The Foundry Announces Shipping Of OCULA 2.1

Leading visual effects software developer The Foundry has announced a new release of OCULA, their unique collection of plug-in tools that address common problems experienced with stereoscopic imagery in post production.
Winner of a TVB Europe IBC Award in 2008 and an inward in 2009, OCULA boosts productivity and ultimately helps deliver a more rewarding stereoscopic viewing experience.
OCULA 2.1, created by The Foundry's SCITECH Award-winning R&D team, is the result of a number of collaborations with artists on high end stereo projects including Avatar. This production testing has enabled us to deliver significant improvements to workflow and robustness.
A big research has resulted in huge improvements to ColourMatcher, allowing for the reliable correction of serious localised colour differences introduced by the polarising effects in mirror and prism rigs.
DisparityGenerator now generates higher-quality disparity maps, with a range of new parameters to help get the best results from tricky footage. We have also added a DisparityViewer plug-in to help visualise disparity maps.
The VerticalAligner tool, used for the correction of misaligned plates, can now also correct existing 3D camera solves at the same time as performing the image correction and the Solver tool, used to calculate stereo geometry, now has a number of workflow improvements, including the ability to manually add feature matches between views.
Erik Winquist, Compositing Supervisor on Avatar at Weta Digital, said: "The OCULA plug-ins for Nuke became an impressive and invaluable toolset for us on Avatar. I wouldn't want to dive into another stereo show without them in the arsenal."
Nuke is currently the only visual effects compositing system that supports OCULA.
(KMcA)