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I loved Shake so much when I was an undergraduate that I attempted a very-over-ambitious node driven digital compositor as my senior capstone project. I learned

I loved Shake so much when I was an undergraduate that I attempted a very-over-ambitious node driven digital compositor as my senior capstone project. I learned Python and Qt just so I could build its GUI (my first non-trivial GUI program). It was able to perform basic compositing operations on streams of TIFF images, including 16 bit depth TIFF which I was quite proud of at the time. All the heavy processing logic was written with C extensions. When I went to graduate school I got a better offer for doing scientific computing work instead of graphics, so that was the last major graphics project I attempted. It was also the most complex native GUI I ever worked on, because by the time I was out of school "Web 2.0" was in full bloom. Thanks for dredging up very happy memories of when I was still trying to combine computers and creative expression.

turnsout 2y ago
So awesome! I had a similar reaction to Shake—I first created an ANSI C command-line based compositor that read in and interpreted scripts. A year or so later I abandoned it in favor of a Mac app with a node-based GUI that compiled down to GPU instructions that I brought to market with a partner. Also just want to highlight Ron's book The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, which is valuable to this day!
- philipkglass 2y ago
  I bought The Art and Science of Digital Compositing at Powell's Technical Books in Portland a year before I started my capstone project. It and Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice 2nd Edition in C were my main references. There was much less open source code to look at back then, and it wasn't as easily searchable either. Working on graphics, I could usually (though not always) resolve an ambiguous directive by trying different approaches and looking at the output. Does the result look like colored snow? Does the whole image now have a magenta tint? I probably need to try a different interpretation (or just fix my bug).

turnsout 2y ago

So awesome! I had a similar reaction to Shake—I first created an ANSI C command-line based compositor that read in and interpreted scripts. A year or so later I abandoned it in favor of a Mac app with a node-based GUI that compiled down to GPU instructions that I brought to market with a partner. Also just want to highlight Ron's book The Art and Science of Digital Compositing, which is valuable to this day!

philipkglass 2y ago
I bought The Art and Science of Digital Compositing at Powell's Technical Books in Portland a year before I started my capstone project. It and Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice 2nd Edition in C were my main references. There was much less open source code to look at back then, and it wasn't as easily searchable either. Working on graphics, I could usually (though not always) resolve an ambiguous directive by trying different approaches and looking at the output. Does the result look like colored snow? Does the whole image now have a magenta tint? I probably need to try a different interpretation (or just fix my bug).