VizWorld.com

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince opens with a stunning VFX sequence of the destruction of London’s famour Millennium Bridge.  The sequence was done by London-based VFX house Double Negative, and talks about it to Popular Mechanics.

In addition to taking high-dynamic-range-image (HDRI) photography of the bridge and the area along the Thames River, Double Negative worked with the architects of the bridge. “They were given plans and CAD files that were used to recreate it as accurately as possible, down to every nut and bolt,” Burke says. A team of five to 20 people spent several months building, texturing and rigging the bridge in 3D animating program Maya, using the HDRI photography to create the right texture and detail.

via Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince Movie Special Effects – F/X For New Harry Potter Film – Popular Mechanics.

Graphics doublenegative, harry potter, hdri, maya, movie, vfx

Mere hours after news broke of NVidia possibly “fudging” the benchmark results of the recent mobile GPU benchmark, a rebuttal has appeared that places the blame not on NVidia, but on ASUS.

Who is at fault here? The answer is not simple, but understandable: ASUS. When we checked for latest drivers, it turned out that AMD’s own site will give you ATI Mobility Radeon X1800 as the latest mobile graphics card out there. No Mobility Radeons 2000, 3000 or 4000 series exist. According to amd.com, ATI stopped making graphics cards for notebooks in 2006. We asked questions to Ian McNaughton and Jay Marsden of AMD fame, but received no answer at press time. We reserve the right to update this article with their answer once it becomes available.

While NVidia could possibly be blamed for not advertising the lack of game profile or in not really pushing the ASUS system to it’s maximum limits, that’s not really their job.  The real puzzler is how did ASUS create a “Gaming laptop” with chips that, supposedly, were not manufactured after 2006?

via nVidia responds to benchmark claims and How ASUS notebook SNAFU caused a war of words between AMD and nVidia – Bright Side Of News*.

Hardware amd, asus, benchmark, drivers, nvidia

A recent press release and benchmark from NVidia won them the title of “world’s most powerful mobile GPU setup”.  They pitted their Alienware M17X, which contains dual GTX280M’s in SLI, against the Asus W90, powered by dual AMD4870′s in Crossfire.  The NVidia/Alienware system won easily. However, new information has come up that has people wondering if perhaps the race should have been a bit closer, or perhaps NVidia should have lost:

To prove their point nVidia tested both systems and when setting up the Asus they stated that they used the “latest drivers”. However it appears that this is far from the truth and the drivers are more than one year old, hardly utilizing the second 4870 at all. It is unclear if nVidia did this to provide a larger, more impressive lead than they already had in the benchmark or if they had to do this to come out on top.

A year in the age of Video drivers is ancient history, and NVidia should know better (#1 rule in every NVidia troubleshooting howto is “Check your driver version”).

Update: Be sure to read the followup to these allegations  that places most of the blame on ASUS.

via nVidia alter benchmarks for Fastest Mobile GPU Crown | eTeknix.com.

Hardware alienware, amd, asus, benchmark, nvidia

Apple released a new beta of it’s iPhone OS3.1 (Beta 2) to developers yesterday and hackers and programmers around the world have been beating on it.  One interesting find is that they now publish some API’s to allow overlays onto the live video available in the 3GS hardware.  This seems to be a means to finally allowing developers to use the iPhone as an Augmented Reality interface, similar to what we’ve seen already done for Nearest Tube, Seer, and Layar.  Currently those applications are stuck in App Store Approval Limbo as they use API’s that violate Apple’s rules for applications, these new API’s (while they will probably require some coding changing) seem to be a way for them to finally reach release.

Of course, this is just a Beta.  Apple could easily retract these API’s prior to release.

iPhone OS 3.1 beta 2 released (update: disables tethering, enables AR?).

Hardware apple, augmented reality, iphone

A new website, Diseasome, visualizes 516 diseases and 903 genes to show common backgrounds and effects.  The result is an interactive map showing how groups of diseases, say Cancer, share a common background and genetic material but manifest in slightly different ways.  There is also a wealth of information about how they did it:

Nodes are positioned on the map according to a topological placement algorithm, i.e. each node is positioned solely according to its linking pattern. Many softwares are available for doing this. Gephi has been chosen for its high quality algorithm ForceAtlas.

Many algorithms make possible for a 2D rendering of an adjacent matrix – i.e. the matrix describing any graph. We used a ForceAtlas algorithm, which shares with all the others the same basic principle: minimizing the system’s energy while maximizing the use of the space available for the representation of the data. To minimize the system’s energy, one can for instance assume that nodes that are not linked to each other are pushing away from each other whereas nodes that are linked to each other are attracting each other. Through iterative steps the algorithm tries to find a way to position nodes where there is as little link overlap as possible. To maximize the use of the mapped space, the graph is spread as much as possible over the surface allocated for its display.

You can view the map at their site, http://diseasome.eu/, as well as buy a Poster or the Book.

Science biomed, disease, genome, graph

China has a huge number of ethnic minority groups scattered across the entire country.  The New York Times has another great interactive infographic charting about a dozen of the most well-known groups and visualizing the percentage of the minority across the country.

Interactive Map of Minorities in China – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com.

Science china, infographic, nyt, population

Will Evans has a new post on Semantic Foundry about “Mood Maps” for mapping a user’s state of mind throughout user experience testing.  At the end he shows a great infographic from Lego (above).

By way of my friend Doc Baty, I stumbled upon a blog post by Bruce Timkin which shows another way to visualize the aggregated mood maps and present an Experience Wheel like the one he found at Lego, although it is unclear what research, activities, or methods are used to arrive at the Experience Wheel – it’s still an interesting way to visualize the total user experience in phases.

via Design Ethnography & Mood Maps.

Science lego, moodmap, semanticfoundry

The Mill has posted a great podcast showing the work that went into the amazing Caterpillar commercial. It shows the original storyboards, previs, reference photography, and various stages of the rendering and compositing work.

The Mill Podcast.

Graphics commercial, the mill, vfx

A new video has surfaced on Youtube showing new features, called “Snow Stack”, that Apple has built into their newest Webkit browser engine.  It’s 3D, Hardware Accelerated CSS effects and JavaScript Features.

This video shows “Snow Stack”, a 3D CSS Visual Effects demo built with HTML, CSS Effects and JavaScript in the latest WebKit nightly on Mac OS X Leopard and Snow Leopard. You can try this out yourself by reading the details on www.satine.org.

Apple is currently trying to get these features as part of the CSS & HTML standard.  Between this & the new HTML5 “video” tag, could technologies like Silverlight & Flash find themselves pushed to the side?

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics apple, browser, css, javascript, safari, webkit

The Crash Dump Analysis website has begun a series of tutorials showing how to load memory dumps into ParaView for analysis and visualization.  They load them as a simple 2D Raw image in ParaView 3.4, as byte-data.

Currently, only the first tutorial is online.  I’m not entirely sure why you would want to do this, but I’m curious to see where he goes with it.

Crash Dump Analysis » Blog Archive » Advanced Memory Visualization (Part 1).

Science howto, memory, paraview