YFilm Voxel
Turns any plate into a voxel world on the GPU: pixel sorted in 3D, lit by one sun, seen through a camera you can tilt.
The plate is cut into voxels, and every voxel becomes a column of cubes in its own colour, as tall as its brightness, darkness, saturation, a channel or its alpha. Before the columns are built, the voxels can be pixel sorted along rows or columns, so a sorted span rises as a ramp or a staircase.
It works inside Nuke's 3D system: plug a Camera into the cam input and the voxels render through it, tracked moves included, and a depth.Z pass lets you ZMerge them with your other renders. Nine looks set the sort, voxels, camera and light in one click.
- Height from brightness, darkness, saturation, red, green, blue, alpha or flat, with a height curve, base height, whole or smooth cubes and random heights.
- Pixel sort in 3D: sort or stretch the voxels up, down, left or right by brightness, hue, saturation or a channel, inside a brightness range, with a maximum span and random breaks.
- Camera: orthographic or perspective, with tilt, spin, zoom and pan. Tilt 0 looks straight down and gives back the pixelated plate, so animating the tilt folds the plate up into the world.
- Nuke 3D: render through a Camera on the cam input, place the world with translate, rotate and scale or an Axis, and ZMerge it with ScanlineRender using the depth.Z pass.
- One sun: direction, height, colour and strength, shadows between the columns and on the floor, ambient light, occlusion near the floor, dark edges and cube lines.
- Extras: gaps, floating cubes, colour levels, anti-aliasing, and a transparent, solid or source plate background. Premultiplied CG with alpha builds only where the alpha is.
- Nuke: Nuke 13 or later, BlinkScript. Runs on the GPU (Metal, CUDA or OpenCL) or vectorised on the CPU.
- Render time: Grows with the voxel count and the anti-aliasing: halving the voxel size gives four times the voxels, and anti-aliasing 3 traces 9 rays per pixel.