VizWorld.com

Lost Season 5 has just concluded, and this season had more VFX than any of the previous seasons, largely due to the “Smoke Monster”.  But one of the most impressive scenes is the Ajira Airline crash:

One of the most complex scenes of Season 5 definitely was the crash landing of the 737-100 familiar to viewers of the show on a dirt airstrip in Episode 9. Featuring 43 shots mostly from the point of view of the cockpit the scene contained 50 billion polygons — a huge number compared to the average—with each frame taking five hours to render. “It s an example of having feature-quality aspirations on a television schedule ” says Suskin. “It was a challenge to get it out in time and make it as reasonable as possible.” Eden FX utilized a new LightWave 3D plug-in that allowed it to manage the vast amounts of data. “That scene would not have been possible without that plug-in.”

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

Graphics television, vfx

The first problem encountered in most visualizations is choosing good colors.  PSU has integreated data from the National Science Foundation and created “ColorBrewer”, a tool to make it alot easier.  Simply select the number of colorlevels you need, whether you want a “Sequential”, “Diverging”, or “Qualitative” Colormap, and then select from their predesigned colors.  The colors are displayed on a sample state & county map, and it then gives you all the information you need:

• Try out other overlay colors for roads or state lines
• Get the color codes in RGB, CMYK, or other colorspaces
• Find out if the colormap is photocopy friendly, colorblind friendly, projector friendly, and more

It’s a great tool to have in any visualization scientists’s (or graphic designer’s) toolbox.

ColorBrewer – Selecting Good Color Schemes for Maps.

Science colors, tool, visualization

Alexey Kashpersky has a walkthrough of a beautiful picture called “Dream” that he created using ZBrush, Photoshop, and several plugins like Ornatrix.  Rendered in both v-ray and MentalRay and composited afterwards, it’s a fantastic image.

Although, it may be slightly NSFW, some artistic female nudity.

Making of Dream – CGArena.

Graphics example, zbrush

Penn State has brought “Acquine” online, which stands for the “Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine”.  From an interview in Penn State Live:

Wang said the system extracts and uses visual aspects such as color saturation, color distribution and photo composition to give any uploaded image a rating from zero to 100. The system learns to associate these aspects with the way humans rate photos based on thousands of previously-rated photographs in online photo-sharing Web sites such as photo.net.

ACQUINE: Aesthetic Quality Inference Engine – Intelligent, Unbiased and Instant Assessment of Photos.

Science imageprocessing, photography

Markus Manninen will be speaking at the Gnomon School of Visual Effects Thursday May 28th, 2009 on Kung Fu Panda.

A presentation of the visual strategies, the production approaches used, and the execution of “Kung Fu Panda”. Learn how the film was shaped from early pre-production to final execution through the Visual Effects Supervisor’s point of view.

The event is free of charge.

via Gnomon School of Visual Effects | Professional 3D Training in Hollywood, CA.

Graphics education

NVidia’s newest ForceWare 185.85 (WHQL Certified) is out, and exPreview takes it for a test drive to see what it improves over the previous version.

In all the 28 minor items, ForceWare 185.85 WHQL outperforms by Version 182.50 in only 10 ones. However, the new driver brings at least 13% improvements under FarCry 2. The improvement even achieves whopping 23.47% under 1920X1200, 4XAA. Besides, the new release brings 1% – 2% improvements under 3DMark Vantage and Call of Duty 5.

So for gaming it seems a decent improvement, but otherwise it might actually hurt performance.  They also test the new “Ambient Occlusion” option to add soft-shadows to games, and find a costly 20-40% reduction in framerates.

via ForceWare 185.85 WHQL Tested – Expreview.com.

Hardware driver, nvidia

CGSociety announces another workshop on the horizon, this time by Cesar Dacol Jr on ZBrush.

By exploring and creating characters in ZBrush, students’ skills with be strengthened and honed in preparation for production. Students will be studying the digital sculpting paradigms as well as the texturing and retopology within ZBrush 3.1. As there will be heavy emphasis on anatomy and structure, students are required to have a working knowledge of ZBrush. This is not a class for beginners into ZBrush. Students will also need to have Photoshop or Corel Painter and a 3D application of their choosing.

Again, an 8 week course beginning June 8th.

CGWorkshop: ZBrush – Sculpting Digital Characters.

Graphics workshop, zbrush

Aaron Koblin recently gave a lecture at the 2009 OFFF in Lisbon.

While it was a theme that seemed to be running through the OFF conference this wasn’t what he was going to talk about. He said while it’s important to be aware of the extreme abundance of data it’s ironic that his job is to use it. With the vast volume of data he argued that we can make insights that we never could have seen before. He said:

“Data tells stories about our lives.”

PFSK has gathered videos of the various visualizations he discussed, and transcribed most of his talk online.

via OFFF Report : Aaron Koblin On Data Visualization – PSFK.com.

Science aaron koblin, conference

Shamus Young over at TwentySided had a idea for a night-time city scene, generated and rendered procedurally.  With a little bit of experience from other projects, he managed to pull it into a fantastic windows Screensaver (Which you can download here), and documented the whole process.  It’s a great collection of optimization tricks, rendering strategies, discussions of various tools, and just a general great read.

See a video of the procedural city project after the break.

Read more…

Science opengl

Francesco Mugnai has recently compiled a fantastic list of 50 great infographics available on the web.  Definately worth checking out.

50 great examples of infographics – FrancescoMugnai.com.

Graphics, Science example, infographic