What is Film Grain?  Real world images often have "noise" in the image, due to the imperfect behavior of film. The noise appears as very small, random discolorations. It's extremely easy to see in any motion picture if you look carefully—every part of the image is "alive" with rapid, very fine, static. It's harder to see in video transfers of films, since video blurs it a lot.  Real film grain has an odd behavior due to the response of film and the way it is processed. Brighter areas of the film have more visible grain than darker areas. There's very little grain visible in solid black areas. However, there's an interesting behavior as the film gets extremely bright. At this top-end (nearly white), the film becomes saturated, and the grain is quickly washed out. You can see this effect when watching a film by looking at a bright, solid white region, which will have no visible grain if the surface is bright enough.  Video can also have grain-like errors, due to poor-quality cameras and recording. The effect isn’t caused by the same film response effects, but it (coincidentally) has similar behavior.  Installation  Copy the Grain.p file to your Newtek\Plugins\Layout directory on your hard drive. Run LightWave Layout Click the Add Plug-ins button on the General Options tab of the Options panel. Use the file requester to load the Grain.p file you just copied to your hard drive. The Plug-in  The Film Grain plug-in is an Image Filter Plug-in and is selected on the Image Processing tab of LightWave's Effects panel.  Film Grain adds effects that emulate the film-grain artifact. This can be very important when trying to composite 3D imagery into a background plate. Since the 3D part doesn't naturally have the "grain" of the background, it can feel very artificial and sterile. Your eye tends to see that it's different from the background, like a layer floating above it [which is quite close to the truth!]  By adding grain to the rendered imagery to match the background grain, this disparity can be reduced considerably. Even if the entire frame is rendered, it can be useful to add grain to make it feel more "alive", like real footage.
Region Parameters  The radio-button controls at the top of the panel allow you to select the regions you wish grain to be applied to.  Apply to all surfaces (but not BG) is useful for compositing. If you have a background plate that already has grain naturally applied to it, you simply want to add grain to the rendered geometry but leave the background alone, which is what this control does. It uses the alpha channel to determine what regions are grained or not.  Apply to full image will add grain to the entire frame, regardless of background. This is useful if your entire scene is rendered, or if your background plate is too clean and you want grain added on top of it anyway.  Apply only to flagged surfaces. Occasionally you may want to add grain only to a certain surfaces in your scene. You can use LightWave's "Special Buffers" in the Surface Panel to "flag" a surface with a value from 0 to 255. A flagged-surface is assigned a value of 255 by LightWave, and an unflagged-surface has a value of 0. You can change these values for each surface in that surface panel control. When Film Grain is applied using this option, those surface buffer values determine which surfaces get grain applied to them.  Apply only to unflagged surfaces will reverse the natural application of flagged surfaces. In this case, surfaces with a value of 0 get fully grained, and surfaces with a value of 255 have no grain added.  Do not apply (disable for now) will turn off the graining process. This is useful when you are making test renders, and do not care about film grain for your quick trials. You can leave Film Grain applied but disabled, and then re-activate it only for your final rendering.
Grain Scale  Grain scale (in pixels) sets the size of the grain. In real life, the size of grain depends on the film stock and format. The grain itself (the discolored spots) are typically extremely small, and in digitized film, it's usually only at the size of a single pixel. Sometimes it gets larger, especially when the film is something like 8mm stock.  In the plug-in, you can set this film grain size in pixels. The default is 2 pixels, and this is rarely changed.  Real grain changes completely and abruptly every frame. If for some reason you want to have the grain "frozen", you can turn off this effect by deselecting the control labeled  Change Grain Every Frame.
Grain Appearance  The most important settings of the plug-in describe the strength of the grain. The visibility of grain can be set for each of the three Red, Green, and Blue color channels independently. In most film, these tend to respond similarly, but film is often color-corrected in processing and scanning, which introduces difference in the RGB responses. The Film Grain plug-in allows you to set the three channels independently to match these differences.  The response is selected by entering two numbers for each channel. The first number is a "fixed" amount of variation, which you can think of as the amount of grain seen in a solid black region. A value of, say, 4, would cause grain to perturb your image color by up to 4 units (out of the usual 0-255 color range for images).  The second control describes the way grain becomes stronger as the image gets brighter. It adds extra variation based on the brightness of the image. A control setting of 2% would allow the image to vary up to 2% of the image brightness. Thus, a pixel with a value of 200, with a 2% grain variation, would have grain of brightness 4.  These two parameters (the base variation, plus the percentage variation) are added together to come up with the total variation. As an example, a variation of "6" plus "5%" applied to an pixel with brightness of 100 would have a grain variation of 6 + 0.05 * 100 = 6 + 5 = 11.  Surprisingly, real film responses can be extremely well reproduced with just these two controls.  White Variation   Real film doesn't have "white" colored grain, but Film Grain adds a channel for white grain anyway. This is mostly for special effects, though it could be used for the monochrome grain of black and white film. It can also be used for reasonable TV static, especially when it has a large grain size and very high strength.
Grain Decay  The final, most subtle, effect is the decay of film grain at the very brightest regions. Some film types don't visibly saturate, and some do, so this is an optional effect in Film Grain, allowing you to match real film. When the Include saturated grain effect checkbox is turned on, two additional controls become available, labeled Start reduction at intensity and Full reduction at intensity. A pixel in your original image that is brighter than the "start" value will not have the full grain variation added; it will start to weaken. [This is a smooth, not sudden effect, however.]  Pixels that are brighter than the "full reduction" value will have no grain added at all.  For example, if the "Start" value is 200, and the "Full" value is 230, a pixel with brightness 200 would be at full brightness, one at 215 would be at half brightness, and one at 230 or more brightness will have no grain at all. This is actually a smooth drop-off curve, and approximates the true saturation effect very closely.
Other  The bottom L and S buttons allow you to load and save settings into a file. The CD includes some sample settings you can use.  It's possible to add multiple copies of Film Grain to a single scene, to allow complicated mixtures of grain.  You can click the title bar for a nifty about box, which includes the phone number for technical support.  If you use Wacom tablets in "relative mode" with the GUI, the minisliders don't work well.

email: tech@newtek.com
fax: (913) 228-8222
phone: (913) 228-8282; 8am to 8pm Central M-Th; 9am to 6pm Fri.

Software License and Limited Warranty

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