Monday April 28, 2008

Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way

If you give a presentation about hardware products, it is easy to make your slides look good: Remove boring text, add nice photos of your hardware and all is well.

But what if you have to present on software, some web service or give a Solaris training with lots of command line stuff?

Sure, you can do screenshots and hope that the GUI looks nice. Or use other photos (like the one to the left) that may or may not relate to the software you present about.

But screenshots and photos (to a lesser degree) are so, well, 2D. They look boring. Wouldn't it be nice to present your screenshots the way Apple presents its iTunes software? Like add some 3D depth to your slide-deck or website, with a nice, shiny, reflective underground?

Well, you don't need to spend thousands of dollars with art departments and graphics artists (they'd be glad to do something different for a change) or work long hours with Photoshop or the Gimp (a most excellent piece of software, BTW),  trying to create that stylish 3D look. Here's a script that can do this easily for you!

You're probably wondering why my daughter Amanda shows up at the top of this article. Well, she was volunteered to be a test subject for my new script. The script uses ImageMagick and POV-Ray in a similar way to my earlier photocube script that we now use to generate the animated cube of the HELDENFunk show notes. It places any image you give it into a 3D space and adds a nice, shiny reflection to it. Let's see how Amanda looks like after she's been through the featurepic.sh script:

-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -s 200 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.

The size (-s) parameter defines the length of either width or height of the result image, whichever is larger. In this case, we choose an image size of a maximum of 200x200 pixels, so the image can fit this blog. You can see the result to the right. Nice, eh?

As you can see, her picture has now been placed into a 3D scene, slightly rotated to the left, onto a shiny, white surface. More interesting than the usual flat picture on a blog, isn't it?

The script uses POV-Ray to place and rotate the photo in 3D and to generate the reflection. ImageMagick is used for pre- and post-processing the image. The reflection is not real, it is actually the same picture, flipped across the y axis and with a gradient transparency applied to it. That way, the reflection can be controlled much better. I tried the real thing and it didn't want to look artistic enough :).

The amount of rotation, the reflection intensity and the length of the reflective tail can be adjusted with command-line switches, so can the height of the camera. Here's an example that uses all of these parameters:

-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -h
Usage: ./featurepic.sh: [-a angle] [-c cameraheight] [-p] [-r reflection] [-s size] [-t taillength] image
-p creates a PNG image with transparency, otherwise a JPEG image is created.
Defaults: -a 15 -c 0.3 -r 0.3 -s 512 -t 0.3
-bash-3.00$ ./featurepic.sh -a 30 -c 0.1 -r 0.8 -s 200 -t 0.5 Amanda_small.jpg
Fetching and pre-processing file:///home/constant/software/featurepic/Amanda_small.jpg
Rendering image.
Writing image: featurepic.jpg
Ready.

The angle is in degrees and can be negative. One good thing about rotating the image into 3D is that you gain horizontal real estate to fit that slightly longer bullet point in. It helps you trade-off image width for height without losing too much detail. An angle value of up to 30 is still ok, I wouldn't recommend more than that.

The camera height (-c) value is relative to the picture: 0 is ground level, 1 is at the top edge. The camera will always look at the center of the image. Camera height values below 0.5 are good because a camera below the subject makes it look slightly more impressing. Values above 0.5 make you look down at the picture, making it a bit smaller and less significant.

The reflection intensity (-r) goes from 0 (no reflection) to 1 (perfect mirror) while the length of the reflection (the fade-off "tail", -t) goes from 0 (no tail) to 1 (same size as image). Smaller values for reflection and the tail length make the reflection more subtle and less distracting. I think the default values are very good for most cases.

Check out the -p option for a nicer way to integrate the resulting image into other graphical elements of your presentation. It creates a PNG image with a transparency channel. This means you can place it above other graphical elements (such as a different background color) and the reflection will still look right. See the next example to the right, where Amanda prefers a pink background. Keep in mind that the rendering step still assumes a white background, so drastic changes in background may or may not result in slight artifacts at the edges.

