AETuts has gathered 15 great Particle-effect tutorials into a single article for your reading enjoyment. Most of them come from VideoCopilot, but they’re all definately worth looking into for some fancy special effects.
15 Inspiring Particle-Based Tutorials from Around the Web – Aetuts+.
eWeek.com has a slideshow up in the form of Facebook’s recently popular “25 things” meme, showing 25 things you didn’t know about Microsoft. Of long-forgotten interest is #11: Microsoft Talisman.
From wikipedia’s “Microsoft Talisman” entry:
PixelFlow, and Talisman, attempted to reduce the memory bandwidth requirements primarily by leaving unchanged post-rendered objects in memory to be re-composited without change. The system used a series of memory buffers and parallel compositing engines to quickly “assemble” a display that was made up of a number of 2D images, or “tiles”. This technique is immediately suitable for 2D images, as any possible change in the display mapping can be made by individual mappings on the tiles. The same is not true from 3D, however, where rotations of the user’s viewpoint requires objects in the display to rotate in 3D, something that can only be simulated by modifying a 2D image.
See the aforementioned video “Chicken Crossing” after the break.
GreyScaleGorilla (GSG) has a video online showing the #1 rookie mistake in Adobe AfterEffects, and how to fix it. What’s the problem? “Wobbly Keyframes”.
The actual problem is that, by default, AfterEffects uses Bezier interpolation for animation keyframes based on positions, so if you attempt to freeze something for a few frames by cloning a keyframe at 2 points, you wind up with an overshoot and bounce as it attempts to smoothly interpolate the motion.
Video included after the break.
Over at CGArena, Rohan Oka shows the work behind her “Cursed Pirate” graphic, done with alot of thumbnail sketches and Autodesk Maya.
Now that VizWorld.com has a few months and a few hundred articles online, I’ve noticed things looking a bit Schizophrenic at times. After consulting with some friends, the guys at Infosthetics, and seeing general traffic patterns, I’ve reorganized the site into three main categories that I believe make up the 3 major focus areas of VizWorld.com:
Those three fundamental categories should cover it, and each one exports its own RSS feed for anyone interested. There’s also a Website category which will be used to cover news about the website, and of course the master RSS feed will include everything. Reducing the number of categories will also mean more tags on articles. A Tag cloud will be made visible shortly, and you can use the tags to find articles related to a single vendor, product, or technology more easily.
In the near future, I might also split the podcast into 2 (Science & Graphics) or maybe 3 individual podcasts, to offer more time to discuss items related to a single area. We’ve got plenty more in store, tho, so keep coming back to see what’s next!
Havok & AMD have put a video on Youtube that shows the power of GPGPU-Accelerated physics engines (eg. AMD + Havok).
This demo shows Havok Cloth in action, simulating 25 dancers, each one wearing a high resolution (7000 polygons) red dress. This demo is completely interactive and runs at solid 60FPS on a standard PC. The dress polygonal model is based on a real-world dress and was provided by Optitex Limited.
It’s pretty impressive. Video after the break.
AMD/ATI’s announced their latest card, the FirePro V7750. With 1GB of GDDR3 memory, a 30-bit display pipeline, dual Displayport and a Dual-link DVI port, HDR rendering with 8,10, and 16-bit color component support, and more. It’s a true horse of a card, and available for $899.
It’s designed primarily for CAD users, like Solidworks. The full press release is inside.
mental images has integrated their own Shader Language named “MetaSLa” into mental ray 3.7, which should make optimization of shaders across various system architectures much simpler:
In choosing the MetaSL universal shader language, mental ray 3.7+ rendering software allows artists to develop shaders that run on all popular software and hardware platforms. Artists won’t need to re-architect shaders every time there is an advancement in new generation software, GPU or CPU based rendering systems. MetaSL-based shaders adapt to fit current and future target platforms.
This version of mental ray ships with Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2010.
Jon Stokes has a piece on Ars Technica about the “3d gaming revolution”, and how it’s not taking place on the classic fronts of consoles & PC’s, but rather on handhelds, driven largely by the iPhone.
I’ve covered at some length the ARM offerings in this space, and why Intel won’t have a shot at a real mobile phone form factor until sometime after transitioning to 32nm, but I’ve paid less attention to the software side of this equation. At a GDC session yesterday by the Khronos Group, a broad industry consortium working on the OpenGL, OpenCL, and other GPU-related APIs, I was surprised at just how little sway Microsoft has in the mobile 3D arena.
While OpenGL ES will run on Windows Mobiles devices (and probably the Palm Pre), those devices have been marketed and targeted mainly toward businesses. They will in time catch-up to the iPhone’s lead in gaming, but the damage has been done: Mobile Embedded Gaming is here to stay.
via Mobile 3D gaming revolution leaving Wintel behind – Ars Technica.
Blair MacIntyre of Georgia Tech has developed a powerful Augmented Reality demo that runs on an iPhone, and is demonstrating it at GDC. A live video can be seen inside.
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