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An Open Source Framework For Visual Effects Software Development

Cortex is an open source framework for visual effects software development. It provides tools for lighting and rendering workflows, crowd simulation, fur and hair generation, and baking lightmaps. A key feature is that code can be written once using Cortex's native data types and then deployed across applications like Maya, Nuke, Houdini, and RenderMan without changes. Cortex has been successfully used in production at several studios.

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Rebecca Taylor
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78 views

An Open Source Framework For Visual Effects Software Development

Cortex is an open source framework for visual effects software development. It provides tools for lighting and rendering workflows, crowd simulation, fur and hair generation, and baking lightmaps. A key feature is that code can be written once using Cortex's native data types and then deployed across applications like Maya, Nuke, Houdini, and RenderMan without changes. Cortex has been successfully used in production at several studios.

Uploaded by

Rebecca Taylor
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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An Open Source Framework For Visual Effects Software Development

John Haddon Image Engine Carsten Kolve Dr D Studios Roberto Hradec Radical

3
3.1

Case Studies
Lighting and Rendering

In Image Engines lighting pipeline all geometry is represented as Cortex procedurals. These pull in cached models and animation, and combine them with layered shaders and other appearance modiers. Look development consists of building such procedurals dynamically from an extensible toolbox of components. Visualisation in Maya is achieved by evaluating procedurals through an OpenGL translation layer and rendering with 3delight uses an equivalent RenderMan layer. Recent developments allow procedural hosting in Nuke, with rendering via 3delight embedded in a custom node.

Abstract
3.2
Cortex [1] is an open source framework applicable to a broad gamut of software development for visual effects. It can be distinguished from projects such as Alembic [2] and GTO [3] in that it provides a cross-application framework for computation and rendering in addition to le IO. Cortex has undergone continuous development at Image Engine since 2006, forming the foundation for work on feature lms such as District 9 and Twilight Eclipse. It has recently seen further use and development at a number of other studios.

Crowd Simulation

Basic Functionality

Dr D Studios are using Cortex for crowd layout, simulation, visualisation and rendering. Cortex extensions allow large volumes of motion capture to be represented and cached efciently. Layouts are generated procedurally using scripted ops hosted in Maya, with Cortex features such as mesh evaluation and fast neighbour queries helping with terrain matching, clumping and collision detection. Visualisation is achieved using procedurals hosted in Houdini, and these also perform geometry instancing and skinning for rendering with 3delight. The geometry can also be output at runtime within Houdini to drive environment interaction effects.

Cortex builds upon the popular Imath and Boost C++ libraries, adding higher level data types such as curves, meshes and images, along with a suite of algorithms for operating on those types. It provides support for reading and writing many common graphics le formats and provides native formats for object serialisation and random access caching. Additionally, conversions are provided between Cortex types and the 3rd party APIs for Maya, Nuke, Houdini, RenderMan and OpenGL. Most functionality is implemented in C++ for speed, but also made available in Python via a thin layer of bindings. This is of particular relevance to TDs, and allows for the rapid development and deployment often necessitated by real world production scenarios.

3.3

Fur and Hair

Image Engines fur and hair system builds directly upon the Cortex C++ libraries for best performance. Seeds are generated on meshes using high quality point distributions and curves are then variously grown, groomed, clumped, frizzed and mutated using algorithms sitting atop Cortexs geometry and image processing routines. This system is multithreaded and happily processes, displays and renders hairs on the order of tens of millions for multiple creatures.

3.4

Baking Lightmaps

Write Once, Deploy Anywhere

A key feature of Cortex is that it allows code to be written once using native types, and then deployed in multiple 3rd party applications without change. Such code comes in two principal forms - ops, which calculate a result given some inputs, and procedurals, which describe geometry and shading through a renderer agnostic interface. In both cases inputs are described as parameters, which dene a required type (e.g. an integer), a set of additional constraints (e.g. an allowable range) and further information such as user help and UI hints. Different host layers then map these inputs to a form appropriate for a given application. A simple command line host maps inputs to command arguments and Maya, Nuke and Houdini hosts map them to attributes on native nodes, performing automatic conversion between the host and Cortex data types. This makes ops and procedurals usable in many different environments.
e-mail:

Cortex is used at Radical to perform baking of volumetric ambient occlusion and bounce light for all game geometry. The process is triggered any time a change to geometry, lighting or texture is published. Extensions to Cortex read in the assets and use the RenderMan support layer to describe them to 3delight. Here the lighting is computed before being stored in a custom encoded 8bit RGBA image. The automated system replaces a previously manual process, reducing baking times from 14 hours to approximately 30 minutes.

Summary

Cortex has been used successfully in a broad range of production scenarios. We hope it will nd further uses in the wider community.

References

[email protected]

e-mail:[email protected] e-mail:[email protected]

[1] Cortex Project Website, http://code.google.com/p/cortex-vfx [2] Alembic Project Website, http://www.alembic.io [3] GTO Project Website, http://code.google.com/p/open-gto

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