Tag: compositing

Discreet Flame 9.5

Behold the mighty Flame. After days of attempts I managed to install the software and have all the hardware and drives properly recognised and functioning. I can’t thank enough the people of the Irix NETWORK forum. Special thanks to gijoe77, def13 and irikinus for their direct help and support.

As a professional compositing supervisor it’s amazing to be able to play again with this software on the original SGI hardware.. actually in this case the very same machine I used 20 years ago.

The original workstation came with Flint 7.6 installed, after some testing and consideration the best version of a discreet product that can run well on my Octane is Flame 9.5 from 2005. Finally with the version 8 they introduced resolution independent projects management and v 9 was completely rewritten as a 64 bit application. After this release Discreet launched another 2 versions of Flint / Flame for Silicon Graphics hardware, the last one named Flame 2008. Sadly I would need more memory and a V12 graphic card instead of my V10… soon or later I will upgrade : P

I copied via FTP a bunch of clips that I had in my photo library just to play a bit with the software. I am still quite impressed by the smoothness and responsiveness of playback, 3d space and painting tools.

Quite shocking how the system handles real time reflections on a 3d object… on a video card with 32 Mb of memory of which only 8 dedicated to textures.. yes megabyte!

Solar System Simulator

I always been obsessed with space exploration and astronomy, and since I was a child I played with telescopes and optical instruments.

I was just trying to show to a friend what you can expect from a cheap telescope when looking at the planets. I quickly downloaded an image of Saturn and set up in Nuke a simple comp to get the scale right and the view from the ocular. Then I tried the same with an image of Jupiter… and another one… Obviously I went a bit too far and after a couple of days I ended up with a complete 3D solar system / telescope simulator in Nuke.

The tool is designed to mimic the view from earth of the planets through a telescope. You can play with the focal length, oculars and Barlow lenses. Tweaking other parameters it is able to render a view from a “probe” in Voyager style. This is Mars with a 2.000 mm focal length and a 2x Barlow lens.

Clearly I had to be precise. Each planets has his own rotation, axis tilt and satellites. Please note the transit of Io in front of Jupiter and its shadow.

The entire system has also the correct scale. Each unit in nuke equals 1.000 Km, and each frame of the animation 1 hour. A bit of patience with some expressions and everything moves automatically. And yes, I also added Pluto, I felt sorry and re-introduced it in my solar system.