The Power of the Incredible Hulk—the ILM Linux Death Star

CinePaint, which until recently was called Film Gimp, is a frame-by-frame motion picture retouching system that branched from GIMP in 1998. I became the CinePaint project leader serendipitously after I wrote some articles about Film Gimp for Linux Journal. In addition to the usual still-image formats, CinePaint supports file formats popular in the motion picture industry. Those formats include Cineon, RnH 16-bit float (a format created by studio Rhythm & Hues that chops off half of a 32-bit float), Radiance HDR, LogLuv TIFF and now OpenEXR. ILM wrote the OpenEXR plugin for CinePaint.

“We never want to look at an image without an appropriate SDev”, says Sutton. “It's important that what you see is what you get. An SDev—a simulation device—is how we make monitors look like film. Since switching to OpenEXR (more on that in a moment) we don't use LUTs much anymore, but we use SDevs all the time.” A LUT is a LookUp Table used to adjust an image to correct gamma. Monitor brightness is not proportional to the input voltage, but rather to the input voltage raised to a power. This exponent is called gamma and varies depending on the display. Macs are usually about 1.8 and PCs about 2.2.

“The way LUTs work is mainly to change contrast”, says Bogart. “What a LUT can't do is increase or decrease saturation.” Instead of LUTs, a more complex lattice computation is used at ILM. Think of a lattice as a 13 × 13 × 13 cube in space—a 3-D indexed array. An odd number is used so the center is gray. In lattice, each RGB value is mapped—not like a LUT that maps per channel. Using three independent lookup tables is not sufficient for getting the look of film—especially with saturated green. The lattice adjusts to a 12-point film curve using a calculated table with 64k entries. An index into the lattice between 0 and 1 returns three values using trilinear or tetrahedral interpolation that are then gamma-corrected. The process is slower, because each pixel must be handled together, but more accurate than the typical RGB channels-based lookup. “Lattices are not just a Hulk thing”, points out Bogart. “For Minority Report that was a bleach process print—very desaturated. We simulated that look with lattices. You can't do desaturation with LUT either.”

The raw 16-bit OpenEXR data format is called Half, as in half of a 32-bit floating-point number. The Half data format is an internal format of NVIDIA graphics cards. It would be nice if the lattice calculation, which consumes CPU cycles, could instead be run directly on the graphics processing unit (GPU) on the graphics card. In fact, that's becoming possible due to advances in graphics cards. “We're looking forward to that”, says Bogart. “We intend to offload image calculations to the GPU running a pixel shader.” NVIDIA offers a new C-like compiler/library called Cg to run bits of pixel code, commonly called shaders, on the GPU. ATI offers a similar technology called High Level Shading Language, and 3Dlabs has OpenGL Shading Language.

GPU programming is something like embedded systems programming, where code is compiled on a host platform then downloaded to the embedded system. GPU programs can be compiled and downloaded to the graphics card at runtime. The compiler is part of the runtime library.

Some 3-D packages, such as SOFTIMAGE and Maya, already are beginning to use Cg to improve rendering performance.

Alias|Wavefront Maya was used for particles and some of the character animation models. Pixar RenderMan and Mental Images Mental Ray software were used for rendering. Raytracing renders reflective surfaces better but takes longer. Raytracing is becoming more practical, thanks to the faster, cheaper Linux systems. Both RenderMan and Mental Ray support shader programming to give images a custom look. RenderMan provides its own shader language, which is considered easy to learn. Mental Ray uses C, which is considered more challenging but more powerful. Which software to use is decided on a scene-by-scene basis. Each scene is rendered under the control of a batch scheduler.