VizWorld.com

Fast & Furious (4) opened in early April to the biggest box office opening of the year (at the time).  Ian Failes talks to Double Negative about their tunnel chase scenes, and Rhythm & Hues exploding tanker sequence.

Kirk: We use Maya in-house for our modeling. So we had a bunch of talented artists sculpting in Maya for quite a long time to create that look, working from reference as much as possible. We also have a proprietary system called dnAssets, which is a tool that lets us store vast amounts of data ready for rendering. We can lay the models out in a scene in a crude, proxy fashion as simple geometry that later on in render time becomes full-res.

via fxguide – vfx blog – Faster and Even More Furious.

Graphics doublenegative, movie, rhythm&hues, vfx

Japanese tech journals are reporting that Panasonic has partnered with Sumitomo Chemical to build OLED panels of 40-inches or larger, for deployingment in 2010.  No word on price, but with Sony’s XEL-1 costing $2500 for a tiny 11-inch screen, you can imagine these will cost a fortune.

Report: Panasonic, Sumitomo teaming on OLED TVs | Crave – CNET.

Hardware display, oled, panasonic

Stanford University will be hosting the “Art and Technology of Science Visualizations” exhibit at Wallenberg Hall on May 18th.  It will highlight the growing genre of science maps based on large scale datasets.

Places & Spaces highlights the rapidly growing genre of science maps based on large scale data sets. “The art, science and understanding of visualization technologies and their application have enabled new insights about complex issues to be shared with broad communities,” states Media X Executive Director Charles House.  “This new exhibit has turned Wallenberg Hall into a gallery setting that complements the world class visualization work on the Stanford campus in campus labs such as the Human Computer Interaction Lab (HCI) and the Spatial History Project.

It consists of both the physical exhibition and an online counterpart at http://www.scimaps.org .  Every hear 10 new maps are added to the exhibit, resulting in 100 maps by 2014.  This is the fifth year.  See the full press release after the break.

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Science exhibition

Adobe has rolled out a new website AdobeArtists.com which showcases work from Nando Costa, Genevieve Gauckler, Erik Natzke, Johnny Kelly, and Cisma.  All the work was done with Adobe CS4 products.

Adobe Creative Suite 4.

Graphics adobe

The nominees for the SIGGRAPH2009 Computer Animation Festival have been named, and CGSociety has the whole list.  Of the 770 submissions, 140 have been selected to show at SIGGRAPH, and the winners will be named at SIGGRAPH.

“We were thrilled with level of quality and technical expertise that was prevalent throughout the hundreds of submissions,” stated Carlye Archibeque, Computer Animation Festival Executive Producer from LightStage, LLC. “The Computer Animation Festival continues to show the power that the latest advances in computer graphics technologies have to amuse and entertain. As always the jury looked not only for amazing graphic content, but also good story telling, whether it was a film about a boy and his spaceship, or a film about new studies in Alzheimer’s research.”

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2009 CAF Nominees.

Graphics contest, siggraph

VRay has just announced their first Beta RC available for Maya.  If you buy it now ($899), you get 10% off the purchase price ($999) and free shipping on the hardware dongle when it’s released.

V-Ray for Maya is now shipping as a Beta RC release. You can now purchase V-Ray for Maya without the original Beta limitations. A release date of the final v1.0 of V-Ray for Maya is slated for the middle of this year. The Beta RC release is downloaded and the licensing is completed via email. All Beta RC customers will receive the final V-Ray for Maya v1.0 release download and licensing dongle when it becomes available.

via V-Ray for Maya Beta RC Now Available!.

Graphics maya, software, vray

DiSTI has just released GL Studio 4.0, a toolkit used in numerous 2D and 3D Cockpits, symbologies, and HUDs. This version integrates support for VR Vantage, from VT MAK.

“Ease of use and open product integration are critical reasons why GL Studio is selected by the global market,” says Darren Humphrey, Chief Technology Officer for DiSTI. “The Training and Simulation market has historically been forced to work with proprietary HMI solutions until the release of GL Studio. We changed the paradigm of the industry with the release of such an open architecture toolkit for the development of cockpits, HUDs, symbology and instrumentation.”

See the full press release after the break.

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Hardware, Science disti

Mechdyne has issued a press release talking about their “Knowledge Wall” deployment going in at the US military’s Joint Intelligence Laboratory (JIL) at the Joint Transformation Command for Intelligence (JTC-I) in Norfolk, VA.  It’s a 37ft x 13ft wall, of 53million pixels (12,288 x 4320) driven by 8 Sony Quad SXRD Projectors.

With its requirements for secure and non-secure data integration and command-size group viewing, Mechdyne believes that the JIL Knowledge Wall ranks as one of the largest and most complex single visualization system installations in the world. The rear-projected Knowledge Wall can show multiple 3D stereoscopic images in the center one-third of the screen while displaying additional images on both sides. Computer and video images from dozens of consolidation points in the JIL, including both secure and non-secure sources, are served to the system through a fiber optic matrix switch.

See the complete press release after the break.

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Hardware display, mechdyne, military

J. Micheal Stracznski, the creator of Babylong 5, will speak at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) May 22nd.  Babylon 5 was the first television show to use computer generated graphics.

His encounter with computer graphics began in the early 1990’s when Ron Thornton, Foundation Imaging’s visual effects director, started working with the Commodore Amiga and New Tek’s Video Toaster, an add-on graphics card. The creators of Babylon 5 discarded the miniature, physical, static models of Star Trek for new possibilities.

via CGI first introduced to TV in Babylon 5 by MIT presentor – Video Games Reviews, Cheats | Geek.com.

Graphics vfx

Rackable may own SGI, and be slowly transforming itself into the new SGI, but that doesn’t make the legal case go away.  With the big hearing Friday and another one next month, there’s still mountains of Legal material being filed every day.

Click inside for a followup to the previous May 8th hearing recap.

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Hardware sgi