VizWorld.com

CGArena has a walkthrough by Rishi Raj on the modeling of a character from Final Fantasy X named “Tidus”.  He uses primarily Maya & Zbrush, and models not only the body but all of the clothes and accessories.

Making of Tidus – CGArena.

Graphics

Related to yesterday’s new case studies (here and here) from Autodesk, they just officially announced HumanIK4 and Kynapse6 at GDC.

“Autodesk middleware products offer a solution to common runtime challenges, allowing development teams to concentrate on the creative work involved in authoring amazing new gameplay experiences,” said Marc Stevens, Autodesk vice president, games. “For example, HumanIK helps to alleviate the burden of large clip libraries by enabling procedural motion adaption, which reduces the number of clips animators need to produce and maintain. With Kynapse, programmers can avoid the development time and costs involved in writing custom runtime solutions for universal AI issues, like spatial awareness.”

CGSociety – Autodesk Middleware.

Graphics autodesk, gdc, humanik, kynapse

Infosthetics tipped me off to a site called “WikiRank”, which creates embeddable javascript widgets that show sparklines and graph for page popularity, comparing up to 4 terms in a single chart.

WikiRank [wikirank.com] shows a series of sparklines to denote those Wikipedia articles that are the most read, and those pages that are gaining in popularity. In addition, one can explore each article’s detail page via search, which includes an article excerpt, traffic numbers and a web-embeddable traffic chart that compares the relative popularity of up to 4 other topics.

Click inside to see a chart I created comparing the popularity of 3ds Max, Maya, ParaView, and VisIt.

via Infosthetics

Read more…

Science wikipedia, wikirank

Looks like the exact details of this event are still coming together, but next month Gnomon will be having a free session in Hollywood, CA to discuss the VFX of Benjamin Button.

When: Thursday, April 30, 2009
Meet & Greet: 6:00PM
Presentation: 7:00PM – 9:00PM
Place: Gnomon School of Visual Effects
1015 N. Cahuenga Blvd. Hollywood, CA 90038

This event is FREE of charge!

Gnomon School of Visual Effects | Professional 3D Training in Hollywood, CA.

Graphics benjamin button, gnomon

The Trinity College Dublin is preparing to exhibit a tool called “Metropolis: Crowd Control”, a massive experiment in crowd modeling and realism.

The Metropolis project, led by Prof Carol O’Sullivan of the Graphics, Vision and Visualisation group at the School of Computer Science and Statistics, aims to contribute towards the development of the computer games and film industry, urban planning, pedestrian and traffic modelling, evacuation simulation and the development of technologies for people with disabilities.

The exhibit will be in the Science Gallery through the rest of this week.

via Dublin goes virtual – News – The Engineer.

Graphics

Cornucopia3D has decided to release Vue7 Pioneer free to the public, all they require is a free Cornucopia3D account registration.  How?

For the time being, the full license of Vue 7 Pioneer is available for free (but we reserve the right to change this at any time).

Vue 7 Pioneer is derived from the research e-on software makes for the high-end products it sells to large special effects studios.

By offering a product of such great quality as Pioneer for free, we are hoping to attract new users to the fun world of Vue. Because we know you’ll love Pioneer, we expect that some of you will buy content from Cornucopia3D, or even decide to expand the product with the optional modules.

The free version has a few restrictions:  All images are watermarked with a Logo (unless you buy one of the T-packs), you cannot import 3D models from other packages (But you can model your own and get models from the Cornucopia3D store), and it’s for “home use only”.  Nonetheless, it might be worth checking out for a newbie to 3D modeling or for some quick playing around.

via Cornucopia3D – Vue 7 Pioneer.

Graphics

The S&P dropped the ratings outlook on NVidia’s stock from “positive” to “stable”, based on slumping revenue and increased competition in the market from chips like Intel’s Larrabee.

S&P noted that graphics-chip life cycles are very brief, contributing to revenue and earnings volatility. Nvidia is trying to expand into graphics-enabled cellphones and other handheld devices, as well as supercomputer applications. But the ratings firm noted revenue from such ventures is small.

…

Nvidia also experienced some manufacturing problems in mid-2008, followed by a delayed product launch and increased competition from rivals at the end of the year. This, combined with a sharp decline in personal-computer sales, has hurt the company’s revenue.

Nvidia shares were up 0.8% to $9.86 in recent trading.

via Article – WSJ.com.

Hardware nvidia

The Kronos Group, with assistance from Google & Mozilla, are looking to develop a standard for 3D visualization & rendering within the browser, probably based on their existing OpenES standard (OpenGL for embedded systems).

Prompted by a proposal from Mozilla the Khronos Group said it has created a working group called “Accelerated 3D on the Web.” Mozilla has offered to chair the group which is open to any interested company that joins Khronos.

…

Chris Blizzard, Mozilla’s director of evangelism, said that he expects the new graphics capabilities would be integrated into the Firefox browser that follows the release of Firefox 3.5, which is what the current Firefox 3.1 beta 3 should become. Firefox 3.5 is expected to be officially released in the second quarter of this year.

They’ve already helped build the standards for OpenGL, OpenCL, OpenVG, Collada, and others, so if there’s a group that could pull this off, they’re it.

via Google, Mozilla Back 3-D Acceleration Web Standard — 3-D Graphics — InformationWeek.

Science browser, kronos, opengl

CGSociety has the honor of hosting a pair of videos from Autodesk’s Master Classes at GDC this year.  The first video is using Maya, showing some of the techniques used in “Silent Hill: Homecoming”, and the second is using 3ds Max with animation controllers and constraints.

CGSociety – Autodesk GDC 2009 Master Classes.

Graphics 3ds max, autodesk, gdc, maya

Visual Computing Labs and Prime Focus teamed up to create an animated “bollywood” style movie named “Roadside Romeo”.  They made extensive use of a wide variety of Autodesk products include Autodesk Maya, Autodesk Flame, Autodesk Combusion, and Autodesk Lustre.  Their story is now on the Autodesk site.

“Fortunately, Maya has a host of features that streamline the character animation process, which enabled us to complete the song sequence on time,” states Khandpur. “One of our favorite features in Maya is its full body IK system, which allowed our artists to rig and animate their characters quickly and easily. Maya also lends itself beautifully to the squash-and-stretch animation style we wanted to achieve. The tool boasts several muscle and skin deformation tools, such as Jiggle, that were very useful for our artists.”

via Autodesk – Film – Visual Computing Labs and Prime Focus.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk