VizWorld.com

Dark Roasted Blend has some fantastic 3D Fractals from the artist Jack Cooper.  Definitely mind-blowing stuff to look at.

Dark Roasted Blend: Three-Dimensional Mechanical Fractals.

Graphics

FiringSquad has a great benchmark of several cards, both NVidia & ATI, with the new F.E.A.R. 2 game at several settings.

Because it’s based on an updated version of the Jupiter Extended (Jupiter EX) game engine first used in F.E.A.R. back in 2005, Monolith’s F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin doesn’t require the latest and greatest DirectX 10 hardware to run well; in fact with its DX9 renderer the game performs quite fluidly on older graphics cards like the GeForce 7800 and Radeon X1800, even with the game settings cranked up to their maximum values. Despite this, we were still eager to see how the game performs with today’s latest hardware, as the series has a large following of fans who enjoyed the original shooter.

What I find particularly interesting is this benchmark:

In this test they compared various cards in SLI & CrossFire configurations against their single-card counterparts.  Of course, the Dual-card configurations are roughly 2x faster than the single card, showing some nice linear scaling.  But the SLI (NVidia) configurations come in at just under 2x (1.95x) while the CrossFire configurations come in just over 2X (2.001X).  It’s a minor different, but I’m surprised to see NVidia losing this battle to AMD/ATI.

via 3D Performance with F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin.

Hardware

Autodesk has launched v7.5 of their Softimage software, with the following features:

• mental ray 3.7+
• Multithreaded Syflex cloth simulation
• UV unfolding
• Full Backwards compatibility with 7.0

Autodesk – Autodesk Softimage.

Science

At a recent get-together of the Digital Cinema Society, at post facility IVC in Burbank, director/editor/inventor Philip Hodgetts presented a session on Internet video and what everyone needs to know to get the best quality.

The take-away?

• Use MPEG-4 H.264 video and AAC Audio in .m4 or .m4v containers.
• Stay 23.98 throughout and never add pulldown.
• De-interlace because all web video is progressive – and don’t blend to de-interlace
• Start with an Apple-compatible preset for iPod/iPhone/Apple TV

Working with these problems daily, it’s become obvious to me that many experts in the field still have difficulties separating the details of containers and codecs, and detailing the effects of all the various options that change between every pairing.

via Studio Daily Blog » Online Video: Codecs, Encoding and Compression.

Science

Just found a TED talk about the Special Effects used in Benjamin Button.

Ed Ulbrich, the digital-effects guru from Digital Domain, explains the Oscar-winning technology that allowed his team to digitally create younger and older versions of Brad Pitt’s face for “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”

via Ed Ulbrich shows how Benjamin Button got his face | Video on TED.com.

Graphics digitaldomain, movie, ted, vfx

A Google engineer named Simon Ilyushchenko has integrated the Project Vulcan CO2 Emission study data into Google Earth as a data layer, showing the CO2 emissions for all 5 states with startling detail.

While several reports and inventories of human fossil fuel CO2 emissions in the US already exist, the most comprehensive one that I know of was produced by Project Vulcan, a team of scientists lead by Dr Kevin Gurney, an assistant professor of Earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue University. Vulcan data represent detailed emissions for all 50 US states in 2002. Dr Gurney presented the most recent results of his work this week at a meeting of North American Carbon Program.

The results produced by Project Vulcan are publicly available, but they are not easy to analyze for a non-scientist, so during my 20% time at Google I have created dynamic maps of the Vulcan data, broken down by sector. You can view the maps in your browser if you have Google Earth plugin installed, or you can load the data in Google Earth itself.

There’s also a great YouTube video of it in-action.

Google LatLong: Mapping CO2 emissions.

Science

A new app is coming out for the iPhone, with an interesting gimmick: 3D Stereo without glasses.

Canadian kids’ broadcaster Family Channel, the Sheridan Visualization Design Institute and Spatial View Inc. have collaborated, through an Ontario Centres of Excellence OCE project, to create a glasses-free 3D mini game for the Apple iPhone.

…

Carnival Craze can be played and viewed in natural 3D, without glasses, on an Apple iPhone, equipped with a 3DeeShell from Toronto-based Spatial View.

The “3DeeShell” is a special case for the iPhone that separates the screen into interlaces lines that are viewing-angle restricted at the interocular distance.  The result is that (at very specific viewing distances & angles) the screen has a 3D effect similar to that of stereoscopic glasses.

via VDI News » Canadians Create 3D Application for iPhone.

Hardware

So the Oscars are over and who won?

• Best Animated Feature film: Wall-E
• Visual Effects: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
• Best Short Film (Animated): La Maison En Petits Cubes
• Actor in a Supporting role: Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight
• Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

Oscar.com has the full list of winners. Congratulations to all!  Feel free to leave praise or disputes in the comments.

OSCAR.com – 81st Annual Academy Awards – Winners.

Graphics, Science

Just found this new Visualization technique called “Time Radar Trees” for displaying weighted dynamic compund digraphs.

The TimeRadarTrees approach shows the information hierarchy as a traditional node-link diagram, but in a radial style. Each graph is represented as a slice on the inner circle and corresponding slices on the smaller outer circles, which we call thumbnails. The inner circle shows the incoming edges, the thumbnails represent the outgoing edges. Many interaction features as well as smooth animation help the user to explore a given data set. Filter functions as well as detail-on-demand per mouse tooltips are also integrated.

via TimeRadarTrees :: TimeLineTrees.

Science

Found this fantastic short-film online.

Through an interessant metaphor, a nice mix of 2D/3D, a graphic style like digital painting, accompanied with a music by Olivier Calmel, Antoine Perez, Céline Desrumaux, Francois Pons et Gary Levesque have directed the last thoughts of an American fighter pilot who is unconscious in his plane which is crashing.

Yankee Gal, the kiss of death – CrystalXP.net.
Yankee Gal from Yankee Team on Vimeo.

Science