Matchbox shader bug fixes

Just fixed various things in a bunch of my shaders and updated them on https://logik-matchbook.org (also still on github here) - grab em if you’ve noticed problems… specifically:

  • Ls_Glint might have been producing wrong matte output sometimes and was printing warnings like “blurredluma” might be used before being initialized
  • Ls_Poly was super broken on NVIDIA GPUs and also now has better looking defaults
  • Ls_Vops now has controls for E and F inputs again plus popup menus for blend modes with more options
  • Ls_Chips is now a .mx instead of .glsl to avoid the problem where it stops working every time the batch setup is reloaded (Flame seems to lose the connection to the texture grid image unless it’s inside the .mx)
  • Ls_Sweat was printing warnings about uninitialized use and may have been slightly busted on NVIDIA GPUs
  • Ls_Wireless had pick buttons that didn’t do anything and it wasn’t clear where tracks should be linked if not manually animating start/end points
  • Ls_Nail was also super confusing about how to use track channels/manual offsets
  • Ls_RndmGrade overlay graphs now look a lil better
  • UI tweaks to all the other Ls_ shaders - showing the right number of inputs, better descriptions, tooltips, missing titles on buttons etc

I also noticed Ls_Airglow often prints warnings like:

dlCheckGLError: Texture::reset()
dlCheckGLError:   LX_INVALID_ENUM

…but seems work fine - not sure what causes that exactly but I’m keeping an eye on it :face_with_monocle:

I’m looking at what’s up with crok_skin right now - I can see it looks different on macOS especially in the centre of frame but more annoyingly if I choose a preset from the list in the top Shader menu, the leather/lemon/etc ones, the settings don’t stick when reloading the batch :face_with_spiral_eyes: Anyone else seeing the same thing!?

Any other bugs people have noticed lemme know and I’ll investigate…

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excited kermit the frog GIF

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Rad. Thanks for taking the time to do this, Lewis!

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Thank you so much, Lewis!

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Thanks heaps @lewis

Ls_Airglow is by far my most used matchbox of all time

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Also chipping in with a massive thank you.

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Hi Lewis,

Firstly thanks so much for all of your shaders - they are my go-tos for so much stuff.

If you’re looking at revisions is there any chance you could look at Ls_Lumps? I use it for tonnes of fixes and having 3 ranges makes it super usefull for isolating fixes to single ranges, very helpful for someone like me who can’t paint to save his life.

Any chance you can add multiple outputs to lumps, one per frequency? Is this pissible with matchbox? Currently I tend to expression link 3 and paint/blur/whatever before recombining. Or maybe add a blur per frequency if it’s not possible so avoiding the need to recombine downstream in a lot of cases.

I tend to use it as below:

Once again thanks so much for putting the time in :slight_smile:

Rich

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Matchboxes can only have the one output sadly (plus a matte) :disappointed: Exactly what you’ve done there with the expression links is the best way I think…

I could put blurs inside the shader though, I never thought of that - I’m guessing it doesn’t do much on the colour frequency but blurring the lumps frequency could be good for removing bumps/soft dirt? I might have a play around - some color correction could get folded in as well, what do you normally do in those CC nodes, reduce contrast of the lumps layer?

Ls_Airglow is the bomb. thanks Lewis.

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Hi Lewis, the CC nodes are usually for tweaking contrast. Maybe a blur/sharpen slider (post frequency selection) would address it? For contrast I don’t know if the contrast pivot point would have to be switchable between linear & rec - 0.5 vs 0.18 etc or if this would be an issue?

Finally finished the detective work to get crok_skin matching across mac/linux - the changes are here and attached. Think @GPM is in the middle of a job but he or someone who uses it a lot should probably check it out before I stick it back on logik-matchbook… had to swap out all the various randomisation/noise functions in the end, so the output is similar but not identical to the previous version.

I rebuilt the presets XML as well - some of the presets didn’t set values for all the controls so looked different depending on what order you went through the presets menu in :open_mouth: Also added a lil note to the description about setting a keyframe when you load a preset, because reloading the batch was causing it to forget settings every time otherwise.

BTW on macOS 12.5.1 at least, shader_builder and flame itself don’t print GLSL compiler errors/warnings any more, just “ERROR: One or more attached shaders not successfully compiled” - makes it mega hard to figure out what’s up when you make a mistake (which is constantly in my case :melting_face:) People might want to stick to Linux for making shaders where it tells you what the error is and which line it’s on…

crok_skin_2022.zip (6.8 MB)

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Thank you so much, Lewis!! I will test it soon.

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Got around to having a look at the Lumps shader again - I’ve added blur/sharpen, contrast and gamma for each band plus sorted various bugs, so maybe some fixes will be possible without having to split the bands out in batch now :+1: Uploaded to Shader: Ls_Lumps

Also, unrelated - I noticed a few shaders I hadn’t seen before, all by nobbl211@gmail.com:
Shader: Reframe
Shader: chromatic_adaptation
Shader: Threshold
…does anyone know who the author might be? I can tell from reading the code that they really know what they’re doing, just curious if we have another secret shader developer lurking…

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Hi Lewis many thanks for your updates.

I was playing with the shader and dialling up the bumps which revealed more blemishes. However it didn’t seem to make any difference to a blur I was doing.

Am I right in thinking that if I dial up the bumps then it’s only to see more clearly what the shader has done?

Yes turning it up rather than down will tend to make things look worse - I think the only time I’ve done that was to make subsurface scattering colour textures for 3D, you can really make people’s veins extremely visible if that’s what you need :nauseated_face: Generally though that control doesn’t affect what the filter page blurs do, I figure you’d normally set up the bands on the first page, to get a good separation where the stuff you want to remove is only in one band, and only then start messing with the filter page to see if you can remove it without having to split the band out in batch and paint stuff :+1:

I’ve made a minor tweak to Ls_Glint so that it now works in Baselight - an engineer from Co3 mailed me about it, and I remember somebody else did last year as well but I didn’t have time to investigate until now. It seems like there’s a bug on the FilmLight side that stopped it working a couple years back which they’re aware of now.

Doesn’t affect how it works in Flame but if you have any colorist friends who might benefit from it, let 'em know!

It’s a bit mysterious which shaders work in Baselight and which don’t since there’s no documentation, but I might try to check some others at some point…

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Thanks Lewis. I use ls glint all the time.

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Hey @lewis thanks a lot for the upddates.

Quick bug report:
LS_Bumps recombine inputs doesn’t seem to work in the new version. I tested it with the old one and my workflow is correct. I’m on Rocky Linux, 2023.0.1.

Cheers

Oh interesting - I just checked in 2023.0.0 on Rocky and it does behave differently to the old version because the big Colour/Lumps/Detail buttons on the right are still active when Recombine inputs is enabled, so unless all three are turned on you don’t get the full recombined image… that was kinda deliberate on my part so you can quickly check the bands without flipping between nodes but maybe it’s too confusing? I’ve just updated the tooltip and the shader notes to mention it for now: Shader: Ls_Lumps

(Unless it was broken in some other way as well :face_with_spiral_eyes: hooked up like the screenshot below it seems to work)

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Does anyone know if this is fixed in later versions of MacOS? @Graziella what version of MacOS are you running?