Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas
BGB wrote: and, recently devised a hack for creating component layered JPEG images, or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps, specular maps, and luma maps (as an essentially 16-component JPEG image composed of multiple component layers, with individual JPEG images placed end-to-end with marker tags between them to mark each layer). dunno if anyone would find any of this all that interesting though. well, I'd certainly be interested in seeing that hack! Mile Fidelman -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Yogi Berra ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas
On 6/4/2012 6:48 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: and, recently devised a hack for creating component layered JPEG images, or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps, specular maps, and luma maps (as an essentially 16-component JPEG image composed of multiple component layers, with individual JPEG images placed end-to-end with marker tags between them to mark each layer). dunno if anyone would find any of this all that interesting though. well, I'd certainly be interested in seeing that hack! Mile Fidelman from a comment in my JPEG code: -- BGB Extensions: APP11: BGBTech Tag ASCIZ TagName Tag-specific data until next marker. AlphaColor: AlphaColor RGBA as string (red green blue alpha). APP11 markers may indicate component layer: FF,APP11,CompLayer\0, layername:ASCIZ RGB: Base RGB XYZ: Normal XYZ (XZY ordering) SpRGB: Specular RGB DASe: Depth, Alpha, Specular-Exponent LuRGB: Luma RGB Alpha: Mono alpha layer Component Layouts: 3 component: (no marker, RGB) 4 component: RGB+Alpha 7 component: RGB+Alpha+LuRGB 8 component: RGB+XYZ+DASe 12 component: RGB+XYZ+SpRGB+DASe 16 component: RGB+XYZ+SpRGB+DASe+LuRGB -- AlphaColor was an prior extension, basically for in-image chroma-keys. the RGB color specifies the color to be matched, and A specifies how strongly the color is matched (IIRC, it is the distance to Alpha=128 or so). it was imagined that this could be calculated dynamically per-image, but doing so is costly, so typically a fixed color is specified during encoding (such as cyan or magenta). CompLayer is the component layers. currently, this tag precedes the SOI tages. example: FF,APP11, CompLayer\0, RGB\0 FF,SOI ... FF,EOI FF,APP11, CompLayer\0, XYZ\0 FF,SOI ... FF,EOI ... basically: most component-layers are generic 4:2:0 RGB/YUV layers (except the mono alpha layer, which is monochrome). the layers may share the same Huffman and Quantization tables (by having only the first layer encode them). the RGB layer always comes first, so a decoder that doesn't know of the extension, will just see the basic RGB components. also all layers are the same resolution. this is hardly an ideal design, but was intended more to allow a simple encoder/decoder tweak to handle it (currently, it is encoded/decoded by a function which may accept 4 RGBA buffers, and may shuffle things around slightly to encode them into the layers). the in-program layers are: RGBA; XYZD ('D' may be used for parallax mapping, and represents the relative depth of the pixel); Specular (RGBe), this basically gives the reflection color and shininess of surface pixels; Luma (RGBA). so, yes, it is all a bit of a hack... there was also a little fudging to the my AVI code to allow these videos to be used for surface video-mapping (basically, the video is streamed into all 4 layers at the same time). example use-cases of something like this would likely be things like making animated textures which resemble moving parts (such as metal gears and blinking lights), or alternatively as a partial alternative to using 3D modeled character faces (the face moving is really the texture and animation frames, rather than 3D geometry), however presently this is likely a better fit for animated textures than for video-maps. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas
BGB wrote: On 6/4/2012 6:48 AM, Miles Fidelman wrote: BGB wrote: and, recently devised a hack for creating component layered JPEG images, or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps, specular maps, and luma maps (as an essentially 16-component JPEG image composed of multiple component layers, with individual JPEG images placed end-to-end with marker tags between them to mark each layer). dunno if anyone would find any of this all that interesting though. well, I'd certainly be interested in seeing that hack! Mile Fidelman from a comment in my JPEG code: -- BGB Extensions: APP11: BGBTech Tag ASCIZ TagName Tag-specific data until next marker. snip Pardon my cluelessness here, but what exactly are you showing as JPEG code? Is this part of a JPEG file header, part of code that's generating a JPEG file, what? And... I don't suppose you have any examples of such files - either behind URLs, or for download? Thanks, Miles -- In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is. Yogi Berra ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] iconic representations of powerful ideas
On 6/3/2012 8:31 PM, Shawn Morel wrote: I'm a very visual learner / thinker. I usually find it mentally painful (yes brow furrowing, headache inducing) to think of hard (distant) ideas until I can find an image in my mind's eye. Understood that not everyone thinks like this :) I guess I often think visually as well, though with both a lot of pictures and text (but, how does one really know for certain?...). I also tend to be a bit of a concrete thinker (or, a sensing type in psychology terms). I was re-reading the original NSF grant proposal, in particular after reading this passage: Key to the tractability of this approach is the separation of the kernel into two complementary facets: representation of executable specifications (structures of message-passing objects) forming symbolic expressions and the meaning of those specifications (interpretation of their structure) that yields concrete behavior. I was gliding along the surface of a dynamically shifting Klein bottle. Curious what other people might think. personally I don't much understand the core goals of the project all that well either. I lurk some, and respond if something interesting shows up, and sometimes make a fool of myself in the process, but oh well... as well, it sometimes seems to me like maybe I am some sort of generalized antagonist for many people or something, at least given how many often pointless arguments seem to pop up (in general). but, thinking of visual things: I had recently looked over the SWF spec, and noticed that to some degree, at this level Flash looks a good deal like some sort of animated photoshop-like thing (both seem to be composed of stacks of layers and similar). or, at least, I found it kind of interesting. then was recently left dealing with the idea of systems being driven from the top-down, rather than how I am more familiar with them in games: basically as interacting finite-state-machines (although top-down wouldn't likely replace FSMs, but they could be used in combination). and, recently devised a hack for creating component layered JPEG images, or, basically, a hack to allow creating JPEGs which also contained alpha-blending, normal maps, specular maps, and luma maps (as an essentially 16-component JPEG image composed of multiple component layers, with individual JPEG images placed end-to-end with marker tags between them to mark each layer). the main purpose was mostly though that I could have more advanced video-mapped surfaces (and, for the most part, I use MJPEG AVIs for these). there wasn't any other clearly better way. among other things... dunno if anyone would find any of this all that interesting though. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc