Special Visual Effects Research Articles

Фреймы TikTok-буктрейлеров

<p>This article poses the problem of the frame content of book trailers published on TikTok Internet platform. The aim of the research is to describe the features of TikTok’s book trailer’s frames as a genre of polycode text, which is achieved by the following tasks: to make a playlist of collected empirical material; to present an abstract analysis of scientific works devoted to the frame; to present the characteristics of TikTok’s book trailers as a genre of polycode text and its genre features; to determine the positions of TikTok’s book trailer in relation to the frame; to analyze the frame content of TikTok’s book trailer. The study material was 70 book trailers posted in the public domain on TikTok platform. These videos were placed in the form of a playlist for this study. Linguistic description and frame analysis methods were used to identify the following types of TikTok’s book trailers' frames: «key words», «plot details», «symbols». Each of them is characterized by its own characteristics of the information contained. The frames of TikTok’s book trailers reflect the structural plot elements of the primary source — the book. They arrange the voluminous information of the literary work in boxes, lining up according to the principles of logical relationship to each other. Each TikTok’s book trailer’s slot is a frame, fragments of video or audio material, sound and visual special effects; some images that are subjected to a socio-cultural factor.</p>

Research Progress on the Design of Structural Color Materials Based on 3D Printing

AbstractThe structural color is produced by the reflection of light through a periodic dielectric structure with photonic bandgap. Because of its special visual effects, researchers in many fields begin to pay attention to photonic crystals with structural colors. This review focuses on the combination of 3D printing technology and photonic crystal structural color materials, summarizes the influence factors of structural color rendering mechanism and the evaluation of color performance, and summarizes the research of structural color materials in simulation. Finally, the challenges faced by structural color materials are summarized, and the future development trend of structural color materials is prospected.

MEMORY AND SPACE IN KAZUO ISHIGURO'S NOVEL "THE BURIED GIANT": INTERMEDIAL ASPECT

The aim of the article is to investigate the phenomenon of intermediality in 2015 novel The Buried Giant by the British writer Kazuo Ishiguro. Particular attention is paid to the notion of “literary cinematographicness” (also known as cinematic or filmic mode), which is defined as the use of cinematic techniques and effects in literature, thus creating the effect of multimodality, with a dramatic-intensive flow of events in the text. Analyzing examples from Ishiguro’s novel, the article focuses on such elements of literary cinematographicness as the prevalent audio-visual modality, with an in-depth semantics of sensory images and characters’ non-verbal language; the abundance of audial and visual special effects; as well as incorporating different shots sizes, perspectives, and angles that produce the effect of multidimensional space in the recipient’s mind. Furthermore, the novel’s central motif of memory and recollections determines its non-linear chronotope, with such cinematic techniques as montage, dynamic frame shots, and flashbacks becoming instrumental in depicting the complex spatio-temporal relations between the scattered scenes and images.

Which emphasis technique to use? Perception of emphasis techniques with varying distractors, backgrounds, and visualization types.

Emphasis effects are visual changes that make data elements distinct from their surroundings. Designers may use computational saliency models to predict how a viewer’s attention will be guided by a specific effect; however, although saliency models provide a foundational understanding of emphasis perception, they only cover specific visual effects in abstract conditions. To address these limitations, we carried out crowdsourced studies that evaluate emphasis perception in a wider range of conditions than previously studied. We varied effect magnitude, distractor number and type, background, and visualization type, and measured the perceived emphasis of 12 visual effects. Our results show that there are perceptual commonalities of emphasis across a wide range of environments, but also that there are limitations on perceptibility for some effects, dependent on a visualization’s background or type. We developed a model of emphasis predictability based on simple scatterplots that can be extended to other viewing conditions. Our studies provide designers with new understanding of how viewers experience emphasis in realistic visualization settings.

Research on 3D Animation Processing Technology in Modern Art Design System

This article analyzes the expressiveness of 3D animation processing technology in terms of lens, character movement, light and shadow, detail shaping, visual special effects, and traditional elements. This paper studies the key points of technical application such as logical structure establishment, 3D animation modeling, animation model texture rendering, and dynamic interactive processing. The author sorted out the test environment, animation modeling test, rendering result test, interactive function evaluation, etc. The purpose of this article is to improve the content rationality of modern art design system and improve the application effect of 3D animation processing technology.