You can also use this script with some pictures of hardware to make them look more interesting, if the hardware shot is dead front and if it doesn't have any border at the bottom. Use an angle value of 0, this will place your hardware onto that virtual glossy carbon plastic that makes it look nicer. See below for an embellished Sun Fire T5440 Server, the new flagship in our line of Chip-Multi-Threading (CMT) servers.

This script should work on any unixoid OS, especially Solaris, that understands sh and where a reasonably recent (6.x.x) version of ImageMagick and POV-Ray are available.

You can get ImageMagick and POV-Ray from their websites. On Solaris, you can easily install them through Blastwave. The version of ImageMagick that is shipped with Solaris in /usr/sfw is not recent enough for the way I'm using it, so the Blastwave version is recommended at the moment.

The featurepic.sh script is free, open source, distributed under the CDDL and you don't have to attribute its use when using the resulting images in your own presentations, websites, or other derivative work.

It's free as in "free beer". Speaking of which, if you like this script, leave a comment or send me email at constantin at sun dot com telling me what you did with it, what other features you'd like to see in the script and where I can meet you for some beer :).

"Presenting images and screenshots the cool, 3D, shiny way" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2008-04-28 00:44:56.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
3d cool effects howto imagemagick imaging photos povray presentations script
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Monday September 17, 2007

The Importance of Archiving (For the Rest of us)

A few weeks ago I was on the road with Dave Cavena. He works as an SE in Hollywood and helps our customers there understand the importance of digitally archiving their movies. The issue here is a simple one: Today, movies are being archived by storing rolls of film on shelves in gigantic warehouses and hoping they'll survive for a few years to come. "Few" could be tens or maybe hundreds of years, but nobody really knows how long they'll really survive and how good the movies will look after a couple of decades of archiving. Will the colours look natural? Will there be scratches? Will the film material degrade so that the movie rips right in the middle of the most important scene? Or will it spontaneously decompose into a heap of dust when someone opens the door after 150 years to see what the heck people were keeping in that warehouse anyway?

Digital Data on the other hand can be kept indefinitely and it can stay perfect through eternity, if people store it right. "Right" means things like keeping redundant copies in geographically distant places (so that the movie survices a warehouse fire or an earthquake), periodical integrity checking and fault healing based on those redundant copies (so silent data corruption can be detected and corrected) and periodic copy and conversion cycles so the data can survive format and media evolution. Try playing "Dragon's Lair", a classic arcade game from the 80ies which was originally produced for Laserdisc-based arcade machines. I loved the game back them and I was glad I found it on DVD. Now look it up on Amazon: You'll find Blu-Ray and HD-DVD versions as well!

Dave and some other very bright people have written an interesting white paper on "Archiving Movies in a Digital World". It is a great read: It shows why archiving movies the digital way is so important (so they can't get lost), how to do it and why this is actually cheaper than keeping rolls of film in warehouses (Hint: Archiving bits takes up less real estate and looks a lot cooler if you use one of these. Your archives may even become smart by using one of these, too!).

That got me thinking: What will happen to all those photos that people are taking using their private digital camera? Parties, Vacations, Babies, Families, etc.? Yes, if people don't start thinking about a good archiving strategy soon, they will all be lost in the next couple of decades. By the time my little daughter gets married, I might have lost all of her baby pictures if I don't do something real quick (as in: This decade).

Storing them on a file server running a serious, enterprise-class OS with ZFS on a set of redundant storage media (could be disks, could be more disks, iSCSI devices, could be USB sticks, it really doesn't matter) is a good start, because it can provide 100% data integrity and self-heal any damages before they become permanent. But this is still not enough. They need to be stored in multiple locations and they need to be periodically copied into more recent media.

I'll figure out the multiple locations part someday (probably a second server that replicates the first file server's ZFS file systems through a couple of zfs send/receive scripts) and the periodical copying means I'll still have an interesting hobby when my daughter has children of her own. Meanwhile, just to be sure, I've started to copy all of my photos to a popular photo-sharing service called Flickr on the net. Yes, all of them. This means I can still decide who can look at my pictures and who not, I get access to all of my pictures from everywhere near a web browser and I can store as many photos as I want for just a small annual fee. And they'll still be there should my basement catch fire or should all of my disks die for some strange statistical reason or when I start taking 3D photographs of my grandchidren. What more could anybody want?

