Fusion: all the sourcey details

Perhaps that should be, all the gourcey details.

The following shows some history of Fusion development, from early 1996, through to August 2010, visualised by gource, and spread over 11 minutes. It's hard to pick out any major milestones - or at least any that correlate with release dates - since the majority of development happens long before any particular release. There are some things I can point out though.



The number of tools and UI controls grow during 1996 and 1997, with the first release of Digital Fusion 1.0 for Windows NT late in 1996. July 1997 shows the tree explode with TIFF and JPEG libraries. While Digital Fusion had already been using them, this was when they were first placed under revision control. It also marks when development was first split between Australia, where all previous development had taken place, and Canada.

1998 shows an explosion of file format support, including QuickTime and OMF support, hardware support, Bins, a Render Manager, and the first version of Paint.

2000 shows the initial development of Particles and Text+, and in there somewhere is the beginnings of the non-grid flow view.

2002 shows DFScript becoming a real product, as part of Digital Fusion 4, along with some reference documentation for it. In there somewhere is the very beginnings of 3D too.

In 2004, there are some wide reaching changes, for Fusion 5 development, to do with transitioning from a binary flow to an ASCII comp format, and changing the plugin SDK from using 32-bit IDs extensively, to using string IDs. The 3D system is starting to mature. Text+ moves from Windows font system, to using freetype for font parsing, with custom character rendering.

By 2005, the basis of 3D has settled, FBX support is added, and development is continued through to the release of Fusion 5 later in the year.

Significant enhancements are made to 3D for 2006, and quite a lot of changes made to get Fusion working on Linux. Not seen here is all the wine updates, and custom wine development. A more advanced materials system based on Cg shaders begins here.

Script plugins, or fuses are introduced in 2008, while the new Cg based 3D material system grows...

2009 sees DoD/RoI and the 3D material system released in Fusion 6.0.

So that's 14.5 years of Fusion development in a nutshell.

Heads up (Updated: Almost here!)

New build of Fusion is coming. Fair number of bugfixes in it.

Updated (16th Dec): Coming real soon now! There's a lot of bugfixes, but there's a few new features as well:

• Fullscreen DirectX viewer (supports 3D Vision stereo, no Quadro needed!)
• View mirroring (copies the main display view to an external view, like the new DX view)
• Pick channels directly from 3D view (includes color, position, Z, UV, and rotation from normals)
• Disk caching on mask tools
• Huge 10x speed improvement in the Probe tool! :-)
• Double-precision support in OpenCL
• Improvements to polyline rendering, point cut/paste etc
• and more...

3D Stereo with a 2D tool

Here's a quick trick: you don't need Fusion's 3D engine to get stereo 3D. You can manage it with an instanced pair of 2D tools - so long as they do 3D rotation :-) All you need to do is produce two slightly-different viewpoints, and combine them. It can be faster to render, too.

OpenCL fuse manual

Hm, been a while since the last post, hasn't it? Fate of most blogs I guess. Not entirely uneventful, what with Fusion 6.1 being released & all. Now that that's out of the way, I can divert a little mental energy elsewhere.

This is just a heads-up that I've posted an updated OpenCL fuse reference manual over on VFXpedia, so you've officially run out of excuses (except for the guy over there with last year's ATi card, you're off the hook). There are some example OpenCL fuses included with Fusion 6.1, and a quick walkthrough (could use a little revising) also on VFXpedia. I'm curious to see what people come up with, now that fuses can be even faster than built-in tools!

Next up, I'll show you how to do stereo 3D titles - without using the 3D engine (cue audience gasps). Also, should I be announcing things like the Build 667 point release here too, in case someone actually notices it here first? Anyone? Bueller? <FX: crickets>

Die 24fps, die!

No, that's not German, I'm just tired of the fascination the industry has with 1920s technology. What is it about blurry, shuddering cinema that's so consistently attractive?

Teasers

I was going to throw up a few artfully-revealing screenshots of Fusion 6.1, to give people something to talk about, but now it looks like I won't have to. With NAB fast approaching, Marketing is going to take all the fun out of things, real soon now it seems.

Stereoscopic developments

So, we've been watching the enthusiasm Hollywood has with stereoscopic video, and pondering ways to take it further. We think we've hit upon a big one: stereoscopic audio.

Adapting existing visual stereoscopy techniques has proved quite fruitful, and neatly avoids the extra expense and inconvenience of requiring more than one speaker. Here are a few approaches we've experimented with: