Blender 2.49 RC1 is now available, with a nice list of new features:
Ronen Barzel
The new SIGGRAPH chair Ronen Barzel sits down for an interview with Bill Desowitz at VFXWorld and they discuss some of the new things in Computer Graphics and SIGGRAPH in general. In particular, they discuss the new focus on Audio this year:
This isn’t a new notion, and there has been work at SIGGRAPH on multisensory experiences, haptic interfaces and so forth for many years. However, this year we felt we wanted to highlight it explicitly. In particular, we’re focusing on music and audio, since sound is such a crucial component of movies, games and human interaction. And, of course, the focus on music resonates with SIGGRAPH coming back to New Orleans — with the rich musical backdrop that this city provides. (Plus, New Orleans’ cuisine gives extra stimulation to the sense of taste!)
Somewhat related to an earlier post about whether or not Data.gov should integrate visualization is an article from The Economist back in 1998 about Deceptive Charts.
If a trade union were after a big pay rise, then the left-hand chart below would make a strong case. The facts seem obvious: the boss’s hourly pay has risen much faster than the workers’ pay. But plot exactly the same data on a logarithmic scale (see middle chart) and the story reverses; the wage gap now appears to narrow, with workers’ wages rising much faster than their boss’s. If the boss wants even stronger ammunition against the union’s pay claim, he might unveil the right-hand chart. This uses an index which sets both wages at 100 in the first year, and shows that his pay rises have lagged far behind his workers’. This corresponds to the facts, as all three charts were constructed on the (admittedly implausible) assumption that the boss’s pay had risen 5% and the workers’ pay 20% each year.
via Deceptive Charts.
During a recent oversight hearing, US senators complained that Recovery.gov wasn’t as accessible and easy to use as it should be. In an attempt to rectify this, Recovery.gov will contain an online forum starting Monday, allowing visitors to make suggestions and vote on reforms. Topics will include website design, data collection and warehousing, analysis, and online visualization.
Shortly after I published my SGI Special Edition Podcast, I was contacted by a former SGI Engineer (who preferred to remain Anonymous) with several stories to tell of what happened to SGI. It’s an amazing story full of minor hardware glitches that wound up costing millions, bone-headed oversights during acquisitions, and basic mismanagement of a billion dollar company. The story is far too long and involved for a single post, so I’ll be adding it in chapters over the next few days. So come on inside and witness the saga of what really happened to SGI over the years.. The story has never been told, until now. We’ll begin at the Top:
ATI’s high-end Radeon cards offer up to 800 shader processors, which makes them ideal for high-end GPGPU work. Rumors have it that NVidia aims to take a bite of that market back with their new GT300 chip which will allegedly have 512 shader processors, and switch from a SIMD architecture to a MIMD architecture.
Why NVidia would change isn’t entirely clear, but MIMD does make the chips better-suited for GPGPU & CUDA applications, as it turns the card into more of a parallel-processor than a stream-processor.
Since 2007, Google has been working with IBM to provide universities with access to compute clusters based on Hadoop, an open-source cluster system based on Google’s distributed file system GFS and using Google’s open-soruce framework for massively parallel data-crunching MapReduce. It’s a move to prep students for work on the types of Massively-parallel algorithms in use by HPC tools and companies like Google and Yahoo. Google and IBM have shoveled between $20m and $25m into the project, and now they’ve got another $5m from the National Science Foundation.
The computational and storage resources provided by this Google-IBM initiative allows us to perform complicated interactive analysis of a pretty-much unprecedentedly large amount of data ” Claudio Silva associate professor at the University of Utah tells The Reg. “It has the ability to completely transform the way we do data analysis and visualization…
The HD4770, the “World’s First” 40nm GPU chipset, is now on the shelves for an amazingly low $99. But is it worth it? Well, exPreview has a massive 17-page review of the card, and they conclude:
AMD claims Radeon HD 4770 is the fastest graphics card under $100, which is quite true. It delivers 95% gaming performance of HD 4850 which is $40 more expensive.
The excellent performance of Radeon HD 4770 in power consumption, overclocking, temperature and noise control owe to the 40nm manufacturing process and what the new processing brings. Actually, Radeon HD 4770 is the biggest surprise that AMD brings us since HD 4800 Series.
First Review of Radeon HD 4770: $99 Monster – Expreview.com.
The Google Newsmap (no affiliation to Google Inc) by Marcos Weskamp takes the top stories from Google News and visualizes them in a 2D rectagular grid structure that uses size to show the popularity of the story, and color to indicate both the category (health, entertainment, world, etc) and age of the story. It’s a great way to get a quick overview of the news, and has lots of features to control what categories and countries are viewed.
Ever find yourself scratching your head when talking to people about displacement maps, photos, and caustic effects? Well, Icrontic has a new article online that describes bump maps, displacement maps, parallax mapping, and more.
Before any journey into the unknown, one must start with a map. That is exactly where we start this journey, focusing on maps. There are many different types of maps used in computer graphics, and collectively they make up a very large portion of the visuals you see in a game. Texture maps, specular maps, shadow maps, shader-based maps, the list goes on. We’re going to focus on the shader-based, specifically bump, parallax, and displacement maps.
via Icrontic Gaming » 3D Jargon Sucks! Mapping techniques explained.
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