As a result we started thinking would there be a cool way to also display the backfacing surfaces and encode them into RGB and XYZ.

Producing the data would be easy enough using a point cloud or even bending over bake2d to make it work using UV coordinates.

But you could also sort the data in interesting ways so unless you looked at the correlation between RGB and XYZ the image would either be meaning less in raster format, or could have another look to it.

So I went looking for a good python binding to a float or half float image library.

OpenEXR has some functionality see this doc

but then I stumbled on cortex-vfx on google code, it is basically a CG toolkit, like CGKit

After failing to get cortex-vfx to build on my imac, (some problem with python and boost not using the same version of python)

I decided to throw Ubuntu 10.04 onto some hardware and see if I could get cortex vfx to install

here are the bit and pieces that I needed to put onto a fresh install:

• libilmbase-dev
• libopenexr-dev
• libtbb-dev
• libboost-all-dev
• libtiff4-dev

here are my options for the scons build so far


CXXFLAGS = ['-pipe', '-Wall', '-O2', '-DNDEBUG', '-DBOOST_DISABLE_ASS
ERTS']
TESTCXXFLAGS = ['-pipe', '-Wall', '-O0']
PYTHONCXXFLAGS = ['-pipe', '-Wall', '-O2', '-DNDEBUG', '-DBOOST_DISAB
LE_ASSERTS']
LINKFLAGS = []
BOOST_INCLUDE_PATH = '/usr/include'
BOOST_LIB_PATH = '/usr/lib'
BOOST_LIB_SUFFIX = ''
OPENEXR_INCLUDE_PATH = '/usr/include/OpenEXR'
OPENEXR_LIB_PATH = '/usr/lib'


Once I get Maya and Nuke installed I can have a look at building against these packages also.

Then hopefully I can find out if it is going to work at all

Its been building for about an hour on this machine with about 11000 bogomips, Intel(R) Pentium(R) D CPU 2.80GHz, hopefully I can post about all the wonderful things cortex-vfx can do

Edit: Huzzah it installed

Now I just need to find some time to do what I intended to do, but I might compile it against Maya and 3delight first