Easy way to Time Ramp in Fusion Using Excel Data Sheet

It is a tedious task for Conformist to go to each and every frame and animate the time stretcher for the case of time ramping the frames. But we could cut down the time taken for this monotonous work by creating two template files. Below are the steps to do this.

Step 1 :

Copy the below script and paste it in a text editor ( I prefer SciTE, because notepad will raise indentation issues). Save this as a text file as this will be used as a template file. You could also copy the time stretcher node and paste it in text editor to get the same script.

{

Tools = ordered() {

TimeStretcher1 = TimeStretcher {

CtrlWZoom = false,

Inputs = {

SourceTime = Input {

SourceOp = "TimeStretcher1SourceTime",

Source = "Value",

},

},

ViewInfo = OperatorInfo { Pos = { 506, 70 } },

},

TimeStretcher1SourceTime = BezierSpline {

SplineColor = { Red = 233, Green = 217, Blue = 243 },

NameSet = true,

KeyFrames = {

[] = {  }

}

}

},

}

Step 2:

Now open a data sheet and make another template like in the picture. You could make a thousand lines of it as per your requirement.

Step 3:

Now that both the steps 1 and 2 are non repeatable, you could save those as templates. And now the step is to put the ramped values in between the curly braces in the template of step 2.

Step 4:

Copy and paste the values to the script as shown in the image.

Now copy the entire script and paste into fusion workspace. Once you create the template, steps 3 and 4 are the only two steps to get the things done.

Reset Distortion Button in 3DEqualizer

For all the lazy people like me who bother to reset the lens distortion manually, here is the button which can reset it all for you in a click. https://www.3dequalizer.com/?site=scriptdb&id=201

Convert .obj to .xyz manually without using any third-party software

             The reason I am stressing about .xyz format is that PFTrack supports .xyz, .pts, .txt, .xyb file formats to import lidar data in the survey solver node. 3DEqualizer can import .obj, .xyz, .pts, .ptx file formats. Here, PFTrack is lagging in importing .obj file format which is supported by most of the 3D applications. So, here comes a situation where you have an .obj file and want to use it for survey in PFTrack, the easiest solution for this is to download MeshLab or some other 3D processing software to convert an .obj file to .xyz file format. Solved it, but what if we come across an even worse situation where you don't have access to internet connection(which is kind of rare situation) to download MeshLab, the solution here is we could manually convert it. 

             There is a closer relation in syntax of both .obj and .xyz file formats. The .obj file contains vertex, vertex normals and faces data stored in it with respect to the world space. Coming to .xyz file format, it stores vertex or point position. Following image depicts the difference in syntax between the two formats.

       Now we got the solution, open the .obj file in a notepad, delete all the lines leaving back the lines with vertex position and we are done. No, no, no....this is not yet over, we have to remove the letter 'v' in front of the position or vertex values, and yes we could manually remove those line by line but it would eat a lot of time when it comes to large data(this time you could better opt for an internet connection).

     Now the actual solution for this is to edit the file using wordpad because notepad doesn't take the indentation of the line into account. Get rid of the unwanted vn, f and # lines. Replace the letter 'v' with nothing, using the find and replace option in wordpad. But this even doesn't work because we can find that there is a space between letter 'v' and the position value, so, when we replace the letter 'v' with null value, each line will start with a space. So, we need to make sure that we are replacing that space too. 

Now, replace the letter and space 'v ' with nothing or null. In this way, we could get a clean file with only position values. Save the file with .xyz extension and import in PFTrack for testing. In PFTrack, make sure you switch the static render proxy and dynamic render proxy to None or 1/2 for point visibility when there are only few points and also choose the correct coordinate system.

Export Blackmagic Fusion Lens Distortion Node...

Ever since I was introduced to 3DEqualizer I have been learning python programming language. It is a great application for a visual effects artist. Compared to other tracking software it is very user friendly and I was fascinated about writing a script like all the other programmers out there. I started to learn the basics of python programming and tried to write some small logical programs to get a kick-start.

Now that I can moderately write a python script in a procedural approach and here comes my first script which I believe can make some sense. Here is the link to the ____ SCRIPT  _____which can export Lens Distortion data from 3DEqualizer to Blackmagic Fusion 8. This script can export animated lens distortion data into a setting file. Now we could just drag and drop the script into fusion workspace to access it. This script totally got 1125 lines of code and I believe this could be reduced to much less value with object oriented programming approach which I have been on my pace of learning. I would love to hear suggestions, improvements and any bugs regarding the script. Get to me at vinodh.vfxartist@gmail.com and I believe this tool saves you some time in your workflow.