Smart Assistant AI

[glorybound]

So, I pre-ordered this (https://witharsenal.com/) and it promises to do a lot of things in photography. One thing is auto-stacking. When you press the shutter it'll scan your scene and pick all the correct settings and it'll take many photos, all seconds apart and stack them, so everything is exposed properly. How long until we get this in V-Ray? I mean, this is all done on this little device that costs a couple hundred bucks.

[joconnell]

Well, the big difference is light is for free and near instant compared to having to calculate all the bounced light - to make things practical, renderers have to sample for what you're going to see so they don't bother on things too dark or too bright - you get a lot of info in your floating point exr of course. On the focus stacking thing, photographers would kill for zdepth (not that it's perfect) and to get the same in vray you'd end up doing several renders to provide the data set of lots of shallow focus images at different points!

Vray is only doing a tiny fraction of the light rays that happen in real life to make things practical where as a camera is using all those glorious free photons travelling at the speed of light! This kind of reminds me of the Light camera and other large format or multiple lens film cameras - all it's doing is putting off making a decision til later in terms of your framing and exposure at the expense of having to process all the data to make a final image you can see. It'd be like you rendering a 180 degree spin around of any of your house models just so you can choose the angle you like after, rather than composing nicely at the start and rendering once!

[glorybound]

I was thinking more in post-production. For instance, I render in float and mask windows out, so I can change the exposure of the windows in post.-production. It would be sweet if V-Ray could do this automatically in the frame buffer. Another way to look at it would be an automatic camera raw type action.

[joconnell]

Hmm - you might be able to do something dirty in photoshop, if you take the raw light pass, it should be a nice map of what's over and under exposed, you'd be able to use levels on that to give you a mask of anything over a certain brightness and likewise below a certain brightness - might have some glitches but it'd work. It's kinda tone mapping functionality it seems?

[glorybound]

Hmm - you might be able to do something dirty in photoshop, if you take the raw light pass, it should be a nice map of what's over and under exposed, you'd be able to use levels on that to give you a mask of anything over a certain brightness and likewise below a certain brightness - might have some glitches but it'd work. It's kinda tone mapping functionality it seems?

Yes, that's what I do now, but it would be nice if the frame buffer was smart enough to balance things out. The Arsenal device has thousands of photos, from professional photographer, that it references. It matches what it sees and sets the camera accordingly.