Thrust v1.0 is now available, and supersedes previously released “Komrade” versions. From their website:
Thrust is a CUDA library of parallel algorithms with an interface resembling the C++ Standard Template Library (STL). Thrust provides a flexible high-level interface for GPU programming that greatly enhances developer productivity. Develop high-performance applications rapidly with Thrust!
Looks pretty promising.
via thrust – Google Code.
And yes, the opening lower-third is missing.. I guess something had to go wrong, it is #13.
I just found an account on YouTube named udiprob that has several animations of physics and computer algorithms in a fun style. From QuickSort vs Bubblesort to Einstein’s Special Relativity, it’s a great collection of animations.
See some after the break.
The Intelligent Systems Lab at the University of Central Florida (ISL at UCF) and the Electronic Visualization Lab at the University of Illinois at Chicago (EVL at UIC) are working on Project Lifelike, a project to create realistic human simulations (avatars). One thing they’ve found, which is related to an earlier discovery, is that the rendering & display is only part of the problem, the bulk of the “realism” comes from behaviors which they’ve implemented with an AI system.
The Project LifeLike team demonstrated the technology this past winter at NSF’s headquarters in Arlington, Va. The team gathered motion and visual information on a NSF staff member, and gave the avatar system information about an upcoming NSF proposal solicitation. Other people were able to sit and talk to the avatar, which could converse with the speaker and answer questions about the solicitation. Colleagues of the NSF staffer were instantly able to recognize who the avatar represented and commented that it captured some of the person’s mannerisms.
ZBrush has announced a new feature in Zbrush4 called “GoZ”, aimed to make moving data between ZBrush and other popular modeling packages even easier.
With a single click of a button, GoZ lets you quickly transfer your geometry back and forth between ZBrush and other 3D application like Maya, Cinema 4D, and Modo, with many other applications soon to come. This means that you can place ZBrush and its GoZ feature at the center of any workflow. Not only can you instantly transfer geometry between ZBrush and other 3D applications, but any texture, normal, and displacement maps created with in ZBrush will automatically be connected to the appropriate shader networks in the program of your choosing.
Adobe has released a small (30Mb) Update for Premiere Pro CS4, version 4.1.0.
The Adobeﾮ Premiereﾮ Pro CS4 4.1.0 update adds additional support for REDCODE and Avid-captured DV or IMX footage, third-party support, and .vob extension support along with numerous other stability and quality improvements. The update is recommended for all Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 users.
Another win for RED.
via Adobe – Premiere Pro : For Windows : Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 4.1.0 update.
This year is the 25th anniversary of Pixar’s “Pool Ball” rendering that launched Renderman at SIGGRAPH1984 in Minneapolis. To commemorate the occasion, FXGuide has an audio interview with Rob Cook of Pixar, the primary architect of Renderman and creator of the original rendering.
With the release of the critically acclaimed film UP by Pixar, we take a moment and acknowledge that 2009 marks 25 years since the famous Pool Ball shot 1984. In this week’s fxpodcast we talk to Rob Cook of Pixar about the some of the history surrounding that landmark shot, his own career and the industry today. Meanwhile we took a bash at redoing the shot to see just how much easier things are today.
They also have recreations of the shot. So far they’ve got Matt Leonard who rendered it with Maya in 1min 42seconds, and David Stripinis who rendered it with Modo in about 2 hours. Think you can do better?
via fxguide – vfx training – 1984 – Pool Balls 25 Years Later.
For our 1000th post here on VizWorld I wanted something special. I was just looking over the SGI Legal Documents we uncovered a while back, and saw alot has been updated. There’s a few new motions from Eliot Bernstein and others, and many notices of serves, but just today they’ve added several Monthly Operating reports for various divisions of SGI and Cray Research. Most of them are blank and fairly dull, except for Docket #419, “Monthly Operating Report for Silicon Graphics, Inc for the Period April1-24, 2009″. It actually contains numbers, including the following impressive chart of executive payments for the period:
If I’m reading that correct, and I’m neither a Lawyer nor an Accountant, the CEO’s are still pulling in $30k a month as the company circles the drain. Also in the document is the amount paid and owed to various companies involved in the bankruptcy proceedings and restructuring (showing a startling amount of money still owed),
Visualization Library has just released v3.2.440 Alpha, focusing on new Volume Rendering features:
This new release concentrates on volume rendering: the new vlVolume::SlicedVolume class can be used to directly render 3D volumes with and without OpenGL Shading Language. You can install your own shaders or use the default ones which support realtime dynamic Blinn-Phong lighting and custom transfer functions.
Also, they’ve improved some basic algorithms like Marching Cubes and added DICOM support.
via Visualization Library | A lightweight C++ OpenGL middleware for 2D/3D graphics.
At the recent CCGrid09, a conference for cluster and grid computing, the LSU Center for Computation and Technology (CCT) won the SCALE2009 challence with an interactive system to simulate and visualize black holes and their gravitational physics.
The demonstration showed live, interactive images of the black hole data using a scientific visualization system distributed across LONI. The CCT group built tangible interaction devices, which they provided on the show floor in Shanghai, allowing observers to interact in real-time with the visualization process.
They ran the simulation on TACC’s Ranger system, using 2048 cores. As an extra “fun” bonus, they managed to connect the simulation to social networks so that it could announce runtime information via Twitter and post real-time images of the simulation to Flickr. Videos of the simulation can be seen at the CactusCode site.
via Dr. Dobb’s | Black Hole Simulation Wins SCALE 2009 Challenge | May 29, 2009.
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