Fine-grained talking face generation with video reinterpretation

Generating a talking face video from a given audio clip and an arbitrary face image has many applications in areas such as special visual effects and human–computer interactions. This is a challenging task, as it requires disentangling semantic information from both input audio clips and face image, then synthesizing novel animated facial image sequences from the combined semantic features. The desired output video should maintain both video realism and audio–lip motion consistency. To achieve these two objectives, we propose a coarse-to-fine tree-like architecture for synthesizing realistic talking face frames directly from audio clips. This is followed by a video-to-word regeneration module to translate the synthesized talking videos back to the words space, which is enforced to align with the input audios. With multi-level facial landmark attentions, the proposed audio-to-video-to-words framework can generate fine-grained talking face videos that are not only synchronous with the input audios but also maintain visual details from the input face images. Multi-purpose discriminators are also adopted for adversarial learning to further improve both image fidelity and semantic consistency. Extensive experiments on GRID and LRW datasets demonstrate the advantages of our framework over previous methods in terms of video quality and audio–video synchronization.

Study on the Colorimetry Properties of Transparent Wood Prepared from Six Wood Species.

Transparent wood (TW) was prepared by directly impregnating the wood cell wall and cavity with index-matched prepolymerized methyl methacrylate (MMA). In this process, lignin is retained compared with the preparation of transparent wood in the past, making the production faster and more energy-efficient. The innovation lies in that the prepared transparent wood retains the natural color and texture of the wood while transmitting light, especially under the illumination of a specific light source, which exist as the special visual effects. In order to enhance the practicality of the research and effectively expand the types of home decoration materials, six common wood species with different densities were selected in the experiment. Then the characteristics and mechanisms of wood, that is, color difference, light transmittance, microstructure, changes of chemical functional groups, and tensile strength, before and after PMMA impregnating were compared and analyzed. It is concluded that the light transmittance and mechanical properties of the wood have been improved, and a good synergistic effect between wood and PMMA has been confirmed by the analysis of scanning electron microscopy and infrared spectroscopy. The above highlights make pervious to transparent wood, which has the potential as an excellent functional decorative material.

Unsupervised Meta-Learning of Figure-Ground Segmentation via Imitating Visual Effects

This paper presents a “learning to learn” approach to figureground image segmentation. By exploring webly-abundant images of specific visual effects, our method can effectively learn the visual-effect internal representations in an unsupervised manner and uses this knowledge to differentiate the figure from the ground in an image. Specifically, we formulate the meta-learning process as a compositional image editing task that learns to imitate a certain visual effect and derive the corresponding internal representation. Such a generative process can help instantiate the underlying figure-ground notion and enables the system to accomplish the intended image segmentation. Whereas existing generative methods are mostly tailored to image synthesis or style transfer, our approach offers a flexible learning mechanism to model a general concept of figure-ground segmentation from unorganized images that have no explicit pixel-level annotations. We validate our approach via extensive experiments on six datasets to demonstrate that the proposed model can be end-to-end trained without ground-truth pixel labeling yet outperforms the existing methods of unsupervised segmentation tasks.

A Study on the Application of Visual Special Effects to TV Dramas; Focus on ,

A Study on the Application of Visual Special Effects to TV Dramas; Focus on ,

Woven Fabric Model Creation from a Single Image

We present a fast, novel image-based technique for reverse engineering woven fabrics at a yarn level. These models can be used in a wide range of interior design and visual special effects applications. To recover our pseudo-Bidirectional Texture Function (BTF), we estimate the three-dimensional (3D) structure and a set of yarn parameters (e.g., yarn width, yarn crossovers) from spatial and frequency domain cues. Drawing inspiration from previous work [Zhao et al. 2012], we solve for the woven fabric pattern and from this build a dataset. In contrast, however, we use a combination of image space analysis and frequency domain analysis, and, in challenging cases, match image statistics with those from previously captured known patterns. Our method determines, from a single digital image, captured with a digital single-lens reflex (DSLR) camera under controlled uniform lighting, the woven cloth structure, depth, and albedo, thus removing the need for separately measured depth data. The focus of this work is on the rapid acquisition of woven cloth structure and therefore we use standard approaches to render the results. Our pipeline first estimates the weave pattern, yarn characteristics, and noise statistics using a novel combination of low-level image processing and Fourier analysis. Next, we estimate a 3D structure for the fabric sample using a first-order Markov chain and our estimated noise model as input, also deriving a depth map and an albedo. Our volumetric textile model includes information about the 3D path of the center of the yarns, their variable width, and hence the volume occupied by the yarns, and colors. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach through comparison images of test scenes rendered using (a) the original photograph, (b) the segmented image, (c) the estimated weave pattern, and (d) the rendered result.

