The Foundry is happy to announce a new release of OCULA – their unique collection of plug-in tools that address common problems experienced with stereoscopic imagery in post production. Winner of a TVB Europe IBC Award in 2008 and an iaward in 2009, OCULA boosts productivity and ultimately helps deliver a more rewarding stereoscopic viewing experience.
OCULA 2.1, created by The Foundry’s SCI-TECH Award®-winning R&D team, is the result of a number of collaborations with artists on high end stereo projects including Avatar. This production testing has enabled us to deliver significant improvements to workflow and robustness.
A big research effort has resulted in huge improvements to ColourMatcher, allowing for the reliable correction of serious localised colour differences introduced by the polarising effects in mirror and prism rigs.
DisparityGenerator now generates higher-quality disparity maps, with a range of new parameters to help get the best results from tricky footage. We have also added a DisparityViewer plug-in to help visualise disparity maps.
The VerticalAligner tool, used for the correction of misaligned plates, can now also correct existing 3d camera solves at the same time as performing the image correction and the Solver tool, used to calculate stereo geometry, now has a number of workflow improvements, including the ability to manually add feature matches between views.
“The OCULA plug-ins for Nuke became an impressive and invaluable toolset for us on Avatar. I wouldn’t want to dive into another stereo show without them in the arsenal.” Erik Winquist, compositing supervisor on Avatar at Weta Digital.
More information about OCULA and a full list of the plug-ins can be found here. Why not also watch the great demo by Robin Hollander from Weta on our YouTube Channel?
NUKE is currently the only visual effects compositing system that supports OCULA.