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If you’ve ever been interested in how to do cloth simulation in Maya, VFXWorld has you covered.
This month, VFXWorld begins a series of six excerpts of the Thomson Course Technology book Maya Plugin Power, which will give VFXWorld readers to learn how to take advantage of the myriad of plugins available to Maya users.
The first excerpt, available on their website now, is using Syflex, a special Maya plugin that’s far superior to Autodesks’s nCloth, to do cloth simulation.
via ….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...
Graphics
The VizWorld Weekly Podcast is growing! And to make it available to as many people as possible, it’s now on several video sharing websites. Simply click the “VizWorld Podcast” link at the top of the page and you’ll get the complete list.
- Subscribe to it in iTunes:
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- See it here in the Podcast Category
via VizWorld Podcast | VizWorld.com.
Website Podcast
NVidia today has announced that they’ve sealed an agreement with Sony to put their PhysX engine into the PS3 SDK, making it the standard for hardware accelerated physics simulation on the console.
“NVIDIA is proud to support PLAYSTATION 3 as an approved middleware provider,” said Tony Tamasi, senior vice president of content and technology at NVIDIA. “Games developed for the PLAYSTATION 3 using PhysX technology offer a more realistic and lifelike interaction between the games characters and other objects within the game. We look forward to the new games that will redefine reality for a new generation of gamers.”
via NVidia Press Release
Science nvidia, physx, ps3, sony
Now available on Youtube, “The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello”.
Nominated for an Oscar and for a BAFTA award, Jasper Morello is a short feature made in a unique style of silhouette animation developed by director Anthony Lucas and inspired by the work of authors Edgar Alan Poe and Jules Verne. [...]
Also winner of the Grand Prix award at the Annecy Animation Festival, Jasper has also won the top honours at the Canadian Film Centre’s Worldwide Short Film Festival, Best Animation at Flickerfest 2005, Best Animation at the Sydney Film Festival Dendy awards and Best Animation at Toronto worldwide shorts.
It’s a great animation showing some fantastic work done in silhouette. Click through to see the video.
Read more…
Science
Don Stewart wanted to visualize the dependencies involved in the Haskell Language Packages, but ran into problems with existing graphics and dependency tracking tools due to the sheer size of Haskell (approximately 1100 packages). So he built his own tool called cabalgraph, and generated some truly impressive dependency graphs.
There’s a lot of Haskell code in the world now. 1125 packages on Hackage, made up of thousands of modules, with hundreds of thousands of import dependencies between them. Some of those packages have hundreds of modules. For fun, I wanted to visualise that module namespace. That is, in one image see all the Haskell modules I could potentially use: a panoramic view of the Haskell landscape.
via Visualising the Haskell Universe « Control.Monad.Writer.
Science
Digital Arts Online has a feature article up about a new commercial that Mainframe has made for Virgin Media’s new show “Rehab”, which shows people’s life shattering in the of addicion. The clip show people “shattering” as if made from porcelain, then slowly rebuilding themselves.
“We were looking into several plug-ins to solve the shattering effect and, after studying Blast Code for Maya and RayFire for 3DS Max, we quickly decided that we should do most of the project in 3DS Max,” he says.
“RayFire seemed more promising for what we were creating and especially for the particles. Utilizing Particle Flow within 3DS Max has been a saviour for us – today we see it as a useful particle plug-in and it will be integrated in our pipeline for future projects.”
Digital Arts – Features – Mainframe creates smashing VFX for Rehab TV show.
Graphics
Jonathan Fienberg of IBM sits down with Xconomy Boston to discuss a tool he developed with IBM called “Wordle”. Wordle has gotten alot of press coverage as some large outlets, like the Washington Post, have used it to convey information about Speeches. But thankfully, Fienberg is skeptical as to whether it’s actually useful:
Calling it a toy was a defensive measure. I don’t want to make any claims for Wordle as a visualization tool that gets you an accurate idea of your text. People write to me and say ‘Wow, I made a Wordle and now I see wasn’t writing about what I thought I was writing about.’ But I feel very resistant to those kinds of analyses.
It’s a fun toy and an interesting idea, but it’s not quite up to par for most scientific uses.
via Weaving Words with Wordle: A Talk with IBM’s Jonathan Feinberg | Xconomy.
Science
In NVidia’s annual report, it was discovered that NVidia has paid $43.6 million in response to the faulty graphics chips that were discovered last year.
In July 2008 Nvidia took a one-time $196 million charge against its second-quarter earnings to cover additional warranty and replacement costs related to faulty graphics chips which the company said included a “weak die packaging material set.” Nvidia s financial year ended on January 25. Based on the $43.6 million spent so far approximately 78 percent of the original amount set aside or $152.4 million remains available to cover costs related to this flaw.
In a possibly related story, NVidia has decided to cancel “NVISION2009″, their premiere developer’s conference & LAN party.
It seems that a number of factors contributed to the cancelling of NVISION 2009. The most obivious is the general, global economic downturn which undoubtedly caused many sponsors interested in the event to scale back their plans. Perhaps NVIDIA also believed that attendess would be harder to find this yea
via Nvidia Spent $43.6 Million to Replace Faulty Graphic Chips – PC World.
viz NVidia Canceles NVISION2009 … New Link: From TechSpot
Hardware nvidia
LightBeam Systems is back in the news this week with a press release about their work in the effects for the new “Battles BC” miniseries on the History Channel which premiered recently.
The digital effects for “Battles BC” were created with Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Toxik, and Adobe After Effects. Lightbeam Systems is thoroughly seasoned in working with production software and has worked closely with Autodesk to design and build the first Autodesk Toxik workstations capable of real-time 32-bit 2K 4-channel streams.
via LIGHTBEAM SYSTEMS REEL SIX PIPELINE SELECTED FOR HISTORY CHANNEL’S “BATTLES BC” DIGITAL EFFECTS | The Briefing Room.
Graphics
Popular Mechanics is jumping on the Watchmen bandwagon with a pair of articles discussing the technology behind Dr Manhattan & Rorschach’s Mask. Of particular interest is the realization that true Rorschach blots are copyrighted, so the inkblots used in the film are custom-made.
Animators customized plug-ins in the 3D animation program Maya that allowed them to create the blots in 2D then move the shapes around on a textured surface—in this case the shape of Healy s face as denoted by the tracking markers embedded in the mask. Each animation was handled on a sequence-by-sequence basis. “We created an animation that was longer than the sequence was ” DesJardin explains. “If the sequence was 300 frames we would make 1600 frames of animation so that we had a way to squash and stretch how long certain shots were taking.”
via The Watchmen Movie Visual FX – The Tech Behind Rorschach’s Mask in the Watchmen – Popular Mechanics.
via The Tech Behind Watchmen’s Dr Manhattan – Watchmen’s CGI Explained
Graphics
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