Hi,

Does anybody knows if it is possible to convert and image to fractal in houdini, I remember that some old softs could do it

thanks !

Julien.

I don't know if this is what you are after but you can use the trace SOP.

You can use or create an image of cracked glass and in a paint or illustration package, using a brush that is a pixel wide or curve tool, trace the cracks or process the image to get thin lines for the cracks. Use a trace SOP to build geometry from the crack image.

If you use too wide a brush or the lines are too thick, you will get double edged lines like in illustrator.

There are a few controls in the trace SOP to reduce the number of points, etc.

I see what you mean, and it's a cool function too, but what I want to achieve is to convert a bitmap texture to a procedural one, I saw some softs doing that, and I thought that maybe Houdini would be able to do that due to it's procedural architecture and VEX building 8)

What is “convert and image to fractal” ???

basically it's about aproximating a bitmap into fractal functions

Undertaker
Does anybody knows if it is possible to convert and image to fractal in houdini, I remember that some old softs could do it

Well; if you *do* remember the name of those “softs”, then *please* let us know – turning an arbitrary image into a small recursive function would be a revolutionary discovery indeed!

I think that what you may be thinking about is a *compression* mechanism that made some waves when it came out a few years ago and was implemented (or at least *claimed* to) in at least one commercial image-manipulation program. The algo claimed to use self-similarity as part of the analysis of the image and so was referred to as “fractal” compression. Can't recall the details right now, sorry; but I *do* remember a lot of heated debate over whether this was real or just another vapour-ware claim/patent…

No. Houdini doesn't do this; although it may be slotted for version 205 or thereabouts.

Well, you are right that's what I was thinking about, I just forgot it was “compression” . Ok, so real convertion doesn't exist
Let's wait until v.205 !

Regarding fractal image compression, yes it's very real. I know that at one point, both RealPlayer and Microsoft Encyclopedia used it. It's developed by the company started by Michael Barsnley, the guy who invented it. However, the company seems to have recently converted to focusing on digital asset management software so not sure what happened to the fractal guys. I had a prof that went to work for them, having done stuff with fractal wavelet image compression. The main problem with the technology though was that it was extremely long to encode and I recall them having a hardware solution at one point.

edward
Regarding fractal image compression, yes it's very real.

Thanks for the info Edward.

Yup; I just did a little google an came across a lot of stuff on it – actually, our own Waterloo seems to be a bit of a hot-spot for it

Given the ratios I saw, I wander why it's not being used a lot more. I guess it just takes too long to encode/decode for trivial applications…