- fermentation 3y agoThis was super interesting and I think the results are beautiful. I'm imagining how cool it would be for game with a photo mode to have a film simulation mode.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoYes!!! The best part about this is that it significantly reduces the urge I've had for years to do it myself.
- hughes 3y agoIt amplified mine and made me start imagining a world where cinematic CGI production integrates a process like this.
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoMore power to you!
- badcppdev 3y agoWere you also left with the worry that motion blur was being neglected??
- 111111IIIIIII 3y agoI think this is reasonable. If nothing else, it is the aspect least possible to imitate. If included, the best imitation would be cheap strobing. Anything better than that would require synthesis, which is something that even rendering engines require significant sacrifices to produce.
- Renaud 3y agoAmazing to be able to recreate a functioning camera on first principles. So much work but the result is totally worth it!
- crote 3y agoTo me, the best part is that most of it is just an emergent property of raytracing. Once you implement the core physics needed for any raytracer, things like lenses and aperture blades just work. I can't want for full-scene realtime raytracing to hit the consumer market.
- constantly 3y agoThis is where I’m losing track of what’s going on here. I generally understand the principles from at least the first half of the video, the pinhole camera and lenses and can imagine how it works in real life, but this is blender. It’s not real life. How does this work in BLENDER? Is it because the underlying physics models in Blender are so accurate one can recreate even these increasingly convoluted things in real life?
- _25im 3y agoThe physics of light is relatively simple. Blender wants to look photorealistic, so cycles (a branched path tracer, commonly known as a ray tracer) almost perfectly models how light works. That means these emergent properties just work. It wouldn't work under a rasteriser (Blender has one, called Eevee) as those operate using a complex series of approximations of reality that are more difficult to create but run far faster. But because Cycles (slower, but more realistic) operates by mimicking how light works this kind of thing is entirely possible.
- turnsout 3y agoAlso keep in mind that Cycles and most renderers use a simplified version of physics—rather than pathtrace all wavelengths, they use a simplified RGB model, which means certain optical properties behave differently. For instance, you don’t get the chromatic aberration with the simulated lens.
- corysama 3y agoIt’s… beautiful.
- zokier 3y agoCould have gotten proper glass dispersion effects, that now got dropped, if he had used luxcore instead of cycles. But that might be considered cheating :)
- CrampusDestrus 3y agoThe magic of digital goods is that you only need to produce them once. This guy put in all the work and now can just copy paste it wherever and have it always ready
- mrtksn 3y agoBrilliant, it's like running a VM inside in a VM. I love how the images have a character due to the lens and simulation characteristics, It should be possible to train a diffusion model which can generate these and make it obsolete though.
- Scene_Cast2 3y agoIf anyone wants to play with a (probably much simpler) blender model of a lens, here's a link: https://studio.blender.org/blog/camera-lenses-with-caustics/ https://studio.blender.org/blog/camera-lenses-with-caustics/ What I've personally always wondered is if you could make a liquid crystal or electrochromatic diaphragm to get perfectly circular bokeh (or maybe even smooth-edge STF bokeh) on demand. Would probably kill the T-stop value when full open due to less than perfect transmissivity though.. I also wonder what would happen if you could substitute an angle-limited piece of glass (kind of like a privacy screen - visible head-on but opaque from an angle) instead of the diaphragm.
- thenickdude 3y agoYou can get smooth-edged bokeh in a physical lens by inserting an apodisation filter inside: http://www.4photos.de/camera-diy/Apodization-Filter.html http://www.4photos.de/camera-diy/Apodization-Filter.html This is an aperture with fuzzy soft edges so that the bokeh fades out smoothly around the edges instead of being formed of hard circles. It makes the images look like they have Photoshop- or cellphone-faked bokeh, because you end up with effectively a Gaussian blur in the background.
- yieldcrv 3y agothe best thing about this is the presentation format one thing thats great about this content world is that people learn how to get to the point very quickly and efficiently! this could have easily been 1:40:03 watching some nerdy guys on a recorded google meet drone on and on about their accomplishment and I’m glad it wasnt!
- kmoser 3y agoIn that case you could just watch the video at 10x speed.
- dailyanchovy 3y agoThe amount of effort this must have taken is obscene. The creator made a physically accurate pin-hole camera and film inside Blender. I hadn't realised that this is even possible with existing off-the-shelf renderers, let alone open source software. What a blast to watch also. That is, the fact that the whole package (Blender + the author's work) emulates a physical camera inside an existing renderer is amazing to me.
- newaccount74 3y agoNot just a pin-hole camera. Later in the video he builds a multi-element lens too!
- anjc 3y agoBrilliant video
- plastic3169 3y agoReminds me of ”how to animate cube in Houdini” -https://youtu.be/NLiL0GLSvIw https://youtu.be/NLiL0GLSvIw
- antonjs 3y agoThis is so delightfully ridiculous. I wonder how many folks come across it looking for a nice beginner tutorial.
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- bloopernova 3y agoI used to wonder what Rendezvous With Rama's landscape would really look like if I were standing on its inner surface. Same with The Stone from Greg Bear's Eon. The renders I've seen so far have all looked too small, or everything is too clear. Maybe simulating something closer to the eye, or a 35mm camera, would give me what I've dreamed about. What do these places look like with clear skies, and then with clouds? 2 metres "up" from the inner surface, what does that really look like?
- NAR8789 3y agoRenders looking too small reminds me of this article: https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/02/28/how-does-perspective-work.html https://aaronhertzmann.com/2022/02/28/how-does-perspective-w... Maybe you're looking for something like "Natural Perspective"?
- bloopernova 3y agoWow! THANK YOU!! That's a really good summary of what I'm referring to.
- reaperman 3y agoThis video is one of the greatest works of art that I've seen in such a long time. Not to even mention all the engineering that went into it.
- Arch-TK 3y agoNone of the elements here are individually surprising, but I had never thought of this, and it most certainly looks like it took ages worth of research and work to get working. The most surprising was the pinhole camera but now that I've had some time to think about it, it makes sense why it should just work. Very sophisticated, very cool. Actually, the most surprising was that this was a fun video and not just a long form blog post as I first assumed it must be.
- supportengineer 3y agoI believe they did this for Wall-E also
- tnecniv 3y agoYeah it what film stock do you use?
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- 0tt049 3y agoI hate how good this is.