Lytro effect - computationally impossible?

[tricky]

You will no doubt have heard of https://www.lytro.com/ but I wondered if there was a way that this type of idea could be implemented with a vray camera? I'm not sure how the file would be handled, but if we could control the DOF in realtime in post, it could be quite interesting.

[tashko.zashev]

Hi,

Interesting and very cool effect is achieved.
I suppose that this camera takes few pictures with small shift in order to get these functionality.
However V-Ray has a little bit of it with the Shademap tool, which can speed up the DOF calculations quite a bit.

[chriserskine]

it dose it with thousands of micro lenses. (i believe its each pixel is its own micro lens)

http://support.lytro.com/entries/205...ld-camera-work

it would be cool to have the effect but it sounds expensive to render.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I think when they were in early stage what they did was take picture through a lens that looked like bees eye or something like that. Then from that they merged images from different parts of lens or something and uhh... old stuff cant remember it

Still quite cool ! It would be epic to have something similar in 3d.

[tricky]

Hi,

Interesting and very cool effect is achieved.
I suppose that this camera takes few pictures with small shift in order to get these functionality.
However V-Ray has a little bit of it with the Shademap tool, which can speed up the DOF calculations quite a bit.

I will await VrayLytroEffect in next edition of Vray then

[bigbossfr]

What about deep pixel and create dof in Nuke for example ?

[alexyork]

That is seriously cool....

[grantwarwick]

My boss is mates with the guy who invented it!

[Neilg]

Render 10 images and build a flow in anything node-based.

Or just do it in post like a normal person.

[eldiablo]

we always could handle DOF in post. Light Fields are a lot more complicated than a DOF filtering. You need a per pixel perspective of light rays for the camera. The real question is this - if you have a 2k lightfield what do you need rendered, resolution, per pixel perspective?

[t1t4]

There was a talk I went to at the 2011 siggraph about using light fields with rendering dof, motion blur and shadows. Was mostly over my head on the math and a bit on the theory side of things but one of the rendering engineers at our company was pretty excited about it. Seemed like their system let you have fewer samples, saved light field info from the render then let you do some reconstruction stuff with the light field data later. Here is the like to the paper.

http://groups.csail.mit.edu/graphics/tlfr/

[Slazzo]

I guess is more as post algorithm

Sigraph 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=NldRufqur3w

[tricky]

I guess is more as post algorithm

Sigraph 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=NldRufqur3w

Amazing ideas there. When can I buy one from Jessops then?

[t1t4]

I guess is more as post algorithm

Sigraph 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?featur...&v=NldRufqur3w

That sigraph 2013 presentation is dealing with creating light fields in the real world just like the Lytro.

The talk I saw was more about using it for rendering. They said it could be useful for speeding up renders with 3d dof and motion blur as well as soft/area shadows but reducing the sample rate (some how) then using the light field info to clean up noise or something mathematically magic like that. And the rendered light field info also made post editing of dof and motion blur trivial and more accurate than a simple depth map for dof. Though if it was as easy and amazing as it seemed at the talk I'm guessing it's already in a bunch of renderers right now or it has some kind of gotcha that makes it less magic in practice than it seemed during the presentation.

Real world light field photography is pretty cool and I can't wait for a light field camera system that less focused on taking pictures for posting on facebook (like the lytro is) and more on photographers and 3d data capture.

I randomly met a guy that worked for Lytro while out doing some astrophotography in Palo Alto here in San Francisco Bay Area. This was a year or two ago just a few months before they released the Lytro and he couldn't really say much about it but he did say they planed on trying to get a mass market consumer friendly version out first and had plans to try and follow up with a more photographer centric version later. The Lytro was the mass market camera he was talking about. He did say it could capture or at least reconstruct a 3d depth map from the light field data. That's what I was asking him more about but because it wasn't released he couldn't talk about any of the details or specs on such things. I also haven't seen any software for the Lytro format that gives users access to that information. It doesn't seem like Lytro or anyone else has released any software or plugins that let users easily access all the cool info stored in the light field images/data that is captured by the lytro. I saw one link where someone had figured out how to get at some of the info but no really easy way of using. Being able to access that stuff in Photoshop, AFX, Nuke and even 3d apps for things like displacement maps would be great.

Doing a quick web search I did find this German company that has a light field cameras targeted more at an industrial and scientific market. Seems like you can probably buy the cameras but the fact that you have to contact them for a price makes it seem like they would cost more than I would like to spend on one.

http://www.raytrix.de/index.php/home.html

[tricky]

I randomly met a guy that worked for Lytro while out doing some astrophotography in Palo Alto here in San Francisco Bay Area. This was a year or two ago just a few months before they released the Lytro and he couldn't really say much about it but he did say they planed on trying to get a mass market consumer friendly version out first and had plans to try and follow up with a more photographer centric version later. The Lytro was the mass market camera he was talking about. He did say it could capture or at least reconstruct a 3d depth map from the light field data. That's what I was asking him more about but because it wasn't released he couldn't talk about any of the details or specs on such things. I also haven't seen any software for the Lytro format that gives users access to that information. It doesn't seem like Lytro or anyone else has released any software or plugins that let users easily access all the cool info stored in the light field images/data that is captured by the lytro. I saw one link where someone had figured out how to get at some of the info but no really easy way of using. Being able to access that stuff in Photoshop, AFX, Nuke and even 3d apps for things like displacement maps would be great.

I think Lytro have been going through a rough patch of late. I suspect it is partly down to the high cost of the camera. If they need to get it into the mass market, they need to drop the cost massively.

I just bought myself another new camera for my summer vacation. It was a Fuji compact ca,era that has 2 lenses and takes 3D pictures. The screen on the back allows you to see the 3D pictures without glasses using a very high quality lenticular display. I can also plug it into my 3DTV at home. Pretty cool. Its not going to replace my 'proper' stills cameras, but only cost me about £140 or so.