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MechDyne, makers of the CAVE immersive environment, and Scalable Graphics SAS have announced a partnership that makes Scalable Graphics a licensed reseller of Mechdyne’s software products.  Of particular interest in Conduit which allows almost any desktop application to be used in an immersive environment.

“Combining Conduit and Direct Transport Compositor enables virtually any desktop application to be displayed in an immersive environment with stunning visual performances ” said Jan Rendek chief marketing officer of Scalable Graphics. “This partnership will shift the paradigms of visualization cluster design. Visual performance can be defined by the designer instead of being imposed by hardware limitations.”

via Mechdyne and Scalable Graphics Announce Partnership for 3D Visualization Software and Graphics Acceleration.

Hardware cave, mechdyne, scalable graphics

Topics in this episode (Yup, it’s a doozy).

• Event Calendar
• What led to the Fall of SGI Series
• Special Edition: Interview with Director of Application Marketing Dean Wormell at Intersense
• Rumor: NVidia GT300 GPU to get 512 shader processors
• Reviews of the Radeon HD4770
• Panasonic’s Living in HD Site
• Scene Graph SDK v5 released
• CG Toolkit v2.2 released
• Video demonstrations of the Caustic card (here and here)
• MSI’s new “Air Force” Panel
• Hands-on with Autodesk 3DS Max 2010
• Mudbox 2009 review from Stephen Mann
• Mike Winkelmann’s “subprime”
• Zoic and Consol see “The End” of Oil Dependence
• Pixologic Announces ZBrush 4
• Frantic Films announces Deadline 3.1
• Autodesk introduces Smoke 2010, Flint 2010, and Lustre 2009
• Autodesk announces “Flaire” for Flame and Inferno
• Noise Industries Releases FXFactory Pro 2.0.7
• N-Sided announces Quidam3
• Forums – Can Visualization & Computer Graphics aid K-12 Education?
• Interview with New SIGGRAPH chair Ronen Barzel
• IBM/Google get an extra $5mil from NSF
• Should Data.gov visualize?
• Charm++ Workshop2009 Videos online
• The Teapot – Computer History Museum
• Google’s new O3D Plugin

Podcast Podcast

Some information has come out about the process used to make “The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf”.  From storyboards and concept photographs, to the rendering and modeling pipeline, they have a great slideshow showing all of it.

Making of The Witcher: Rise of the White Wolf Trailer.

Graphics

A new video from Kai Kostok showcases the new GLSL features in Blender by rendering the Visible Human dataset in real-time, anc capturing it on video for all of us to enjoy.

“In this demonstration you are about to see a little 10 minutes tour through a real female human body age 59 from the Visual Human Project. Everything is real-time recorded. The shown “block” consists of 1746 x 570 x 666 cells in resolution. It s a plain stack of hundreds of planes each mapped with slice of the dataset. i have written a script to fully automate the process of conversion. It is rendered by a basic GeForce 8600 GT with 512 MB of video memory on top of a 2 4 GHz Quad-Core system with 4 GB of memory. “

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Science biomed, blender, visible human

ASUS has launched the new ENGTX275 card, and the interesting new feature is their new current protection.  Overclockers are well aware of the potential to accidentally damage a card through over-current and over-voltage conditions.  ASUS is going to some old-school technology, Fuses, to triple the protection.

The ASUS ENGTX275 Series is just the first of ASUS’ graphics cards to come equipped with a second over-current protection device—Fuse Protection, that eliminates any chance of an excessive or dangerous temperature rise in the conductors on the graphics card. With three sets of input fuses present on the circuit board of the ENGTX275/HTDI/896MD3, at least one of these sets will “break” to interrupt the flow of electrical current if the over-current protection controllers malfunction.

ASUSTeK Computer Inc..

Hardware asus, nvidia

The Discovery Channel has a new show airing called “Doing daVinci” where a group of four experts attempt to build some of daVinci’s greatest never-before-contructed inventions.  For the conceptual designs and prototyping, they use Autodesk’s Inventor and Autodesk’s Digital Protyping solutions.

“We are thrilled that the Doing daVinci team sought out Inventor to bring daVinci’s inventions to life,” said Robert “Buzz” Kross, senior vice president, Manufacturing Industry Group at Autodesk. “Autodesk Inventor software has helped manufacturers around the world design and build better products faster, but until today it has never been used for time travel.”

Doing daVinci airs Mondays on the Discovery Channel at 10pm Eastern.

See Examples of the use of Autodesk Inventor at the Doing daVinci Fan Site.

via Autodesk Brings Historic Designs to Life in New Discovery Channel Series “Doing DaVinci” « { design@tive } information design.

Graphics autodesk, inventor

"Influenza" news from Apr 21 - Apr 26, from HealthMap

If you’ve been trying to keep up with the progression of the latest health scare “Swine Flu” (H1N1), then you might want to check out HealthMap’s global disease alert map.  It’s a google-maps mashup allowing you to select individual diseases, data sources, and time-frames and see them overlaid onto a map.  The picture above shows all information on “Influenze” from Apr21 – Apr26.

HealthMap | Global disease alert map.

Science biomed

Sparkle has released a new GTX260 card called the Calibre X260.  It’s a 55nm non-reference design with GDDR3 memory, higher clock speeds than most of the GTX260′s on the market (650Mhz rather than 576Mhz), and some interesting software to allow you to adjust the performance and power-consumption on the fly.

The Calibre X260/X260 HM Graphics Card is bundled with convenient SPA Tune, an own designed software, effectively balancing the computing power and power consumption. It provides three mode transition buttons for Overclocking mode (OC), standard mode (STD) and green mode (GRN).

via SPARKLE Intros Calibre X260/X260 HM OC Graphics Card :: News :: www.hardwarezone.com®.

Hardware nvidia, sparkle

Men-From-Marks, the long based visual effects company, talks about the various tools and effects they used in the upcoming Mutant Chronicles movie.

So, one can only wonder how London-based Men-From-Mars managed to single-handedly produce 1,454 multilayered shots for Mutant Chronicles with only six 3D artists, 2 to 3 matte painters and 20 compositors… Moreover, this team of 30 was able to deliver the bulk of the work — 900 shots — in less than six months, and on a very tight budget.

In the article, they talk about using Cinema4D, and an advanced Softimage/mental ray/Shake pipeline with Boujou for motion tracking.

via ….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...

Graphics men-from-mars, vfx

Autodesk’s new 3Ds Max 2010 is in the hands of users, and boasts a huge new featureset including 100 new modeling tools in “Graphite”, Microsoft’s new “Ribbon” interface, and integration with the popular plugin PolyBoost.  VFXWorld’s Ryan Lesser takes it for a test drive and gives us his view of the good and the bad.

This week I received the new 3ds Max 2010. I will be putting it through the paces, paying specific attention to the new additions. As you may have seen in Autodesk’s press notes for the product, there are more than 100 new additions to the modeling toolset alone, so I will have lots to cover. 3ds Max 2010 is available as of this week for $3,495 or as an upgrade from 3ds Max 2009 for $895.

via ….. >> VFXWorld / Feature Articles << …...

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk