Eyeon:Manual/Changes Between Fusion 5 and 5.1/Tool Changes
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New Tools
Bender 3D
The Bender 3D tool is used to bend, taper, twist or shear the geometry in a 3D scene based upon its bounding box. It takes a 3D scene as input and outputs a modified 3D scene. Only the geometry in the scene is modified - any lights, cameras or materials are passed through unaffected. Note that particles may no longer face the camera after being Bent.
See Bender 3D for complete details.
Displace 3D
The Displace 3D tool is used to displace the vertices of an object along their normals, using a second image as the reference. The texture coordinates on the geometry are used to determine where to sample the image.
See Displace 3D for complete details.
Replace Material 3D
The Replace Material 3D tool replaces the material on all geometry in the input scene. Any lights or cameras in the input scene are simply passed through unaffected.
If you have a large number of objects with the same material, it can be useful to pipe them through a ReplaceMaterial3D tool to allow you to adjust all their materials simultaneously rather than having to adjust each tools material settings individually.
See Replace Material 3D for complete details.
Projector 3D
The Projector 3D tool is used to project an image upon 3D geometry. This can be useful in many ways; texturing objects with multiple layers, applying a texture across multiple separate objects, projecting background shots from the camera's viewpoint, image-based rendering techniques and much more.
See Projector 3D for complete details.
Day Sky
The DaySky generator aims to produce a simulation of the daylight produced at a specific time and location on the earth, and generate an high dynamic range image which represents a map of that light. It is not a sky generator, though it could be combined with a cloud generator or noise tool to produce one.
See Day Sky for complete details.
SmeeHee
SmeeHee, well... try it and see!
File LUT
The File LUT tool is a variation on the Color Curves tool that does not use a spline-based LUT. Instead it loads the LUT from a file stored on the system or network.
The only part of the LUT stored in the composition is the path to the file. Since LUT's files can be very large, this dramatically reduces the file size of a composition when several LUT's are present. It also becomes possible to adjust all File LUT tools using the same file at the same time, simply by changing the contents of the LUT. This can be useful when the same LUT based color correction is applied in many different compositions.
See File LUT for details.
Vector Distortion
The Vector Distortion tool distorts the main source image along the X and Y axis separately, based on the vector channel data in the source image, or a channel from a second image, reference image.
See Vector Distortion for complete details.
Perturb Modifier
Added a Perturb modifier, which smoothly varying random values for several input types, based on Perlin noise. It can be used to add jitter, shake or wobble to any animatable control, even if the control is already animated. Unlike other random modifiers the Perturb modifier can also be applied to polylines, shapes, grid meshes and even color gradients.
See Perturb Modifier for complete details.
Updated Tools
In addition to the several new tools described above, many existing tools have been improved or enhanced in Fusion 5.1.
Camera 3D
There were two significant changes to the Camera 3D tool in Fusion 5.1. The clipping plane for perspective cameras is now automatically set to match the extents of the scene, unless the 'Adaptively Adjust Near/Far Clip' checkbox is disabled. Additionally, the Camera now has the ability to project a connected 2D image into the scene as light.
See the Camera 3D tools for additional information.
Duplicate 3D
The Duplicate 3D tool now provides an option to jitter the translation, rotation, scale and axis of the duplicated objects. This can be used to make the appearance of the duplicated objects less uniform.
See the Duplicate 3D page for details.
FBX Mesh
There were three significant changes to the FBX Mesh tool in Fusion 5.1. The range of formats available to be imported now includes the 3DS and DXF object formats in addition to the OBJ and FBX formats available in previous versions. Additionally, rather than importing all of the geometry specified in the file, it is now possible to specify an object within the scene by name, which will limit the geometry loaded to just the named object.
Finally, it is now possible to create an FBX Mesh tool by dragging an FBX, OBJ, 3DS or DXF file from the file browser into the flow.
See the FBX Mesh page for details.
Locator 3D
Several changes were made to enhance the usefulness of the Locator 3D tool. The Locator 3D tool now passes the scene geometry through to its output instead of removing it. This eliminates the necessity of placing the locator on an isolated branch of the composition, simplifying the flow's layout.
Locator 3D now has an optional Target input that can be used to locate a fully-transformed object in the scene. If a target object is connected to this input, the locator will follow the fully-transformed position of the target. A good example would be a composition that contains a Cube 3D followed by a Transform 3D that is then connected to a Locator 3D.
If the Cube 3D is connected to the Locator tools second input, the locator's position will be matched to the Cube. This is superior to connecting the XYZ translation of the locator directly to the XYZ translation of the Cube, because the locator will now take into account downstream translations, such as the one applied by the Transform 3D in our example. When configured this way the XYZ Offset controls in the locator's transform tab can be used to apply an offset to the position of the connected object (e.g. the Cube in our example)
Finally, a SubID slider was placed in the controls tab to specify target sub-objects. (For example, individual characters from a Text 3D tool, or specific copies created by a Duplicate 3D tool.)
See the Locator 3D page for details.
