NASA has teamed with NOAA to combine satellite imagery of the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic ocean with tracked storm data from the 2008 Hurricane season, and released an interesting video to let you watch the entire 2008 hurricane season in just over 1 minute.
The movie displays the infrared cloud imagery from the geosynchronous weather satellites, principally NOAA’s Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES)-12. The original cloud imagery was remapped and enhanced to display cloudtop texture. The GOES cloud images were overlaid on a true-color background map previously created from the Moderate Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on NASA’s Terra satellite.
The Molecule has a new blog post up talking about the problems they experienced doing the 3D Modeling and simulation work for “The Detonators” on Discovery Channel. Each of the 20 simulations took multiple layers (5 to 8) plus 2D overlays, and they found alot of interesting tricks along the way.
Additionally, it is important to note that the layers were not all rendered at the same resolution–occlusion and shadow passes were amongst the slowest, and rendering them at half- or quarter-resolution would allow us to decrease the render time by a factor of 4 or 16, with no noticeable difference in final image quality.
Most of the modeling was done with Maya and the nCloth solver.
Chris Landreth, scheduled speaker at SIGGRAPH2009, has just received another honor: Best of Fest at the Melbourne International Animation Festival. This is his second time to receive the award, the first being for Ryan in 2005. It’s a great honor, being chosen from the almost 400 films as the Best. The description of the film:
The Spine is a poignant story of redemption that takes us into the relationship between a man and a woman trapped in a spiral of mutual destruction. Dan and Mary Rutherford, married 26 years, sit unhappily in a couples’ group counselling session. Angela, another troubled participant in this group, wonders why their marriage has become so lopsided, so twisted. But when Mary leaves Dan, he undergoes a beautiful transformation. What will happen when she returns? Director and scriptwriter Landreth has created an insightful and daring look at the ways individuals evolve, adapt and break.
See the press release and pictures, after the break.
Mountain Dew’s new “Game Fuel” drink has a fun commercial making the rounds where two mild-mannered women meet in a grocery store, minutes later turning into their World of Warcraft characters and leveling half the store in a fierce battle. The spot was created by Zoic Studios using assets provided by Blizzard and motion capture data from House of Moves.
See the entire press release, pictures, and the video after the break.
A new report from Francisco Ortigosa, Repsol YPF talks about the problems oil and gas companies have visualizing data from the bottom of the ocean, particularly the US Gulf of Mexico. Their solution? Combining the Mare Nostrum supercomputer with Cell Processors (just like the PS3 or the RoadRunner) to create the “Kaleidoscope Project”.
The Kaleidoscope Project encompasses a simultaneous innovation of hardware and software to achieve a petascale solution to seismic imaging using off-the-shelf technology. Software research focuses on the quality of algorithms and avoids shortcuts or tradeoffs common because of lack of computing power. Kaleidoscope is to ensure the maximum possible imaging quality regardless of the computer power required. And of course speed and power, which are the two main factors for the project to succeed, are guaranteed while ensuring low cost because it’s coming from a massive market.
Visual Versioning – Accesses the complete history of a file and allows the user to revert to any version
Visual Search – Finds any file, even if it’s offline, and shows how it fits into a project
Foolproof Packaging – Gathers and updates all files automatically, keeping the package current
Time Tracking – Automatically records how much time was spent on a file or project
Looks pretty impressive, and at $299 it’s fairly affordable for professionals and pro-sumers alike. See all the details of the product on their Flow page, including a guided tour and signup for free trials.
A spec commercial for Nike, created by the guys at Big Lazy Robot Visual Effects studio, shows a mechanized free-runner performing some death-defying stunts over rooftops, elevator shafts, and dark alleyways.
Our wish was to show off the nerve and spark and freshness of the city with the strength and power of modern sport competition, all in a whole 3d environment.‘Exploit Yourself’ talks about pushing your limits just for the sake of it.
Love him or hate him, you can’t deny Micheal Jackson changed music and dance forever, and no song of his (or of anyone since) could match the epic ‘Thriller’. A fitting tribute from the VFX community to a rock & pop legend.
Yes, I know this is an older video, but that doesn’t make it any less impressive.
While not the 10 most important moments, 3dworld has compiled a list of 10 very important moments in CG History, beginning with FutureWorld (1978, shown right) through Chicken Little (2005).
In the early days of the 1970s, just a few seconds of computer generated 2D animation was expensive to produce and considered a huge innovation. But today entire motion pictures are being produced using 3D animation and released in stereoscopic digital 3D. All the hard work of the modellers, FX supervisors and animators jumps right out into your lap. None of it would have been possible without these top groundbreaking moments in the history of CG…
The guys at FXGuide sit down with Rhythm & Hues to discuss the tools and techniques they used to build some of the VFX shots.
fxg: What approach did you take to modelling and animating the dinosaur?
BW: We use Maya for a lot of our modelling here. We also used zBrush to do the detailed work. Our art director, Chris Grun, is also an amazing creature designer. He guided the zBrush artists to put in all the scale detail. We’ve done films in the past with other animals where you gather up as much reference as possible.
Chris Landreth, 
Mountain Dew’s new “Game Fuel” drink has a fun commercial making the rounds where two mild-mannered women meet in a grocery store, minutes later turning into their World of Warcraft characters and leveling half the store in a fierce battle. The spot was created by Zoic Studios using assets provided by Blizzard and motion capture data from House of Moves.
GridIron 
While not the 10 most important moments, 3dworld has compiled a list of 10 very important moments in CG History, beginning with FutureWorld (1978, shown right) through Chicken Little (2005).
VizWorld.com 
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