Home » Archives for April 2009
Autodesk has just shown that Mudbox2009 is now available to run natively on Mac OS X. They’ve got a great preview video of it running, online. They actually announced this back in January (Press Release), but it looks like it’s finally coming to market.
Area : inHouse.
Graphics autodesk, mac, mudbox
Rumors are circulating that Sony will be announcing a new OLED Television at the IFA2009 show. The IFA show is typically for products that are relatively close to market release, so if it does show then it shouldn’t be but a few months before it’s available.
The XEL-2 that s what we ll call it until Sony gives us an official name might be a 27″ model as promised by Sony a year ago or it might be the 21″ displays shown just last week. We ll have to wait and see
via Sony believed to be unveiling their 2nd generation XEL-2 OLED TV at IFA 2009.
Hardware oled, sony, tv
The University of Illinois will be holding a reception tomorrow (Monday) from 5:30 to 7pm at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts to celebrate inaugural transfer of digital arts media between the NCSA and the Krannert Center via a new 10-gig connection funded by the NSF. Provost Linda Katehi, Professor John Jennings, Donna Cox, and others will be on hand.
“Our goals include fostering creativity through real-world project-based courses classrooms and a curriculum that will yield an online master s professional degree as well as a Ph.D. in art informatics ” she said. The doctorate program will be the first of its kind among U.S. universities.
via The News-Gazette.com: Krannert reception to mark inception of new digital-arts program.
Graphics, Science krannert, ncsa, nsf
As computer graphics progress to making better and better approximations of reality, one thing we hear alot is that eventually CG actors will replace real actors. Is this even possible? Well, the Wall Street Journal went out and interviewed Ed Ulbrich (Digital Domain, the group behind Benjamin Button) and John Knoll (Lucasfilm Ltd, the studio behind Pirates of the Caribbean) to see what they think.
Using an actor isn’t always possible, though, particularly where complicated stunts come into play. Computer-generated versions of characters work best in situations that would be impossible or too dangerous for a real actor — for example, a close-up of a character being hit with a knockout punch.
Is It Brad or Is It Fake? – WSJ.com.
Graphics interview, uncanny valley, vfx
Todat at a Press Conference at NAB, Autodesk announced “Flare”. Flare is a companion product to Flame and Inferno that allows you to swap assets and iterations back and forth between the products. It is a software-only product that provides an extra seat to Flame or Inferno suites, at 1/5 the cost.
Studio Daily Blog » Autodesk Adds Flare to Flame and Inferno.
Graphics autodesk, flame, flare, inferno, nab
IDEO Labs has developed a completely new technology that looks like a viable replacement for Mechdyne’s cave. Built with $600,000 of projector equipment and a 10x10x10 white room, it creates a fully immersive environment for a user equipped with nothing but a featherweight headset.
The markers are illuminated by IR LED floodlights located on the perimeter of the room, and IR-sensitive cameras use those positions to determine the precise location of each eye within the room. From those positions, stereo images for each projector are calculated and rendered on the fly, and the result is absolutely amazing.
See the demonstration video after the break.
Read more…
Hardware 3d, ideo, immersive
Designhive was commisioned by Atkins to develop a realistic 3D simulation of city traffic patterns of the Oxford Circus, including pedestrian presence.
‘Designhive devised a method of reflecting Atkins’ two-dimensional traffic and pedestrian models in a 3D Studio Max model of the proposals. Combining the models in the simulation in this way makes the finished product particularly compelling and is among the first time this technique has been used.
via designhive | architectural visualisation experts | News London Oxford Circus.
Graphics, Science 3dsmax, designhive, particles
After 6 years of development work on Fable, Lionhead studios wasted no time in beginning work on the sequel Fable2. However, they needed a significantly higher number of fully articulated and animated character models for the game, and their existing pipeline simply couldn’t handle the workload. They went back to the drawing board and came up with a new pipeline using Autodesk Softimage and the new GATOR features.
Autodesk Softimage is our main asset creation tool for a variety of reasons. The fact that we can talk to other applications including Autodesk 3ds Max software, ZBrush, and Adobe Photoshop has given us an incredibly powerful framework for jobs like Fable II. We used dotXSI and XML animation formats to export all our final data. FableEd, our in-house editorial tool, was specifically tailored to blend and transform a massive amount of data.”
via Autodesk – Games – Lionhead Studios.
Graphics autodesk, video game
Rebecca Keegan interviews Phil McNally “Captain 3D”, who’s responsible for Dreamwork’s latest movie Monsters vs Aliens. The video starts off slow, but at about the 1:30 mark they begin discussing the foundations of 3D cinema, and at around 3:00 they demonstrate the Intersense VCam technology.
Latest Videos from TIME.com.
Hardware 3d, dreamworks, intersense, interview
VizWorld.com 
Comments