Vectorized point based global illumination on Intel MIC architecture

Point-based global illumination (PBGI) is a popular rendering method in visual special effects and motion picture productions. This rendering algorithm models the 3D scene as a dense point cloud, which acts as caching records for light transport simulation. Structured in a tree, this cache supports the image synthesis stage through massive adaptive tree cut searches, together with the projection of these cuts on the many receiver shading points i.e., unprojected pixels in 3D space, where visibility is solved with receiver-specific z-buffer. These two operations are both time consuming in this algorithm, but they can be formulated for efficient parallel execution, in particular regarding wide-SIMD hardware. During the PBGI tree traversal procedure, we introduce a single-receiver traversal scheme for incoherent receivers, a packet traversal scheme for coherent receivers, as well as logic for dynamically switching between these methods at run-time. During the per-receiver rasterization procedure, we propose three different vectorization strategies for near-, mid- and far-distance points separately. We conducted experiments on an Intel Many Integrated Core (MIC) architecture and report results on several scenes, showing that up to a 9 × speedup can be achieved when compared with non-vectorized execution during the traversal step, and nearly 2.5 × speedup during rasterization step without quality degradation.

Inkjet Alchemy - Inkjet-printing of Thin Metal Oxide Films with Metallic Appearance

In this paper, we describe a new way of producing digital prints with high reflectivity and dichroic or metallic appearance. The special visual effect is achieved using conventional office class inkjet printers and jetting inks containing metal oxide nano-particles onto surface of nanoporous substrates, such as inkjet photo papers. A thin metal oxide layer of uniform thickness in ~10-1000μm range may be produced almost instantly by ambient drying of the print. The formation of metal oxide layer of highly uniform thickness is a result of interaction of metal oxide ink with surface of inkjet media of certain pore structure and high volume porosity. Capillary forces drain liquid phase of the ink into the substrate, while retaining the nanoparticles on the surface. These forces also help to flatten jetted metal oxide particles into optically uniform and continuous layer with high optical reflectivity. The appearance of the films produced is highly dependent on refractive index, native coloration and printed layer thickness of the metal oxide used. Inks based on magnetite (Fe3O4, refractive index ~2.5) printed into layers with ~ 50-100-nm thickness produce prints with visual appearance of metallic gold. Inkjet printing may also be used for stacking high refractive index metal oxide films with layers of conventional colorants (organic pigment particles) and produce prints with metallic color appearance.

Mithras in Scotland: A Mithraeum at Inveresk (East Lothian)

AbstractExcavations to the east of the Roman fort of Inveresk in 2010 partly uncovered remains of a Mithraeum — the first from Scotland and the earliest securely dated example from Britain. A large rectangular sunken feature with lateral benches contained two altars buried face down at its north-western end. One was dedicated to Mithras, with iconography of both Mithras and Apollo as well as libation vessels. The other was dedicated to Sol, with a frieze above showing the Four Seasons. The Sol altar had a recess in the rear for a light which would have shone through his pierced rays, eyes, mouth and nose. Remains of an iron rod behind the nose hint at a more complex arrangement to create special visual or acoustic effects. Paint and plaster traces were recorded on both altars. The dedicator, G(aius) Cas(sius) Fla(…), a centurion, may have been in command of the garrison or of a legionary detachment. Stylistic links, especially in letter form, connect the work to sculptors of Legio XX. The stones and pigments are most likely from local sources. Little of the setting could be explored but there were traces of a precinct. A pit beside the Mithraeum included a large part of a well-used fineware beaker, which represented a deliberate offering. The Supplementary Material available online (http://journals.cambridge.org/bri) contains detailed descriptions of the altars, observations on the stone-working technology, lithology and pigment analysis, with extensive illustrations.

A novel approach to multi-scale blending based on saliency mapping for multimedia image compositing applications

In multimedia applications, compositing is an inevitable step for creating special visual effects from entertainment to education. It is often desirable to merge two regions or an object from one image over background of another image to get a completely new image. However, compositing multiple images with different textures and colors results in the creation of visual artifacts along the boundaries. A multi-scale seamless image compositing method is proposed to minimize these artifacts in order to generate visually appealing and natural looking composites. Unlike existing compositing techniques, the proposed method automatically detects the visually salient objects from the source image for merging it over a destination image background. Novel facets of the algorithm are: (1) use of a novel salient object detection method for automatic mask generation, (2) formulation of a novel 2-D exponentially weighted Savitzky–Golay (2-D EWS–G) filter, which is an extension of 2-D S-G filter, for multi-scale pyramid based blending with edge preserving blurring property. Experiments performed over different datasets are compared with the state-of-the-art methods to justify the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. Despite smoothing the seams, our algorithm retains the sharpness of the image features, effectively reduces noise, and is robust to change in window size of the proposed filter. Thus, the proposed algorithm exhibits a considerable improvement in image compositing and hence it could be quite useful for multimedia applications.

