VizWorld.com

UT Austin has a news story up about their HPC “Ranger” and the associated visualization cluster “Spur”.

“Spur is the first-of-its-kind visualization resource to be tightly integrated with a high performance computing system (HPC) of Ranger’s magnitude,” Paul Navratil, Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) visualization scientist, said. “Each Spur node is more than a researcher will have on their desktop or laptop, and the remote visualization aspect allows the researcher to perform his or her analysis on a powerful machine from a remote location. Researchers no longer have to come to the graphics resources. We’re bringing the graphics resources to them.”

Spur is based on the Sun Visualization System and uses hardware from AMD & NVidia to developer Remote visualization to users.

via TACC Provides One-Stop-Shop for HPC, Data Analysis and Visualization Efforts | The University of Texas at Austin.

Hardware

Autodesk has official announced some of the new tools that will be available in their next major release 2010.  New modeling tools, material explorers, new Mental Ray features, model validation tools, etc.  There’s a great writeup of it all on CGSociety.

CGSociety – Autodesk 2010 BIMs.

Science autodesk

Wayne Robson has started a free Mudbox 2009 QuickStart series on his website.  The series has become so popular however, that it forced a move onto another domain.  It’s entirely free, non-profit, and straight from the source.  Check it out.

Autodesk Mudbox 2009 Video Tutorials, QuickStart Series,free video tutorials, Dash Dot Slash, DarthWayne Wayne Robson.

Graphics

Wolfram has just released Mathematica 7, and it contains alot of new features.  Most notably for us, it contains alot of Image Processing tools and functions ranging from trivial (segment, rotate, reverse) to fairly sophisticated (similarity graphs, Laplacians, Morphological components).  These functions have been available in other tools (like Matlab) for a while, but this is the firstversion of Mathematica’s Home Version to include them.

Details on Mathematica7′s Image Processing Features

Details on Mathematica7 Home Edition

Science mathematica

This isn’t a new link, but FlowingData has some great informations-visualization techniques applied to visualization email Inbox’s.  Techniques to show trends, spam, forwards, threads, and more, it’s a fascinating look at information visualization in-use.

21 Ways to Visualize and Explore Your Email Inbox | FlowingData.

Science

The upcoming AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) will be meeting  in the Hyatt Regency in Chicago this weekend.  The meeting will be about recent trends in supercomputing and the upcoming move to petascale computing and how it will revolutionize science and engineering.  But during these talks, NCSA’a Advanced Visualization Lab will be exhibiting 4k stereo animations of recent simulations.

In the Columbian room of the Hyatt, NCSA’s Advanced Visualization Lab will exhibit 4K super-high-resolution 3D stereo animations of scientific phenomena, from colliding galaxies to the formation of a tornado to the flow of traffic on Chicago’s streets. These impressive images began with data produced from supercomputing simulations; then the AVL team worked intensively with researchers in disciplines from astronomy to atmospheric science to understand and represent the data accurately and artfully. The resulting work has been seen by thousands of people at planetariums, museums, and in televised documentaries on PBS, the Discovery Channel, and the National Geographic Channel. By translating data into images, NCSA’s visualization team shares cutting-edge science with the broadest possible public audience.

via HPCwire: NCSA Sponsors Panel, Showcases Visualizations at AAAS.

Science

Raffael Marty, author of “Applied Security Visualization” has an article on ITWorld about the 3 Do’s and Don’ts of Security Visualization.

“Computers are a very exact science. You tell them to do something and they do exactly that. Visualization is an art ” says Raffael Marty author of Applied Security Visualization. “Visualizing security data is really the intersection of both of these disciplines. You have a lot of creative freedom when generating visuals. However you are restrained to certain principles. It’s both an art and a science to create the right visuals in order for them to be useful. I like that intersection. I like the fact that I apply my creativity and combine it with my security domain knowledge in order to solve security problems.”

He emphasizes the need for experimentation and trying new things, but reinforces that it takes alot of practice and training to product visualizations that are useful.

via Getting started with security visualization | ITworld.

Science

For anyone out there using NVidia’s latest Stereoscopic tools, they’ve just updated the drivers to 181.25 which adds support for alot more games & hardware.

GeForce Stereoscopic 3D Technology.

Hardware nvidia

On the Autodesk blogs they’ve posted details and videos of the new design for 3D Studio Max 2010.  Some interesting features:  Integrated mesh analysis, confidenceExposure lighting analysis, and new Graphic modeling tools.

Area : Ken Blog detail.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk

AWN has a good interview with Henry Selick about the impact of CG & Digital imaging on the Stop-motion film “Coraline”.

Animation World Magazine.

Graphics