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Pixar’s first technical paper that founded the Renderman rendering engine had it’s 25th anniversary this year.  Prior to their famous “Toy Story”, they had been creating animated short for 10 years, not as a standalone business but as a way to demonstrate their powerful computers.

At the time, John Lasseter was an “interface designer” for the new computer company. And at the time, Pixar basically just sold specially designed computers for animation. The company’s sales were flagging, though, so it needed a way to show off what Pixar’s computers were capable of doing. In stepped Lasseter, who’d been trained by Disney Animation Studio before transitioning into 3D animation. He provided their first true short (previous works had been interesting but still ultimately tech demos), which premiered at the SIGGRAPH computer industry conference to a standing ovation.

See some of the early works, including “Luxo Jr” and “Tin Toy”, over at Paste Magazine.

via Salute Your Shorts: Pixar, Part 1 – The Early Years :: Features Film & TV :: Articles :: Paste.

Graphics, Science animation, history, pixar, video

Update: Look at the bottom for a response from Google.

If you’ve been anxiously awaiting O3D to come to the masses, making hardware-accelerated 3D Rendering in the browser a reality, then you might be waiting a while longer.  According to a new article from CNet, Google is now pushing “Native Client”, a technology for running x86 software in the browser, into Chromium and intends to pair it with O3D.

Native Client, called NaCl for short, is a mechanism to run software downloaded over the Web directly on x86 processors such as Intel’s Core line. The key motivation is to attain the speed of regular “native” software installed on a computer rather than the much slower JavaScript environment that sophisticated Web sites use today. It’s one part of Google’s broad effort to evolve the Web from a collection of relatively static sites into foundation for more powerful applications.

What does this mean?  Well, it could mean that a standard for O3D has to wait on a standard for Native Client execution to materialize first.  If O3D only works via Native Client execution, it might be a while..

A rebuttal: Henry Bridge, a Native Client developer, responded with the following information.

Using O3D does not and will not require using Native Client, and conversely, using Native Client does not and will not require using O3D. We think the two technologies will be very powerful together, however, we intend to make O3D usable from both Javascript scripts and Native Client binaries.

Google Native Client grows out of research phase | Webware – CNET.

Science 3d, browser, google, internet, o3d

The makers of the “Pogo Stylus”, available at Thinkgeek for $15, are holding a competition for users to draw and doodle on their iPhones.  The contest runs through July 1st, at which point they’ll declare  a winner of the $500 cash prize.

The only requirements are an iPhone and a Pogo Stylus (although I’m not really sure how they’ld know).  Given the recent hype around the New Yorker Cover drawn with Brushes, I can expect they’re going to get some stellar entries.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware art, contest, iphone, pogo, stylus

The Autodesk Assistance Program aims to help people who may have been displaced in the recent economic turmoil through free trial licenses (90 day) of their most popular software and free access to training materials.  Enrollment is free and includes:

• Free Software License: Student licenses of 17 Autodesk® products, including AutoCAD®, Revit® Architecture, Autodesk® Inventor® Professional, and/or AutoCAD® Civil 3D® software.
• Free Online Training: On-demand training available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week with Subscription eLearning, Autodesk University online, and vBooks.
• Reduced-Cost Classroom Training: Over 70 Autodesk Authorized Value Added Resellers and Autodesk Training Center (ATC®) partners are offering classroom training at their training facilities for free or for a significantly reduced fee. (Offerings will vary, please check with your local reseller or ATC to get details)
• Certification: Certification preparation and exams available at discounted rates.

So even if you’re not an unemployed graphic artist, this could be a great chance to get some hands-on with Autodesk Products which are the standard in several fields including architecture, engineering, and design.

via Autodesk Assistance Program.

Graphics, Science autodesk, education, free, software, training

A new project available on Google Code uses NVidia’s CUDA SDK to simulate electromagnetic effects and then render them via OpenGL.

