VizWorld.com

It’s no secret that one of the biggest advertised features in 3ds Max 2010 is the new MetaSL implementation, but what does this mean?  Well, zap’s mental ray tips talks about it.  The image you see above, the left side is the Final Image while the Right side is the run-time Viewport, rendered with the help of MetaSL shaders.

What happens in 3ds Max 2010 is that several of the shaders has been given an implementation in the MetaSL shading language. MetaSL is mental images renderer agnostic shading language. When this shading language is taken through the mental mill compiler, out the other end drops something that can fit multiple different graphics hardware, as well as several different renderers!

via zap’s mental ray tips: 3ds Max 2010, MetaSL and mental mill.

Graphics 3dsmax, mental images, metasl

Tobari Architect has just released v2 of their Mathsurf library, a maxscript plugin for mathematical geometry in 3ds Max.  This new version adds significant performance improvements, as well as support for curves anad implicit surfaces.  Also, this new version comes with three new tools : Mathdeform, Mathcurve, and Implicit Surfaces.

The plugin suite can be freely downloaded from their site.

Torabi Architect.

Graphics, Science 3dsmax, mathematics, mathsurf, modeling, plugin, tobari

Ever looked at the specs for a Digital Camera (video or photo) and see it talk about “4:2:2″ or “4:1:1″ sensors, and wondered what that meant?  Well, John Galt has a fantastic article over at CreativeCow about what this means, how it translates to the older notion of video footage and sensors, and why it does and doesn’t matter.

For motion picture camera sensors, the word “pixel” is kind of complicated. In the old days, there was a one-to-one relationship between photosites and pixels. Any of the high-end high definition video cameras, they had 3 sensors: one 1 red, a green and a blue photosite to create 1 RGB pixel.

But what we have seen particularly with these Bayer pattern cameras is that they are basically sub-sampled chroma cameras. In other words they have half the number of color pixels as they do luminance And the luminance is what they call green typically. So what happens is you have two green photo sites for every red and blue.

Towards the end it gets into 4k (IMAX) frame sizes and how they aren’t truly 4K.

via The Truth About 2K, 4K and The Future of Pixels – Creative COW.

Graphics, Hardware camera, imax, sensors, technical

One of my biggest fears is the loss of data because of improper preservation, irrelevance to the public and hoarding.  As a geoscientist, I love maps, especially old ones that tell long stories of where people lived, how their land use priorities changed through time and how sprawl develops.  I also believe in more than one instance of a map.

Tim Waters has developed an open source tool called Map Warper (Beta) into which you can upload a scanned map, georectify it and save it out as an image or a map layer.  As a former resident of New Orleans, where a transparent recovery and historic preservation are daily uphill battles, this tool can be invaluable in saving and sharing ancient and new maps of the city’s original development and re-development since Hurricane Katrina and The Flood.  The following shows how, in under ten minutes, I georectified an 1895 map of the French Quarter and Garden District of New Orleans and exported it to Google Maps.

Read more…

Science georectification, geospatial, history, maps

In a possible rebuttal to the “How many Pixels do we really need“, John Sviokla over at the Harvard Business blog discusses how Data Visualization is aiding Knowledge discovery in fascinating new ways.  One great anecdotal piece of evidence is this:

In another instance, a group of neuroscientists, psychiatrists, neurophysiologists, and geneticists gathered together at Calit2, a supercomputer and visualization lab, headed by Dr. Larry Smarr — where there’s a 40 by ten-foot visualization wall which has tens of thousands of times more resolution than the most advanced HDTV at Best Buy. This team used the spectacular display space to simultaneously look at CAT scans, genetic and statistical data. By being able to see all the data together, and have the minds of all those experts working in harmony, they were able to identify two genes that they suspect are involved in causing schizophrenia. It is still early, but the participants claim that this vital discovery would not have been possible if they were not able to see all the data, in detail, and in its entirety as a group.

The article continues on to discuss how such large displays are routinely aiding in knowledge discovery, but that few (if any) corporate entities are actively pursuing the technology.  It’s a bit misinformed, as several entities are actively engaged in visualizations of large-scale datasets and massive displays, but they don’t get the same kind of press coverage as other entities.  It’s also a huge research problem, as there are still more questions than answers on how to effectively use the technology.

I think I smell another VizWorld feature coming along.

via It’s Time to Reinvent Knowledge Work – John Sviokla – HarvardBusiness.org.

Science displays, editorial

Noise Industries has released FxFactory 2.0.7, a visual effects suits for AfterEffects, Final Cut, and Motion.   The upgrade is free for existing FxFactory Pro 2.x customers, and adds over 300 visual effects with real-time performance on Mac systems.  This version offers big performance improvements, as well as three new plugins: PDF Animator, Perlin Noise generator, and Alpha Merger.

See the full announcement after the break, and get the 15-day trial on the FxFactory website.

Read more…

Graphics aftereffects, finalcut, fxfactory, noiseindustries, software, vfx

The GIMP Animation package, the popular addon suite to the GIMP Image Suite that adds in After-effects style features, has just released v2.6.0 to bring it inline with the GIMP2.6 suite.

Look after the break for the full list of new features in 2.6.0.

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Graphics animation, free, gimp, opensource, software

Sputterfish has released Brazil v2.1 final, the popular render engine.  New features lean mostly toward optimization and bugfixes, but a few new features such as Fresnel Texmaps in scanline rendering make it something to check out.

SplutterFish: Brazil Rendering System for 3ds Max | Home.

Graphics 3dsmax, brazil, engine, software, sputterfish

Even the US Department of Defense is getting into CUDA & GPGPU, and their Data Analysis & Assessment Center (DAAC) have begun posting a good set of very detailed tutorials on their website.  The DAAC is a division of the DoD’s High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP), which specializing in maintaining and running supercomputers for various defense researchers.

It looks like they’re still in-progress, but it’s a great collection of very low-level tutorials showing exact translations between classic C & Fortran codes to their CUDA equivalents.  They also have details on enabling double-precision support, working with CUDA error messages, and synchronization issues when using multiple threads.

General Purpose GPU – Visualization.

Hardware, Science cuda, government, gpgpu, training, tutorial

A User’s Group Meeting hosted by the Los Angeles Film School Computer Animation group will be held next week on June 11th in the B2 Theater.  Special guests include software developers from StudioGPU, who will be talking about MachStudio Pro, and artists Dan Bigelow and Robert Silva.  RSVP is required, but it sounds like a great chance to learn some new tricks and network with some experts in the field.

Full announcement after the break.

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Graphics education, lafs, studiogpu