Monday, December 24th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Get Motiva’s RealPerception for Nuke and Fusion

Motiva has released RealPerception, an intriguing new collection of compositing plugins that attempts to mimic real perception, whether “human based, camera or photographic film”.

The tools are compatible with Nuke, Fusion, Autodesk Composite and Sony Vegas.

This is one of those products that is easier to see than read about, so we’ve embedded all three of Motiva’s demo videos here.

(Note: as a Spanish developer, Motiva has opted to use speech synthesis for the voiceover, resulting in some odd pronunciations of technical terms. It’s like hearing GLaDOS read a product manual via Google Translate.)

Tools to simulate real cameras
In practice, most of the tools, which are divided into three ‘packs’, simulate the look of real cameras rather than the behaviour of the human eye or brain.

For example, the Realcamera tool from Pack 1 (shown above) offers a fairly standard range of colour response, vignetting and chromatic aberration controls, along with the option to simulate bleach bypass photography.

More interesting is Pack 2, which does go some way towards simulating human perception.

The RealEdges filter mimics human edge detection, generating more realistic object boundaries in 3D renders: something built upon by the RealDeep tool, which controls perceived depth.

There is also a rather nice option to adjust tonemapping on moving from a darkened to a well-lit environment (or vice versa) with a delay to simulate the way the human eye adjusts to changing light levels.

Pack 3 introduces RealStereo, which generates stereoscopic output from a single images and a Z-Depth pass. The results can be outputted in a variety of standard stereo formats.

RealMove adopts a similar approach to fake small camera shifts from a single frame and a Z-Depth pass: not enough to generate an entire camera move, but fine for product presentation work.

Price and availability
The RealPerception tools, which are all based on the Open Effects (OFX) standard, are available at a list price of €99 each (around $130) or €198 ($260) for all three.

Motiva is offering a 35% discount to anyone ordering before the end of the year.

Read more about RealPerception on the Motiva website