What's New in Flame FX

| Improvements to Bump Displace Using the new Bump Displace inputs, it is now possible to use clips from different bit depths as front and displacement inputs. It is now possible to select either red, green, blue or luminance channels from the incoming displacement input for which the bump will then be extracted. The new Light Threshold parameter allows you to restrict the light exposure by filtering bumps out using their height as the constraint. The higher the light threshold, the fewer bumps are affected, leaving a larger portion of the original unaffected by either light or bump effects. The new Hardware Anti-Aliasing section allows you to apply filtering to the effect to offset problematic aliasing, for example when the effect contains a high height value with a low softness value.
| Improvements to Damage Blotches, Dust and Hairs now have a new Softness parameter allowing their assets to be out of focus. A Proportional option has been added to the Size parameter of Grain, Snow and Pixelation. Analog, Film and Digital Damage Presets have been added. They can be loaded from the Preset File Browser available on the right side of the Setup Name field.
| Improvements to Depth Of Field In addition to the existing Basic Blooming mode, you can now choose the new Additive Blooming mode to control the overall visual contribution of Bokeh effects. The Additive Blooming mode allows you to create higher intensity Bokeh patterns from any source image using a Min and Max threshold for highlight segregation. The Depth-O-Gram now features built-in histogram manipulations to control how the Depth values get mapped into the supported [0,1] range. Two new numeric fields have been added to perform this task: Z Offset and Z Range. Z Offset allows you to "slide" the histogram information within the [0,1] range and define which value should be considered as 0. Z Range allows you to "contract" or "extend" the histogram information around the 0 value defined with the Z Offset position. Depth Of Field now features Z-Depth output, which allows you to propagate the Depth information to other tools of your pipeline. The modifications eventually introduced by the Depth-O-Gram are processed in the output of the node.
| Improvements to Glow A new toggle button has been added in the Matte Output section, which allows you to select between Glow Luma and Blend Matte. The Glow Luma option generates a straight forward luminance conversion of the actual glow effect -- the effect seen when using the Glow Only option in the Result Output. The Blend Matte option outputs the matte used internally to preform the blending of the glow effect over the input image.
| Improvements to Blur You can now choose between 2 Blooming modes: Basic and the new Additive mode. The Additive Blooming mode allows you to create high intensity bokeh patterns from any source image generating extreme highlight content, which was not possible with the Basic mode.
| Improvements to Motif The Motif tool is now available on the Desktop as a module in the Flame FX2 menu. A new Triangle ROI mode has been introduced, as well as proportional scaling and a new Softness setting.
| Improvements to Motion Analysis The Motion Analysis tool is now available on the Desktop as a module in the Flame FX2 menu.
| Improvements to Auto Stabilize The Use Matte button can now be enabled to constrain the Analysis region.
| Motion Blur A brand new GPU-based Motion Blur tool is now available. This tool offers two independent algorithms called Trails and Samples. Here are some of the node's key functionalities: Vector Conversion: The Vector Conversion section allows you to handle normalized vector information without having to leave the tool. Motion Blur Trails controls: Various settings can be used to balance the motion blur trail so it is located either in between, before or after the feature's movement. The Motion Blur Opacity curve gives full control over the opacity of the trail, allowing you to shape the motion blur trail to your liking. See Motion Blur.
| Matchbox Matchbox is an interactive development tool that allows you to run generic OpenGL Shading Language (GLSL) shader code directly in Batch or through the Desktop module, to add specific functionality, or create custom effects. GLSL is a high-level shading language that is part of the OpenGL specification. The Matchbox node automatically populates the user interface based on the parameters required by the shader, or allows you to design and implement more sophisticated interface elements and naming, through the use of an XML sidecar file. Included are a number of useful example shaders, that can be used as is, or serve as starting points for you to develop your own tools. See Matchbox.
| Recursive Ops The Recursive Ops tool can be used to perform a wide range of recursive, accumulation-based blending effects. The tool is very useful to clean up green screens or perform back plate stitching (in conjunction with Auto-stabilize), as well as a wide range of creative effects by using any combination of the included recursive effects: Distortion, Blur, 2D Transform and Colour Correction. See Recursive Ops.
| Stylize The Stylize tool can be used to create a wide range of visual styles on an image sequence, including painting, printing or sketching. The tool offers a collection of 10 core effects that can be stacked and blended together as layers, providing a virtually infinite range of possibilities. The tool ships with over 90 presets grouped in 4 distinct categories: Comic, Paint, Print and Sketch. See Stylize.

#### Topics in this section

- Motion Blur
- Recursive Ops
- Stylize
- Matchbox