VizWorld.com

More information on the VFX in Angels & Demons, this time from VFXWorld.  They cover the huge photo montages that were required, but then get into some of the modeling and rendering tricks used in some of the huge crowd scenes.

It was decided, therefore, to use RenderMan‘s point cloud baking tools to bake all the illumination into a series of point clouds. Using additional proprietary tools, the team was able to combine all the point clouds for the different groups of lights together, so that they had one point cloud for each region. By splitting up the lighting in this way, they were able to use memory intensive techniques like ray tracing to get the best possible quality in the lighting.

They were also able to use the tools that Pixar had added to calculate ambient occlusion and color bleeding from the point clouds. These were then combined together in the renders, but could be overridden if the lighting had to change. Baking the lighting in meant that the lighting artists could build their scene, hit render, and immediately have a decent starting point for realistic lighting.

via VFXWorld.

Graphics movie, vfx

Showtime has created a fun little 2-minute infographic about the history of Cannibis (Weed, Marijuana, etc) since it’s first uses in ancient China.  A neat combination of CG, charcoal, modeling, and compositing, it’s a fun watch.  See it after the break.

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Graphics animation, infographic, marijuana, showtime

Thanks to the high-resolution and capabilities of the RED Camera, more and more filmmakers are picking it up for their next project.  Editing solutions, however, are a bit behind and struggling to catch up.  Autodesk today has announced that Flare and Inferno 2010 are RED capable, and getting some rave reviews.

“This is the best RED workflow I’ve seen.” Victor Wolansky, VFX artist, E3Post
“The speed and interactivity of Flame still astound me every day as I’m using it on feature films. Add GPU Burn and you’ll never have time to check your Facebook page!” Ara Khanikian, lead Flame artist, Rodeo FX

See the entire press release after the break.
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Graphics, Hardware autodesk, flame, inferno, red, software

It seems that computer graphics and rendering is becoming more and more widespread, with the justice system now catching onto the power of visual animations in contrast to simply spoken testimony.

Although computer graphics have been routinely used for about two decades in high-stakes civil trials, their use is rapidly expanding into criminal cases as technology improves and the price tag drops, Nations said.

Studies show that when jurors deliberate, 8% of what they remember comes from what they hear, while 55% is from what they see, according to Nations’ law firm, which lectures on the most effective ways to argue persuasively to juries.

I wonder if Lawyers will need to start taking graphics design and animation courses soon.

via Computer graphics inform, connect prosecutors with jury | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press.

Science justice, psychology

From the old days of the S3 Virge and the old 3dfx Voodoo, graphics cards have come  along way.  MaximumPC has a massive 9-page novel chronicling the rise and fall of video cards throughout the years.

It’s pretty amazing when you think about how far graphics technology has come. To help you do that, we’re going to take a look back at every major GPU release since the infancy of 3D graphics. Join us as we travel back in time and relive releases like 3dfx’s Voodoo3 and S3′s ViRGE lineup. This is one nostalgiac ride you don’t want to miss!

via From Voodoo to GeForce: The Awesome History of 3D Graphics | Maximum PC.

Hardware 3dfx, amd, graphicscards, nvidia, s3

Turbosquid and Cubicspace Studios Ltd have just released rtre 2.1.  In this release, users can use realtime view at an astonishing 100+ million polys/second in 3ds Max for interactive preview and exploration of models.  They’ve also added alot of new rendering and publishing features.

Rendering

· Automatic irradiance lighting of all selected objects added to the embedded Realtime view inside of 3ds Max allows for quick setup and preview of scene with materials.

· Dynamic Realtime view offers customizable field-of-view, near and far clip planes and depth colored fog for advanced composition and layout to further augment your ideas and vision.

There’s a free trial of rtre available on TurboSquid’s website.

via CGSociety – rtre v2.1.

Graphics cubicspace, rtre, software, turbosquid

By using a new technology called Light Guide Sheets (LGS), LG has been able to reduce the thickness of an 42-inch LCD Television to a mere 6mm, and the weight to 6.1kg.

The displays can reproduce a rich range of natural-looking colors with color saturation level of 80% (NTSC). The panels feature the company’s 120Hz technology with a motion picture response time (MPRT) of 8ms, eliminating motion blur and boasting full HD (1920 x 1080) resolution.

Not much news on Availability and Pricing, tho.

via LG Display Unveils ‘Thinnest’ LCD TV Panel — Tech-On!.

Hardware display, lcd, lg

Chart courtesy of the new Wolfram|Alpha . (Corrected)

A new press release today states that Rackable has finished the paperwork for acquiring SGI, and the final change is that the “RACK” stock symbol is no more, to be replaced by “SGI”.

See the full press release after the break.

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Hardware rackable, sgi

Appro announced yesterday a new rack-system that combines Tesla blades with traditional clusters to pack 78 TeraFlops into a single rack.  Appro is a small niche player in the HPC space, but has decided to join the ranks of the GPGPU elite with this offering. Why so late to the game?  They were waiting for more “proficient” GPGPU offerings, which NVidia has finally offered in the Tesla’s latest Double-precision support.  However, they’re really waiting for the next generation of cards.

The exact design of these future Tesla co-processors is not known but Lee hinted that it would be a lot more elegant than the current Tesla PCI-Express cards and would have much better double-precision performance too.

So what’s the actual rack?

The Appro HyperPower puts 19 of the twin Nehalem EP servers interleaved in a standard 42U rack with 19 of the Tesla appliances, which yields 304 x64 cores and 18,240 GPU cores. The peak performance of such a rack weighs in at just over 78 teraflops on single-precision codes and 6.56 teraflops at double-precision math. Here’s the scary bit – and it’s not surprising: One of these Tesla appliances burns at 800 watts when it is working hard.

via Appro bridges Tesla GPUs, Nehalems • The Register.

Hardware appro, nehalem, nvidia, tesla

CUDA, GPGPU, Tesla, OpenCL.. Every day that goes by has another vendor or software company touting the benefits of GPU-accelerated Computing.  But why?  Video cards have been around for years, so what’s happened in the last few years to make it so lucrative and desirable?  Not just for consumers, but for big players in High Performance Computing?

Come on inside for the VizWorld’s feature article on Why everyone is Buzzing about GPGPU.

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Hardware feature, gpgpu