Inverse Modelling of Incompressible Gas Flow in Subspace

AbstractThis paper advocates a novel method for modelling physically realistic flow from captured incompressible gas sequence via modal analysis in frequency‐constrained subspace. Our analytical tool is uniquely founded upon empirical mode decomposition (EMD) and modal reduction for fluids, which are seamlessly integrated towards a powerful, style‐controllable flow modelling approach. We first extend EMD, which is capable of processing 1D time series but has shown inadequacies for 3D graphics earlier, to fit gas flows in 3D. Next, frequency components from EMD are adopted as candidate vectors for bases of modal reduction. The prerequisite parameters of the Navier–Stokes equations are then optimized to inversely model the physically realistic flow in the frequency‐constrained subspace. The estimated parameters can be utilized for re‐simulation, or be altered toward fluid editing. Our novel inverse‐modelling technique produces real‐time gas sequences after precomputation, and is convenient to couple with other methods for visual enhancement and/or special visual effects. We integrate our new modelling tool with a state‐of‐the‐art fluid capturing approach, forming a complete pipeline from real‐world fluid to flow re‐simulation and editing for various graphics applications.

BRDF Representation and Acquisition

AbstractPhotorealistic rendering of real world environments is important in a range of different areas; including Visual Special effects, Interior/Exterior Modelling, Architectural Modelling, Cultural Heritage, Computer Games and Automotive Design.Currently, rendering systems are able to produce photorealistic simulations of the appearance of many real‐world materials. In the real world, viewer perception of objects depends on the lighting and object/material/surface characteristics, the way a surface interacts with the light and on how the light is reflected, scattered, absorbed by the surface and the impact these characteristics have on material appearance. In order to re‐produce this, it is necessary to understand how materials interact with light. Thus the representation and acquisition of material models has become such an active research area.This survey of the state‐of‐the‐art of BRDF Representation and Acquisition presents an overview of BRDF (Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function) models used to represent surface/material reflection characteristics, and describes current acquisition methods for the capture and rendering of photorealistic materials.

Virtual four-dimensional environments for human-computer interaction

The paper discusses basic approaches to implementation of a graphical user interface (GUI) as virtual two- and three-dimensional environments for human-computer interaction. A design approach to virtual four-dimensional environments based on special visual effects is proposed. Functional capabilities of the FDC package that implements an environment prototype and principles of user operation are given.

The Analysis of the Visual-Effects used in the Film Pohang

Today, visual-special effects in films do not merely focus on creating impossible expressions, but can also be found in various other instances, such as the reconstruction of reality and in predicting the outcome of shots through pre-visualization. However, it also has disadvantages, such as an increase in production costs if the pre-planning process has not been executed properly. This study intends to analyze how visual effects have been applied in the film by providing examples of the visual-special effects processes that were used in the film Pohang, and by proposing the most effective special effects techniques. This study selects some of the film’s scenes in order to investigate the content, what objectives were intended to be expressed, and what the director’s requirements were, and then identifies the plan and composition that were designed to complete these scenes. In addition, it explains problematic factors that the visual effects team encountered and presents technical methods used to solve these issues. It also explores how problems are assessed and rectified, identifies the limits of visual-special effects production during the post-production process in low-budget filmmaking, and presents methods of circumventing such limits.

Design Analysis of Visual Illusion Application in Visual Communication

Visual illusion is a universal phenomenon that deviates from people’s conventional perception experience. Applying this phenomenon into design can exploit vast form innovation in visual field. This paper takes advantage of visual illusion to widen designer’s design thought. Especially, the special visual effects it generates can intensively simulate human vision and induce psychological association. Visual illusion embodies a sort of meaningful form as well as declares the various manifestation patterns of visual design itself.

Design and Analysis of Visual Illusion Application in Visual Communication

Visual illusion is a universal phenomenon that deviates from people’s conventional perception experience. Applying this phenomenon into design can exploit vast form innovation in visual field. This paper takes advantage of visual illusion to widen designer’s design thought. Especially, the special visual effects it generates can intensively simulate human vision and induce psychological association. Visual illusion embodies a sort of meaningful form as well as declares the various manifestation patterns of visual design itself.