VFX Decimal & Hex Conversions -

Decimal & Hex Conversions

Picture This:

An animation professional explaining a lay person about the amount of work that goes into creating a single second of animation.

The professional is most probably going to have a proud smile, and the lay person will have an amazed expression.

Now let’s pause for a second and think… Have we, as professionals from the animation ecosystem, ever had that amazed expression on our faces?

There are so many things that we use at work so regularly and take so much for granted. If only, we were to be a little more curious, we would realize that a lot of technology which we take for granted is actually amazing!

We are all aware that the computer at the deepest level works on the binary language that is 1 & 0. It is also common knowledge that most electronic display devices have RGB as the default color mode and there are close to approximately 16.5 million colors that can be displayed. Each of these 16.5 million shades of colors has an individual hex code, an individual RGB combination and an individual binary code.

Now consider this fact that every single (multi layered) rendered frame has hundreds of thousands of pixels where each pixel could have a different shade resulting in a lot of binary code. 24 frames in second means 24 times of that voluminous code changing 24 times a second based on advanced algorithms!

For all those curious about what’s the relation between hex codes and RGB, hex codes here is some interesting information. Decimals, Hex code and RGB.

WEIGHTS:- Each digit of a multi digit number has a fixed value determined by its position. Those values are called weights.

Decimal to Hexadecimal Conversion
The RGB values are in decimal form.Therefore ,before we dwell upon the relation between hexadecimal & RGB, we will first see how a decimal number is converted to its hexadecimal equivalent.

Here is the procedure which is used for this conversion.
1. Take any decimal number.
2. Divide that number by 16, note down quotient & remainder. Remainder will be between the range 0 to 15.
3. Divide the quotient occurred, by 16.
4. Repeat step 3 again , till quotient is no longer divisible by 16.
5. The resultant sequence of remainders must be read from top to bottom in order to get the equivalent hexa decimal number.
Following is the example which shows how the above conversion can be done.

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