The WWDC Keynote is going on right now. One announcement is new Macbook pro laptops with some improved specs. The new laptops seems to include NVidia chipsets, both the 9400M and 9600M (on select models). This way they get the battery-savings of the 9400M combined with the higher-end features of the 9600M when needed.
Prices and full specs at the link.
We’ve talked about the Machu Picchu Post video before, the fantastical adventure of a boy and an air mail pilot. MaxUnderground has an interview with the Supinfocom students behind the magic : Clément Crocq, Margaux Durand-Rival and Nicolas Novali.
As we didn’t have too many outdoor shots, we decided to use a mix of matte painting and camera mapping with self illumination projected onto a 3D low poly mesh. The 3D base was necessary to build the landscape and to capture the shadows of the plane, and then Clément painted textures on it. The really far mountains were only matte paintings. The clouds were all made in 2D and we incorporated and animated them in compositing. For the mist and the wind we used a simple particle system with a map projection of a cloud and a lot of compositing.
A new app for the iPhone named “Mosaica” aims to make creating montages & panorams easier. Through a demonstration video on YouTube, they show how you can snap multiple pictures and have them stitched on the phone automatically. Then you can pan around and view them, or upload them to a webserver for sharing & higher-quality images. Supporting multiple angles and zooms (close-ups for detail, distance for context) it’s a pretty impressive tool and the results he shows on the phone (with live processing times) are impressive.
See the video after the break.
Orbaz Technologies has posted a video showing some of the impressive features in the new ParticleFlow Toolbox Box#2 Pro suite. With new features allowing you to bind particles to any mesh, they open a whole new world of using particles for soft-body simulations and cloth-simulations complete with tearing. It’s an impressive video, and with the latest version it’s PhysX accelerated on NVidia hardware.
Following on the popularity of the 50 Great Examples of Infographics meme, WebDesigner Depot has gathered 50 Great Examples of Data Visualization. Focusing heavily on Web visualization, they show examples (and links to applications, where they can) for visualizations of many types.
Below are 50 of the best data visualizations and tools for creating your own visualizations out there, covering everything from Digg activity to network connectivity to what’s currently happening on Twitter.
50 Great Examples of Data Visualization | Webdesigner Depot.
Another interesting find from SID Display Week, LG was exhibiting a 15-inch OLED panel that, during demonstrations, could withstand direct mallet strikes. It’s formed with an OLED layer on glass substrate and a steel sheet on its back, with a resin sealing layer on the front making it durable to shock. The downside? It’s no longer flexible because of the glass.
The display operates 1366×768 @ 120Hz, making it a 720P display, and is 0.85mm thick.
[SID] LG Display Develops ‘OLED Panel Durable to Hammer Strikes’ — Tech-On!.
We’ve talked about iZ3D monitors before, the passive stereo LCD’s that give you stereo with pretty much any video cards and without shutter glasses. The technology is neat, but NVidia is eating into their market with the new GeForce Stereo solution. Anandtech takes an iZ3D display for a test drive, and finds it a bit lacking.
But despite the fact that iZ3D delivers on hardware compatibility and offers passive glasses that are much more user friendly, the fact that each game requires manual tweaking combined with the image quality issues really disappointed us. For an NVIDIA owner, GeForce 3D Vision adds more value, and the iZ3D monitor really isn’t something we believe would add as much value to an AMD set up as 3D Vision adds to NVIDIA hardware (which still isn’t a lot without much better developer and software support).
via AnandTech: Stereoscopic 3D Monitor From iZ3D: Passive Glasses and Polarized Screens.
If you do a lot of rendering in Google’s Sketchup, you might want to check out SU Podium. Just released as a 1.7 Beta, it’s a photorealistic rendering plugin for Sketchup that can generating high-quality renderings of your scenes. It supports reflections and textures, and the results are far improved over the default settings in SketchUp.
Licenses are available for prices ranging from $80 (Educational discount) to $800 (Commercial licenses).
Siger Studios has released a collection of presets for Materials in V-Ray with 3ds Max. The current beta contains 285 v-ray material presets and templates covering leather, ceramics, metals, glass, liquids, and fabrics. Samples can be seen in PDF format on their website, and a limited-functionality demo can be downloade from their site.
Works with 3ds max 2009 and 2010, vray SP2 and SP3, and costs 70 Euros (approx $100).
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