CGCon2009, running from July 16th to July 19th in Los Angeles, CA has assembled a star-studded cast of Animation & VFX professionals to lead classes during the conference.
Animation Mentor has been kind enough over the past few weeks to help us put together the animation program at CG CON 2009, providing many of their own mentors to teach at CG CON, including Charles Alleneck from ILM, Morgan R. Kelly from Dreamworks Animation, Anthony Wong from Pixar Animation and many more.
This on top of industry legend, Dave Burgess, provided by Dreamworks Animation, who brings over two decades of animation experience.
Definately something to check out. Full list of classes is here.
A new website in the “Data Visualization 2.0″ space, Timetric makes nice simple little line graphs of lots of different statistics (86,000 + as of this writing). In addition, the graphs are interactive & update dynamically as new data flows in. Great for stockmarket updates, but the graphs are also embeddable into other websites making for great information on lots of data: Populations, incomines, crime surveys, emissions data, etc.
Today NVidia announced it’s “CUDA Ventures” Program. From their site:
NVIDIA is committed to supporting the vibrant ecosystem of developers that have adopted the CUDA GPU computing platform. We provide a combination of technical, operational and financial resources for enterprises that are enabling new usage models and advancing GPU computing.
One interesting tidbit there: they offer “financial resources”. What does this mean? According to The Register:
Nvidia wants to give you between $0.5m to $5m (£0.36 to £3.6m), plus partner with you on marketing, development, distribution, and more.
Jason Perlow over at ZDNet has a fun article up on TouchGraph, which applies basic Data Visualization methods to popular social networks like FaceBook, for fun results.
Immediately after I started using TouchGraph, I was able to determine that my friends belong to two primary groups — one related to technology and technology writing, and the other related to food — the two main areas I write about. I also was able to better understand where most of my friends were located due to their network association and lots of other metrics I wouldn’t normally have been aware of had I just used FaceBook itself.
A fantastic & catchy animated musical, “Sita Sings the Blues” has been in legal entanglements for as long as I can remember over the rights to the Music. However, it’s finally been resolved and is now available to watch free on their website!
I hereby give Sita Sings the Blues to you. Like all culture, it belongs to you already, but I am making it explicit with a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License. Please distribute, copy, share, archive, and show Sita Sings the Blues. From the shared culture it came, and back into the shared culture it goes.
Links to view or download the video are on their website.
LightBeam Systems, makers of the “Autodesk Toxic” workstation, have announced a new workstation with some pretty impressive claims.
Supporting over eight billion colors and 4K plus resolution, the new Reel Six compositing workstations are ideal for ultra high-quality, industrial-grade compositing. A second NVIDIA Quadro FX graphic card can be added to support demanding real-time stereoscopic compositing.
It uses NVidia QuadroFX cards and multi-core processing to allows 2K and 4K multi-stream compositing on a desktop.
Adobe has updated their website with Video Tutorials for their CS3 and CS4 products. While most of them are rather basic, they do provide a few neat tricks and could be particularly useful for anyone new to the tools.
AMD/ATI announced a new Quad-Display card today, capable of running 4 monitors, either DVI or VGA, at up to 1920 x 1200 resolution.
The card is also relatively low-power and peaks at 32W under a heavy load, dropping to 17W in typical 2D-only conditions. As with other parts in AMD’s more modern line, the 2450 also supports DirectX 10.1 and OpenGL 2.1 visual effects. A single version of the new FirePro ships today with 512MB of memory for $499; official support requires Windows.
Some interesting artistic visualizations of various data.
“Aaron Koblin is an artist designer and researcher focused on creating and visualizing human systems. Currently working out of San Francisco California Aaron creates software and architectures to transform social and infrastructural data into artwork”. www.aaronkoblin.com
VizWorld.com 
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