Now what if the movie industry found out about this and started archiving their movies on Flickr as well, image after image, all of them, for just the same small annual fee?

Update (Sep. 18th, 2007): Thanks to Jesse's comment, I've now tried SmugMug and I love it! They offer a 50% discount for Flickr refugees during the first year and there's a nice tool called SmuggLr that makes migration a snap. Thank you Jesse!

"The Importance of Archiving (For the Rest of us)" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-09-17 14:52:17.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
archiving backups cinema digital flickr movies personal photos storage zfs
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Thursday August 23, 2007

Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris

One of the features I like most about Apple's iPhoto application is the transition effect in slideshows where the whole screen becomes a cube that rotates into the next photograph. The same effect is also used when switching users, etc.

Recently we took a team photograph for an internal web page. I wanted that effect and I love the open source raytracer POV-Ray so I wrote a script that renders the same animation effect and creates an animated GIF using ImageMagick. You can see an example output to the right featuring photos of some popular Sun products. BTW, check out photos.sun.com for free, high-quality access to Sun product photography.

To create your own photocubes, you just need POV-Ray and ImageMagick in your path and the photocube.sh script. Being open source, all run on Solaris but also on Linux, NetBSD or any other operating system that can run open source software. I'd love to try this script out on a Niagara 2 system with its 8 cores, 16 pipelines, 64 threads and 8 FPUs. Hmmm, all rendering frames in parallel :).

There are already precompiled distributions of POVRay and ImageMagick on Blastwave that you can install very easily onto your Solaris machine if you don't have them already.

Just call the script with 6 URLs or pathnames. It will then automatically read in the images, render the animation frames and then combine them all into an animated GIF:

-bash-3.00$ ../photocube.sh *.jpg
Converting images to be quadratic...
Fetching and processing 721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing 915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
Fetching and processing ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
Rendering animation frames...
Creating animated gif file...
-bash-3.00$ ls
721_DRIVE-open.1024x768.jpg          blackbox_wind_turbine.1024x768.jpg
773_FrtAbv-78L-PWR-FAN.1024x768.jpg  photocube.gif
915_Lside-plexiOFF.1024x768.jpg      ultra_cool_combo.1024x768.jpg
IMG_4551.1024x768.jpg
-bash-3.00$

The script uses ImageMagick to make the pictures quadratic and to limit their size to 1200x1200 pictures if necessary. Since the -extent switch is fairly new, you'll need to use a newer distribution of ImageMagick, the one on the Solaris Companion CD is sadly not new enough. The POVRay source (embedded in the script) uses an S-curve to turn the cube which produces a natural and smooth acceleration/decelleration effect. It would have been more efficient to let POVRay output PNG files rather than TGA but for some reason some of the PNG files that POVRay produces were not compatible with ImageMagick.

Feel free to modify this script to your needs. You may want to experiment with other ways of animating the cube or other image transition effects. Maybe you want to use ffmpeg to create real video files instead of animated GIFs. Be careful when cranking up the number of frames while using ImageMagick to create animated GIFs, ImageMagick wants to suck in all frames into memory before creating the animated GIF and so you may end up using a lot of memory. If someone has a more elegant, scriptable animated GIF creator, please leave me a comment.

I hope you enjoy this little exercise in raytracing and animation. Let me know if you have suggestions or other ideas to improve this script!

"Cool Apple-Like Photo Animations With POV-Ray, ImageMagick and Solaris" has been brought to you by Constantin's Blooog.
This entry was created on 2007-08-23 13:20:47.0 PST and is associated with the following tags:
apple cool diy howto imagemagick iphoto opensolaris opensource photos pov-ray raytracing script slideshow solaris
You're welcome to use this Permalink , add a comment below or send your feedback to constantin at sun dot com.
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