VizWorld.com

Comingsoon.net has a great interview with Henry Selick, the director of the upcoming feature film Coraline.

Long before the novel became a success, director Henry Selick, whose groundbreaking work in stop-motion animation made Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas a perennial classic, was working on adapting the novel as his next project. It took many years before Selick was able to get the movie off the ground, complicated by the fact that the director wanted to make this the first stop-motion animated feature film to be shot and projected using the latest 3D technology. With Dakota Fanning providing the voice of Coraline and Terri Hatcher as both her real mother and the evil “Other Mother,” Selick began what would end up taking almost eight years to complete.

While the interview starts out with alot of information about the source material, about halfway through it gets into more technical information like the tradeoffs between Stop-Motion and CG, shooting in 3D, and more.

via Exclusive: Henry Selick on Making Coraline – ComingSoon.net.

Graphics

The guys at fxguide have gotten theri hands on one of the new Autodesk HP xw8600 systems, with dual Quad Core Xeon processors, a Quadro FX5600 and a Lucid 88192 D/A converter.

We’ve got one of the new Autodesk HP xw8600 systems fired up at the fxphd loft in Chicago. The new systems started shipping last month and we got it quickly up and running and paying the bills. But before we shut down our old IBM6217 system, we took the time to run our fxguide suite of benchmarks so we had something to which we could compare the new system. In our results, we’ve also included results from our old school original Onyx 2 system, which was running Inferno version 5.3. The new xw8600 was from 1.1 to over 2 times faster than the 6217 on our benchmark test.

They’ve got their entire test suite & a benchmarking report available on their site.

via fxguide quick takes » Flame 2009 Benchmarks on the new HP xw8600 System.

Hardware

Sony Pictures ImageWorks has updated their website with some step-by-steps on the processes used to build a standing army shot (good example of multi-plate compositing) and a flyaround of the Berghof House (good use of compositing with CG Rendering passes).

The entire site is flash however, so click “shows” in the upper-left, then pick “Valkyrie” from the list on the right.

Sony Pictures Imageworks – Award-Winning Visual Effects and Character Animation.

Graphics

John West over at InsideHPC.com has the info on an upcoming Webinar hosted by NVidia about Tesla Computing with Matlab.

NVIDIA is hosting a Tesla GPU Computing Webinar on Thursday, February 5 at 2:00pm EST. Melissa sent me an email with the details, which I paste in below for your convenience

Attendees will learn about GPU computing, NVIDIA CUDA parallel computing architecture, the Jacket engine for MATLAB from AccelerEyes, and how to get 10x to 50x speed-up for several MATLAB functions.

Topics covered will include GPU computing in general, CUDA, and the Jacket engine for MATLAB from AccelerEyes.

via Webinar on using Jacket and GPUs to speed up Matlab | insideHPC.com.

Hardware matlab, tesla

BOXX Technologies has just announced a new workstation named the 4850 that (they claim) is the most powerful single-processor workstation ever designed, and several reviewers are showin it several thousand dollars below all the competition.

Now, in addition to those stellar performance numbers, BOXX detailed cost analysis reveals that, in terms of price, the 4850 Extreme also bests these same Apple, Dell, and HP systems. Extreme is priced nearly $2000 below Dell’s model, nearly $3000 below Apple, and $3400 below HP.

The benchmarks they’re showing are pretty impressive as well:

More information about the Boxx 4850 can be found on BOXX’s website.

via PR-CANADA.net – BOXX Technologies “Extreme” Workstation Priced Thousands Below Competition.

Hardware boxx

Next Technologies, the folks behind RealFlow, have just announced the “RealFlow Render Kit” (RFRK).

The RealFlow RenderKit is a set of tools that has been designed to facilitate the complex task of rendering RealFlow™ fluids. The RFRK enables you to generate procedural geometry at render time, and also render individual fluid particles. As a result, the RFRK will dramatically simplify and accelerate your RealFlow™ workflow.

Used by the guys behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, it allows you to directly manipulate and render the particles in RenderMan & Mental Ray, without having to convert your RealFlow simulation to a mesh first.  A definite timesaver, to be sure.

via RealFlow RenderKit.

Graphics next, realflow

CGSociety has a profile up of Evgeni Tomov who most recently won an Annie nomination for The Tale of Despereaux.

Tucked in among the prestigious Annie award nominations (from the International Animated Film Society, ASIFA-Hollywood) are a few that specifically reward artists, including one this year for production designer Evgeni Tomov.

Tomov, widely lauded for his work on the 2D feature, “Les Triplettes de Belleville,” received the coveted Annie nomination for designing Universal Pictures’ first animated feature, “The Tale of Despereaux,” which was created at Framestore. The competition is tough: He’s up against production designers for “Wall-E”, “Bolt”, and “Kung Fu Panda.”

via CGSociety – Evgeni Tomov :: Artist Profile.

Graphics

CGSociety has unveiled their latest NVArt competition, with help from NVidia, focusing on the surrealist artworks of Jacek Yerka.

For a long time, artists have created strange and wonderful imaginings that are surreal. Like windows into some fantastic world Surreal paintings have a special fascination that reminds us of the boundless creativity we all knew as children. Now the digital medium allows the artists to bring their wildest dreams to life. In an age where virtuality meets reality the surreal has become real.

In this, the fourth NVArt competition, artists are invited to recreate their most imaginative fantasies in the style of master surrealist, Jacek Yerka.

Entries must be received by March 2, and first place is $10,000 and 2 QuadroFX 5800 4GB cards.

via NVArt – Surreal – Introduction.

Graphics contest