Lightbrush is available

#1

From their website:

“Lightbrush is designed to give artists full control over the separation process. With Lightbrush, texture artists, content creators, and photographers can independently edit and manipulate the surface colors and the lighting of real-world imagery. This technology from the frontiers of computer vision enables modes of image editing previously possible only with rendered 3D graphics.”

http://www.tandent.com/lightbrush/

Make sure you check this awesome video!

[VIMEO]65166614[/VIMEO]

#2

Looks like a great tool, been following since the fxguide article.

Unfortunately, pricing it at $2500 is going to chase away 90% of the potential CG users.

They’ll sell 500 @ 2.5k, or 10000 @ 200. It’s probably an issue of not being able to properly support a huge user base.

#3

I agree - wish it was priced more aggressively. Just now Isotropix have lowered the price of clarisse IFX to a much lower level and I am sure that will increase sales and its adoption. I think it’s important to gain a userbase early in a software’s life and a low point of entry will help do that!

I find the pricing model of software and digital goods very interesting, I guess for the vendor the only ‘supply’ in supply vs. depend would be the support - as you stated. I like the model where companies sell the product for $X and then offer support/maintenance at $Y.

#4

is there a demo version to try out ?

#5

I believe you can request a 30 day trial on their site

#6

Um, you can do this in photoshop, I already demonstrated how to accurately edit shadows and retrieve the correct light source color component using nothing more than layer blending, basic averaging and color picking technique on cgtalk several years ago, even before then there were algorithms to extract albedo etc from static images and now there are other much cheaper tools available to automate the process, this is far from cutting edge. If that’s all this product does then I’m sorry, but it’s not worth its current price for the convenience.

#7

I’d be interested to have a look at your technique. Could you share a link?

#8

Sure, here’s an overview from a thread posted in 2010 : http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=857467

At that point I’m pretty sure stuff like Xnormal already existed for extracting albedo from images and a few motion trackers had started to play with this stuff, and I know that me and Paul Everett had been experimenting with albedo calculations from images years before. In a single light source situation it’s not too hard to do, then it’s easy to paint in as you please.

#9

Just to point out, it’s a great accomplishment to get a product to market, but $2500 is a steep asking price for a very specialized tool with a lot of marketing nonsense speak but little practical explanation of the value add over traditional techniques used to solve such situations. For instance can it handle multiple light sources in a scene? How about normal or depth calculation, and perhaps relighting with that rather than with brushes? Perhaps the ability to generate a light dome from the image?

These are all possible manually and algorithmically and most people here will have done this stuff before, so ignoring the marketing speak about how cutting edge it’s meant to be, the real question is whether what’s on offer pays for itself in terms of improved workflow, time saved. That’s all any tool can offer, but right now what’s been shown isn’t selling that to me.

#10

Thank you!

#11

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