VizWorld.com

Intel’s at it again, this time with a new SIMD chip that runs on 10% of the power of current chips, making it perfect for portable devices & netbooks.  SIMD chips are great for tasks like video encoding/decoding, so they’re becoming high-demand items as blu-Ray and HD streaming becoming prevalent.

Intel researchers have developed a SIMD Accelerator that consumes about 10 times less energy than the accelerators used today, making it ideal for small devices. This advancement could enable richer multimedia and more immersive visuals, particularly on Mobile Internet Devices and other small devices in the future.

Update: Original I had NVidia in the title.. oops.

via XBit Labs and SoftPedia

Hardware intel

If you happen to be in Massachusets on Saturday, April 4th, there will be a gather at the Mt. Ida College in Newton, MA from 10am-6pm.

As we face tenuous times, we thought it could benefit everyone to pull together the 3d community in the northeast, without industry or product-centric boundaries, to network, learn and support each other as artists – whether by learning a new product, a new industry using 3d, basically building a community.

Registration begins at 9am that morning, and it’s free!  They’ve got sessions lined up on Maya, Max, and making a living as a 3D Artist, and they’ll be showing the SIGGRAPH Animation Festival Screening DVD.

via Boston Post Mortem » Blog Archive » 3D Stimulus Day.

Graphics

Looks like both ATI & NVidia will be speculating on the future of Graphics Hardware at GDC2009 this year.  They’ve already got a press release loaded with buzzwords like tesselation, DirectX 11, and Stereoscopic 3D.

While ATI will discuss the future with DirectX 11 and tessellation, NVIDIA will focus on promoting the efficient use of the technologies it currently supports, including the much publicized PhysX and its newly released product, Stereoscopic 3D.

via AMD and NVIDIA to Talk Future of Graphics at GDC 2009 – NVIDIA to promote physics while ATI promotes DirectX 11 – Softpedia.

Hardware

SIGGRAPH2009 Asia is now accepting volunteers & registrations for anyone interested in travling to Yokohama, Japan this December.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2009 encourages artists, educators, engineers, filmmakers, innovators producers, researchers, and scientists throughout the world to submit their work for presentation in Yokohama, 16-19 December 2009.

SIGGRAPH Asia 2009.

Graphics siggraph

EXOTIQUE5, which I’ve mentioned here once or twice before, is now accepting submissions for their 5th issue.

Ballistic Publishing invites you to submit your work to EXOTIQUE 5: THE WORLD’S MOST BEAUTIFUL CG CHARACTERS. The fifth book in the series will showcase the best digital character creations produced for film, television, games and personal endeavor.

Deadline for submissions is June 15th.

via Ballistic Publishing: EXOTIQUE 5 Call for entries.

Graphics exotique

Kitware, makers of VTK, ParaView, VolumeViz, and more, has just completed a reorganization that promotes several of the staff to new positions and invites new shareholders into the group.

The Technical Leadership level has expanded to recognize the growing responsibilities, leadership qualities and technical excellence of several individuals. Utkarsh Ayachit, Brad Davis, Julien Jomier, Amitha Perera and Wes Turner join Luis Ibáñez as Technical Leaders. In addition, Stephen Aylward, Berk Geveci and Anthony Hoogs form Kitware’s new Management level, overseeing the Medical Imaging, Scientific Computing and Computer Vision groups, respectively. Kitware would also like to welcome four new shareholders: Rick Avila, Stephen Aylward, Berk Geveci and Anthony Hoogs. These four individuals join the original founders to provide overall management for the Company.

via Kitware Reorganizes, Welcomes New Shareholders.

Science kitware

Gravity made this fun commercial for Pelephone, an Israeli telecom company, showing some fantastic (and some would say fantastical) technology.

Gravity: Pelephone “Other World” | Motionographer | Motion graphics, design, animation, filmmaking and visual effects.

Graphics

At CGArena, Alexander Tomchuk has a great walkthrough of modeling a giant monster called “Ashoan” using 3ds Max and ZBrush.

No need to unwrap model before exporting to ZBrush on this stage. You can do it later. What I do, is just exporting the model without Turbo Smooth modifier on it. Then, even if you finished with sculpting, you always can export first Sub divide level to 3ds max and change what ever you need. Then import it back in ZBrush over the first subdivide level. Just remember, you can not add or remove polygons.

via Making of Ashoan – CGArena.

Graphics

No big surprise here, the graphics card companies are being hit by the poor economy and slowing consumer demand. Just like everyone else:

According to the report, the discrete graphics card market started to shrink in the second quarter of 2008, in which sales of graphics cards were 6.7 per cent down on the same period in 2007. However, graphics card sales then nosedived towards the end of the year, with sales in the fourth quarter of 2008 plummeting by 42.7 percent when compared with the same period in 2007.

The folks behind this report (JPR) are quick to also state:

The research firm notes that sales of PCs and workstations dropped by around ten percent in comparison, but emphatically states that this doesn’t mean that chipsets with integrated graphics have been encroaching on discrete graphics cards’ territory. JPR notes that the market share from integrated graphics in the fourth quarter of 2008 was 40.6 percent, which was only marginally up from the 40.2 percent in the same period in 2007. I

via bit-tech.net | Graphics card market shrinks by 42.7 percent.

Hardware

CGSociety has a great article up about the PS3′s newest hit, Killzone 2.  Announced long ago (Back in 2005 at E3), the game has been widely panned because of the long development time.  While the trailers showed some amazing visuals, everyone was pretty sure they were heavily doctored to look more impressive.  Now that the game is out, however, everyone is backtracking as the visuals far surpass anything out.  How did they make it so impressive?

Lead Tech Artist at Guerrilla Games, Paulus Bannink, tells us that all of the animation was done in Maya 8.5 – with only some of the motion capture being cleaned up a little in MotionBuilder which – right off the bat – is out of the ordinary considering that most 3D games have been developed using Autodesk’s 3ds Max.

That’s a big step right there.  But there’s more….

via CGSociety – Killzone 2.

Graphics game, ps3