Home » Archives for July 2009
Between the recent economic collapse, the presidential election, and the many celebrity deaths, the media has been cranking out one-liners and soundbites quicker than we can process them. MemeTracker, from researchers at Stanford and Cornell, visualizes popular memes over a three-month period. Containing such classics as “lipstick on a pig” (Barack Obama on Sarah Palin) and ” I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s”, (John McCain, on his POW experience) it’s an interesting visualization showing how the phrases evolve and keep returning cyclically.
The researchers have published a paper describing the algorithms used to catalog, group, and analyze the 90 million articles gathered for the project. The paper is available here.
MemeTracker: Top phrases.
Science cornell, infographic, news, paper, stanford
We’ve previously discussed ILM’s new technology for fire in the new Harry Potter film, but now they’ve begun to talk about some of the other technology they created for the movie. In an interview with Post Magazine, they discuss how they rendered the film’s penultimate sequence inside a Crystal Cave with thousands of underwater “Inferi”.
“We had both fire and water going at the same time,” Weaver says, “and the two interacting. We had escape bubbles, with the fire going under the water.”
Representing the thousands of Inferi under the water involved normal-mapping: applying a cycle of animation to the character rigs and rendering it, flatly lit, on a card as a sprite. “When we go under the water, with thousands of these creatures,” Weaver says, “the normal-mapping allowed us to re-light the Inferi. This was an innovative way of handling a crowd pipeline that we hadn’t done before and it worked out incredibly well.”
via COVER STORY: ‘HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE’ | Articles | Post Magazine.
Graphics harry potter, ilm, movie, vfx
Amsterdam’s Streamline Studios was responsible for 90% of the environmental assets and art in the new Terminator Salvation videogame. 47 artists worked around-the-clock to create the buildings, foliage, and textures used in the project.
All of the foliage was done from scratch, from tons of photos that the crew took themselves. Sometimes leaves were painted one by one when photo sourcing couldn’t get the job done. “The concept guys actually painted some of the plant textures from scratch and they look just gorgeous,” gushes Banninga. “For the textures that look 3D, we employed ZBrush for all the lovely broken concrete and rubble. Rendering those scenes down to textures with ambient bakes and some additional Photoshop work helped us create some very convincing ruins and decay.”
CGSociety – Streamline Terminator: The Game.
Graphics photoshop, streamline, video game, zbrush
Intel’s weekly show “Visualize This!”, hosted by Arti Gupta, conducts an interview with Chris Taylor, CEO of Gas Powered Games. The video opens with some new developments in Intel’s Graphics Performance Analyzer (GPA), and then moves into talking about how the GPA was instrumental in the development of GPG’s “Demigod”.
See the Video after the break.
Read more…
Hardware, Science gaspoweredgames, gpa, intel, interview, video game
@alba tipped me off to a pair of videos on Vimeo from Sorin Voicu that show an augmented reality interface on the streets of Rome (I think). Called “Realta Aumentata”, it has some interesting ideas on how an augmented reality interface could work. The VFX breakdown is interesting as well to see how the VFX were implemented.
I’m unable to translate the captions & credits. Anyone care to post a translation?
See both videos after the break.
Read more…
Graphics augmented reality, breakdown, vfx
Jerzy Drozda, also known as Maltaannon, has posted the first of 4 tutorials on his website designed to recreate some of his favorite effects from the Magic Bullet Looks tool.
Back in February 2009 I wrote a blog post about Separating RGB Channels. I thought that it would be a great example of what Adobe Pixel Bender technology can to – it’s simple and quite useful. Useful plugins don’t have to be very complex – it’s quite the opposite - it’s mostly simple and small things that make our everyday tasks easier.
He’s got the RGB Splitter Plugin for CS4 available for free, but selling an additional bundle of plugins for sale for a mere $12.
via ChromAbberation | maltaannon.com.
Graphics aftereffects, chromatic abberation, howto
The Methodist Hospital in Houston, TX has worked with Body Viz from Visual Medical Solutions, LLC, TeraRecon, Mechdyne, Circle Twelve, Fovia, and NEC Corporation of America to create “Plato’s Cave”. The system uses 3-dimensional CT and MRI Scans of patients to create an interactive volume-visualization that can be viewed in true-3D with special glasses.
With a video game controller, physicians visualize or “travel” under the skin, swooping past bones and surfing the bloodstream to the exact location requiring surgery or closer examination. Viewing a holographic image of the body through special glasses, physicians can then create more precise treatment plans for patients undergoing radiation therapy and surgery.
“This technology enables us to combine data from CT, MRI and PET scans and channel them into a single computer to generate one clear, comprehensive image,” said Dr. E. Brian Butler, Chairman of Radiation Oncology at The Methodist Hospital in Houston and creator of “Plato’s Cave.” “The 3-D images allow us to view inside the patient, something we‘ve been unable to do outside of surgery—until now.”
A few videos of the system can be viewed at the Methodist Health Website.
Newswise Medical News | New Technology Offers Virtual Visualization of the Human Body.
Hardware, Science biomed, mechdyne, terarecon, volume
A website serving up a browsable map of Hong Kong, similar to Google Maps, shows a beautiful isometric view with buildings, foliage, and labeled streets. It only has 4 levels of detail but it really sets a new standard for what web-maps should be.
map for hong kong,map of hong kong city,e map of hong kong,3D map for hong kong,public transportation map,public transportation map_Edushi.
Graphics, Science city, map
Over at GameTrailers, they sit down with some experts and analysts to talk about the new gaming technology announced at E3, in particular the Wii Vitality Sensor and the Sony Motion Wand controller. They show some interesting examples that I haven’t seen elsewhere and some of the new Sony Augmented Reality games demonstrated like the EyePet and Invizimals.
See the video after the break.
via WiiNintendo.
Read more…
Hardware, Science augmented reality, e3, sony, videogame
VizWorld.com 
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