While Pushing Daisies may not be coming back to TV this season, there’s no doubt that the visual effects shots they created will be shown to students for years to come. CreativeCow talks to William Powloski about the process behind some of their more memorable scenes.
While it might seem an extraordinary amount of work to create and manage a physical object on such a scale, “Daisies” has found that it offers a tremendous amount of creative flexibility and time savings. In the first season, everything outside the windows was blue screen. A digital environment had to be created for every angle, every time of day. For a show building VFX until the very last minute, relying on perfect renders in the home stretch was just too risky.
The OpenToolkit Library has just released versions 0.9.8-1 and 0.9.9, bringing support for OpenGL, OpenAL, and OpenCL to .NET. Available for Windows, Linux, and OSX, it’s a common library to 3d graphics, audio, and GPGPU programming.
A new tutorial online at flashtuts+ shows how to use Adobe Flash to create a looping run cycle. While the mechanics are Flash-centric, the theory he covers could be applied to any tool.
In this tutorial we’ll create a quad run cycle. The animation will be created using simple lines. Along the way we’ll cover a bit of work flow and animation theory, then near the end we’ll use Motion Tween and ActionScript to move the animal across the screen.
At the most basic level, the brain creates memories through connections between nerve cells using a phenomenon called “synaptic plasticity”. In a paper in this month’s Science journal, researchers at UCLA and McGill University have, for the first time ever, photographed live memory creation.
The researchers used sensory and motor neurons from the sea slug Aplysia Californica that can form connections in culture. The neurons were stimulated with serotonin, which strengthens the synapses, and allowed them to detect new protein synthesis—the making of a memory— using a “translational reporter,” a fluorescent protein that can be easily detected and tracked.
There’s a great quote from one of the researchers, Kesley Martin:
“While this was not really surprising to us given the complexity of information processing in the brain,” said Martin, “visualizing the process of protein synthesis at individual synapses, and beginning to discern the elegance of its regulation, leaves us, as biologists, with a wonderful sense of awe.”
Researchers at Vienna & Austria have developed a new event visualization algorithm called “Event Tunnels”, and they’ve just released a report on it and how they were able to use it to visualize automated fraud detection in online betting and real-time monitoring of logistics processes. InformationAesthetics describes it as so:
The data visualization technique is based on the metaphor of considering the event stream as a cylindrical tunnel, which is then presented to the user from multiple perspectives. The “top view” looks into the stream of events along the time-axis, so that events on the inner circles of the tunnel are displayed smaller to simulate perspective projection. The angular position of each event is not implicitly defined and can be controlled by the business analyst with placement policies. The “side view” plots the events in temporal order, and resembles process charts such as GANTT diagrams without the depiction of dependencies.
Looks interesting, and the PDF is available online here.
At the CEDIA expo, JVC is showing off a new 32-inch 100Hz LED backlight TV, the LT-32WX50. What makes this TV shine? A native contrast ratio of 4000:1, and 90% coverage of the Adobe RGB color space doesn’t hurt, but the real kicker is the 7mm thickness and 5kg (11lbs) weight, making it the slimmest LCD JVC has made to date.
It also comes with 2 HDMI inputs, PC input, and slots for SD cards and USB sticks. Targeted for post-production markets, they expect to sell it on the consumer market for about £1,900 ($3,100 US) sometime in October/November.
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about the events surrounding the SGI Legal Case. What, you thought it was over? Far from it, actually. There’s a hearing today (June 24th) at 10AM to address some more issues, big items on the docket include objections raised by Intel and Oracle about transfer of contracts. Also, a new set of Monthly Operating Reports have been published in dockets 480-493 showing that the CEO’s pulled in a nice $190k this month, down from last month’s $223k. It also shows that SGI operated at a net loss of $15Million this month, not surprising for a company that’s really nothing more than a dying husk at this point as the actual business is being done in the new SGI company.
It’s worth nothing that Eliot Bernstein (iViewIt) and William Kuntz III are still working the system with several objections and legal motions surrounding the event. Check back later for an update of Eliot Bernstein’s objections, direct from the man himself.
At the recent High Performance Computing and Simulation 2009 conference held in Leipzig, Germany from June 21-24, a paper on GPU Acceleration took home the Best Paper Award. The paper, “Fast Seismic Modeling and Reverse Time Migration on a GPU Cluster” from Rached Abdelkhalek, Henri Calandra, Olivier Coulad, Jean Roman, and Guillaume Latu was presented in the Workshop on Architecture-Aware Simulation and Computing. The abstract of the winning paper reads:
We have designed a fast parallel simulator that solves the acoustic wave equation on a GPU cluster. Solving the acoustic wave equation in an oil exploration industrial context aims at speeding up seismic modeling and Reverse Time Migration. We consider a finite difference approach on a regular mesh, in both 2D and 3D cases. The acoustic wave equation is solved in either a constant density or a variable density domain. All the computations are done in single precision, since double precision is not required in our context. We use CUDA to take advantage of the GPUs computational power. We study different implementations and their impact on the application performance. We obtain a speed up of 10 for Reverse Time Migration and up to 30 for the modeling application over a code running on general purpose CPUs.
I haven’t actually been able to find the PDF of the paper yet. Anyone have it?
A fun little title sequence made as a school project shows that AfterEffects, if you’ve got ALOT of free time, can really make some fantastic looking stuff.
For school (VFS), we had to make a Title Sequence and I decided to make the movie of my life (so far we just have the title sequence :P) and its everything in boxes and circles… It took me a lot of work… there is thousands of key frames made in after effects…
It’s been a while since we’ve talked about the events surrounding the 
The new issue of Computer Graphics World (CGW) is out, covering a wide variety of topics:
VizWorld.com 
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