At the present moment, the application only displays static electric field lines generated from a static distribution of charges. It uses all available GPUs in the system to, then displays the field lines using OpenGL.

electromag-with-cuda – Google Code.

Science cuda, nvidia, simulation

Dr. Lawrence Witmer, professor of anatomy and paleontology at Ohio University, specializes in the 3D visualization of dinosaur and modern mammalian skulls to understand the “functional morphology of the heads of vertebrates” and thus reconstruct soft tissues in dinosaurs.

These 3D images are sourced from CT scans and generated in Adobe Acrobat 3D.  Another great use of visualization technology to further science!

Science anatomy, dinosaur, paleontology, Science, visualization

StudioGPU has announce v1.0.2.10 of MachStudio with some interesting new features.  The biggest feature is new exporters of geometry, animation, and camera data to 3ds Max and Maya.

The tool’s creators StudioGPU also claim that artists can update animation files in Maya or Max and those additions will automatically update in MachStudio Pro. “You can even update just a sequence of animation frames and plug-them right into the MachStudio Pro scene,” said the company.

In addition, they’ve added 107 new materials covering everything from fabric to marble, and new animatable fog.  Sounds like MachStudio is becoming a great entry in the collection of animation and rendering tools.

via MachStudio Pro adds suite of updates | Game Development | News by Develop.

Graphics machstudio, software, studiogpu

A new press release talks about a pair of projects from Loyalkaspar and LORI PATE+ that use some interesting technology.  The first is the opening to A&E’s “Tattoo Highway” which combines video shot with a RED Camera with animations done in Flash.  The second is a promotional spot for MTV’s Spring Break `09 which uses some special digital effects to replicate the effects of old LOMO cameras.

Read the press release, with links to the promos and graphics, after the break.

Read more…

Graphics a&e, commercial, flash, loripate, loyalkaspar, mtv, red, vfx

HPCWire is carrying a story that a group of researchers have pushed VisIt into record-breaking territory by running visualizations of 500billion to 2trillion gridpoint datasets (that’s 2-terapoints in size).

The team ran VisIt using 8,000 to 32,000 processing cores to tackle datasets ranging from 500 billion to 2 trillion zones, or grid points. The project was a collaboration among leading visualization researchers from Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab), Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL).

Seems a good portion of the Department of Energy‘s Visualization staff was involved: Wes Bethel, Sean Ahern, Mark Howison, Dave Pugmire, and others.

The test runs created three-dimensional grids ranging from 512 x 512 x 512 “zones” or sample points up to approximately 10,000 x 10,000 x 10,000 samples for 1 trillion zones and approximately 12,500 x 12,500 x 12,500 to achieve 2 trillion grid points.

“This level of grid resolution, while uncommon today, is anticipated to be commonplace in the near future,” said Ahern. “A primary objective for our SciDAC Center is to be well prepared to tackle tomorrow’s scientific data understanding challenges.”

The tests consisted of isosurfaces and volume renderings.  While they don’t mention the results of the tests, they did carefully monitor them and collect benchmarking data that can be used in further development of VisIt.

Click the banner image above for larger Volume Rendering from the test.

via HPCwire: DOE Researchers Test Limits of Visualization Tool.

Science benchmark, doe, extreme, scidac, software, visit

Showcasing the power of the new Safari4 Javascript engine, someone has built a Navier-Stokes equation solver that runs entirely in JavaScript.  Simply select the resolution & solver iterations (The default work nicely) then start clicking in the big black box.  You can start & stop the simulation, and click the “Toggle drawing mode” to switch between flow glyphs and surface visualizations.  The image above was rendered with the simulation on FireFox3.5 beta, running at 5-6fps.

The surface visualizations also allow you to add “density sources” which create some impressive flow visualization effects.  Is this the future of simulation/visualization on the web?  I doubt it, but it’s pretty kewl either way.

Oliver’s simple fluid dynamics simulator.

Science javascript, sciviz, simulation