Renderer 3D
The Renderer 3D tool is now able to employ two different lighting models when using the OpenGL render mode. The per-vertex lighting model calculates lighting at each vertex of the scenes geometry. This produces a fast approximation of the scene's lighting, but tends to produce blocky results when the scenes polygon count is low.
The per-vertex lighting model calculates lighting at each vertex of the scenes geometry. This produces a fast approximation of the scene's lighting, but tends to produce blocky results when the scenes polygon count is low. The per-pixel method uses a different method that does not rely on the amount of detail in the scenes geometry for lighting, which generally produces superior results.
While using per-pixel lighting in the OpenGL renderer produces results closer to that produced by the more accurate software renderer, it still has some disadvantages. Even with per-pixel lighting, the OpenGL renderer is less capable of dealing correctly with semi-transparency, soft shadows and colored shadows. There is also little to no antialiasing, and the color depth of the rendering will be limited by the capabilities of the graphics card in the system.
As a result of these differences the OpenGL renderer should generally be used for previews and previsualization, and the software renderer should be used for producing final results.
Shape 3D
In addition to adding a new Icosohedron primitive, the Sphere, Cone and Torus primitive have been enhanced to include additional control over the objects shape.
See the Shape 3D page for details.
Text 3D
New material inputs were added to the Text 3D tool for use on beveled and extruded faces.
Spotlight
Shadow Changes
Shadow calculation has changed so that shadow maps are produced for the entire penumbra of the light. In Fusion 5.0 the cone angle alone was used to produce the shadow map. This means that Fusion 5.0 compositions which are loaded into Fusion 5.1 could potentially produce more jagged shadows and shadows in places where there were none previously. This will generally occur in rare cases where the penumbra angle is much wider than the falloff, causing a shadow map to be created where very little light is cast.
Creator Tools
It is now possible to animate, publish or add modifiers to the Width, Height, Aspect and Depth controls on all Source tools.
The Depth multi-button control has been moved from the Common Controls tab to the Image tab in all Creator tools.
Blur, Glow and Soft Glow
The Blur, Glow and Soft Glow tools now have a new mode called Multibox. Multibox blurs are often faster than Gaussian blurs when doing 8 passes or less. The default is 4 passes, which gives a very good good approximation of the equivalent Gaussian mode blur.
The Soft Glow tool now has a Color Scale control that functions like the one found in the Glow tool.
The pre-masking code used in Glow was improved to remove dark outlines that could appear under some circumstances. This change may cause pre-masked Glow tools created in earlier versions of Fusion to render slightly differently under Fusion 5.1.
Rank Filter
The Rank Filter tool can now process floating point images.
Erode Dilate
The Erode Dilate tool is now sub-pixel accurate. Be aware that this will change the way previous comps render, unless the artist had worked out an exact pixel amount.
Texture
The deep pixel Texture tool now has controls to adjust the texture scale.
Paint
Multistroke Mode
The Paint tool has been significantly re-worked to improve performance in Fusion 5.1. These changes are particularily effective in improving responsiveness between strokes. The improvement was achieved by eliminating the overhead from creating a new stroke modifier each time a new stroke was created. As a result, Fusion 5.1 now offers a default paint mode called Multistroke.
In many respects, Multistroke paint is similar to a destructive bitmap type paint, although in the case of multistroke, the results remain re-renderable and resolution independent. When painting, the Paint tool will collect each new stroke created by the artist into a single multistroke modifier.
Note that a stroke created within a multistroke modifier cannot be modified further once it has been painted. However, it is still possible to select and Group one or more multistrokes, to allow tracking/repositioning, scaling and rotation.
The paint method used by previous versions of Fusion is still available, for situations where control over each stroke is more important than interactive performance while painting. Performance of single strokes is still improved over 5.0, especially for larger or float-depth images.
When a new Paint tool is added to the composition it will be set to multistroke mode, and each stroke will have a default duration of 1 frame. To switch from multistroke mode to stroke mode click on the 'stroke mode' icon in the paint tools display view toolbar.
Overlay Options for Clone Mode Painting
When painting with the clone apply mode, the artist can now overlay the clone source image over the image which is being painted in the display view. This makes it easier to make precision adjustments to the position and time offset of the clone source. To enable a temporary translucent overlay press and hold the O key while painting. To toggle the display of a persistent opaque overlay, press the P key.
While either overlay is displayed in the views, pressing the [ and ] keys will adjust the source time of the clone source by a frame in either direction. The arrow keys on the keyboard can also be used to adjust or nudge the center of the clone source while the overlay is active.
Auto Proxy
The Paint tool now ignores the global Auto Proxy setting. This prevents the image from jumping into and out of proxy with each stroke, and eliminates the need for the artist to manually disable Auto-Proxy when painting.
Grid Warp
The ability to apply a shape box to selected points on a Grid Warp tool was added.
Connections and Modifiers
Enabled (and tweaked) code to allow inserting of a modifier between a tool or modifier and an already connected modifier (use the "Insert" sub-menu of an Input's context menu). No longer do you have to build your modifier chain in reverse; you can easily modify your animation key values with Insert Modifier.
Added a Perturb modifier.
