The Briefing Room

Leading visual effects developer The Foundry today announced the debut release of its visual effects plug-ins and image-processing tools for Autodesk‘s Combustion (Windows only) desktop software. For the first time, The Foundry has made its entire Tinderbox collection of industry-leading plug-ins available to Combustion artists, bringing over 70 new effects within easy reach of users and enabling them to significantly enhance their VFX capabilities.

The complete collection of Tinderboxes, 1, 2, 3 and 4, feature over 70 powerful 2D visual effects. Each comes with a multitude of adjustable parameters to give everyone involved in the creation of stylish motion graphics and visual effects, access to a comprehensive toolset that can deliver unlimited creative possibilities.

“Everything we do is driven by what the market wants, and Combustion users were asking for greater visual effects firepower,” commented Dr Bill Collis, CEO at The Foundry. “The Tinderbox collections, deliver just that - cutting-edge creative tools that can be easily used to create stunning effects.”

The Foundry‘s Tinderbox range comprises four separate collections of plug-ins, including generators, creative visual effects and image-processing tools. Examples include: Sky, which generates realistic evolving skies, with controls for clouds, sun, haze, fog, atmosphere and sun flares; Water, which simulates the effect of water droplets rippling on a surface; Fire, for generating realistic animated flames; Colourist, for automatic colour correction and balancing; Starburst, which adds sparkles and highlights; BadTV, for simulating poor television reception; plus over sixty five other stylish effects.

“The Tinderbox series is a powerful collection of tools that have added amazing power and functionality to our shop.” D. Jennekens, Bullseye Post.

Tinderbox - highlights:

Blur: is a time constant sub-pixel guassian blur. It is very fast at large and small blurs and being sub-pixel it can be smoothly animated over time.

Diffuse: scatters pixels in an image.

Sky: generates realistic evolving skies. There are controls for clouds, sun, haze, fog, atmosphere and sun flares plus numerous presets.

HeatHaze: simulates the layered rippling distortions that is characteristic of viewing images through hot air.

Rays: creates a backlit ray effect. The rays are sourced from selected areas of the image‘s luminance, or a matte. The colour of the rays can come from the source image or a fixed colour.

Glass: gives the impression of viewing an image through a layer of distorting glass.

Grain: adds noise to images to simulate grain. A luminance curve is provided to reduce the amount of grain added in the shadows and highlights.

LensFlare: generates realistic and highly customisable lens flares. There are controls for the bright spot, light rays, polygonal lens inter-reflections and much more.

Newsprint: converts images into their constituent dot patterns that are characteristic of printed material. Features three different print methods - Two Tone, CMY and RGB.

NightSky: renders the brightest 9000 stars visible from Earth. It uses real data so constellations are in their correct positions and with their correct colour. Numerous presets display the constellations.

Swirl: distorts an image around a point.

BumpShade: gives images the appearance of depth by falsely extruding the luminance or matte. Lighting is provided to accentuate the relief and parameters to soften the effect are supplied.

Condensation: renders thousands of water particles that clump together into water droplets. The droplets are used to distort the source image giving the appearance of water condensation on glass. The plug-in comes with lighting controls and the effect auto-animates drips.

EdgeDetect: finds and highlights edges in images. The result can be blended back into the original using the built-in blending methods. Quick glows and back-lit effects are possible using this technique.

Silk: is a digital wrinkle cream. It is used to reduce wrinkles, freckles and minor blemishes in actors‘ faces without having to draw mattes. It is a tolerance blur with a variable blur size that can be used to maintain edges and smooth off regions of a similar hue.

Lightning: generates highly realistic forked lightning and plasma bolts. There are numerous parameters to control all aspects of the bolt from fork depth to glow intensity. Optional mattes can be used to restrict the path of the plasma around objects.

Starfield: renders an infinite three dimensional field of stars. There are controls to look in a particular direction or at a fixed position in 3D space regardless of the motion of the observer. An auto mode is supplied to randomly tumble you through space.

Cartoon: flattens colour and adds lines to edges to give a cartoon feel to images.

Channels: a versatile tool for channel and image manipulation. It provides a range of functionality including image based arithmetic, clamping, clipping, channel rewiring and colour space conversion.

Flow: essentially a flood fill along a path defined by a matte. It can be used to write on text and generating animated mattes as transition effects.

Rain: renders 2D rain over an image. It‘s quick to render and gives very plausible results for many shots.

Snow: renders swirling, falling snow that can settle on objects.

SoftGlow: provides a subtle glow to images.

Availability and Pricing:

Now shipping, Tinderbox is available for artists running a Windows version of Combustion. Nodelocked licenses are available for $500.00 / ?250.00 per box. To celebrate the launch of the new Tinderbox range, until the 28th September 07 The Foundry is offering the complete range of four boxes for just $1,500.00 / ?750.00.

Existing Tinderbox for After Effects 7.0 customers who are running a Windows version of Combustion on the same machine as their After Effects 7.0 Pro can download the Combustion (Windows only) builds from The Foundry‘s website. Existing Tinderbox for After Effects 7.0 licenses will license the plug-ins to work on both Combustion and After Effects although customers will not be able to run both programs at the same time.

For more information and free evaluation licenses please visit www.thefoundry.co.uk

The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post production. On February 10th 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award? to The Foundry‘s development team for the Furnace image processing suite. The company now holds a trio of Academy Award? winning products including the high-end compositing system NUKE, and keying application Keylight.

The Foundry‘s products support a wide range of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk? Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, NUKE, Scratch and Shake. The company has also driven OpenFX, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins, now broadly adopted by host and plug-in developers such as Autodesk?, Assimilate, FilmLight, Digital Vision, Grass Valley, Soluciones Graficas por Ordenador (S.G.O.), Photron and others.

Customers include: Digital Domain, The Moving Picture Company, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Warner Bros and Weta Digital Ltd. The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For more information please visit The Foundry‘s website at www.thefoundry.co.uk.