[Episode Jabbah] Progress Update XVIII

Greetings,

last week I did some rendering but was mostly busy with fixing my post work pipeline. If someone cares for that I'll go a bit more into that below. The main image is a bonus render and not canon. We will have to wait for Selene to come back in the main story but I still can't keep my hands of her... sort of...

Postwork Pipeline

Last time I mentioned I noticed that there is a difference in brightness in my images between what I see in After Effects, the tool I use for post work, and the final exported images. The second image shows that difference. The right side is how it looks in the viewer in After Effects and the left side was how the image was exported previously. I only realized the problem in very dark images. In brighter images it isn't that noticeable.

Well I went a bit down a rabbit hole, trying to figure out what the problem was und how to fix it.

I use After Effects for my post work, like color grading, adding flares, some fx and other minor and more complex stuff. After effects allows my to do this in bulk in a single composition where I can even automate some corrections. However, I don't use the internal render engine from After Effects as it takes too much time and setup for exporting single frames that I can already see in the viewer. It's a bit hard to explain what my pain is with that, however, there is a very widely used tool that helps with that. "FX Console", it has a internal gallery and can do screenshots from your current view and after that you can export all those screenshots quite comfortable as images. Way quicker than the internal tools from After Effects. However, this tool uses a undocumented method to take this screenshots which uses the wrong color space/color transformation. It's only meant to be used with linear color space, but I'm using a different color management (OCIO or rather AgX/sRGB) which is more suitable for 3D applications. As there wasn't another tool that does this correctly, I went out to write my own tool. It took a few different approaches to finally get what I went but I got it working now. It grabs the pixels directly from the frame buffer and saves exactly what I'm also seeing in the viewer. I know it sounds trivial, but sadly it isn't. Took me the better part of the week to get it done. Anyway, my tool is quicker and more robust I think. I'm pretty happy with it.

However, while developing that tool I also improved my other tool "LUT Manager". A tool I wrote to quickly apply color grading presets from a browser with previews. The "improving" broke all my old files and I had to write a second tool to migrate those broken files... However, it should be stable now.

The third image shows both tools and a little cleavage. On the left is my "LUT Manager" for browsing color grading presets and on the right is "QuickShot", my screenshot and export tool.

I only want to do some minor improvements for those two tools and then release them. I think they could be useful for other people as well who work with After Effects. I don't want to sell them as they are mostly written with AI and they are rather small, but I wouldn't mind to couple them with a donation option and I'm looking for a reasonable way to set that up. Maybe Gumroad or something, but if I remember correctly they had a fall from grace last year, but I don't remember exactly what it was. I was thinking on putting them here on Patreon but I think that would people scare away who don't want to have anything to do with adult stuff.

If someone of you have a good idea, I'll be glad to hear about it.

Anyway, I think that's enough about that.

Content

575 HD renders

2 HD Animations

~ 40% scripting done

Story is written and in review process