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Richard Grove has written up a piece on Renderosity and his own blog about his experiences at SIGGRAPH, and what he hopes to do this year.  In it he covers not only what will happen, but how SIGGRAPH wound up in New Orleans after Katrina and some of the new things the ACM has integrated into the conference this year, such as “realtime rendering”:

Other new areas of emphasis at this years conference include Siggraph’s first ever inclusion of “realtime rendering” as a track. This essential means that the games industry is now a full participant at the conference. Will Wright will be giving a keynote address as a games specialist (I guess conceiving and designing SimCity, The Sims and Spore qualifies him). From a machinima perspective, I think it’s going to take some time before there is general acceptance of machinima as a viable artform, especially at Siggraph, which has an academic slant to it already. One of my goals is to be a ambassador for machinima to people I meet at Siggraph. Wish me luck.

via Richard Grove » Getting Ready for Siggraph 2009.

Graphics siggraph

Weta Digital has convinced the New Zealand government to front them $5.8M in cash to be used to develop new products and tools for export.  They’ll be partnering with a company named TechNZ, the business investment side of the Foundation for Research, Science, and Technology.

Science and Technology Minister Wayne Mapp said Weta’s investment would be on a basis of at least two-for-one.

“It’s about growing new products and processes for export.”

The joint partnership with TechNZ – the business investment programme of the Foundation for Research, Science and Technology – is intended to accelerate the growth of New Zealand’s strong creative digital industry.

No definitive word on how this relates to the TransFX initiative they announced back in May.

via Govt cash for Weta Digital – film – entertainment | Stuff.co.nz.

Science government, research, vfx, weta

Computer Graphics World (CGW) will be hosting a session specifically for the student volunteers at SIGGRAPH.

Computer Graphics World knows that YOU, the student volunteers of SIGGRAPH, will be the next generation of leaders in our industry.

That is why we have gathered some of the CG industry’s biggest names to give you an insight into this ever-changing and exciting field.

Join Computer Graphics World for an informative, student-focused event with talks from high-profile industry executives streamed live from SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans on Sunday, August 2nd, at 6 pm (Central time).

Guest speakers include higher-ups at Digital Domain, ILM, and EA. For those not lucky enough to attend, the event will be streaming live on their website.

via Computer Graphics World – 2009 SIGGRAPH Student Volunteer Session.

Graphics cgw, conference, siggraph2009

Since the New York Times first opened their article API, several people have built some fun and beautiful visualizations.  The New York Times has a “gallery” where they host some of the best, and they’ve rounded up the cream of the crop in a new feature highlighting use of the API in Art.

If you’ve visited the Times Developer Network, you’ve probably noticed that it offers an application gallery. Collections of sample applications are often called “galleries” on the Web, and it’s not always an apt analogy. Browsing an assemblage of apps may be fun on a slow afternoon, but is it really akin to strolling through the wing of your choice at the Met?

Yes — at least sometimes. Visualizations can turn data into art, and several Times API users have created some stunning images that both beautify and clarify information. (The term “visualization” can refer to lots of things, but for our purposes, it’s any graphical representation of nonvisual data.)

via Visualizations: The Art of Times APIs – First Look Blog – NYTimes.com.

Graphics, Science art, nyt

The threat of overpopulation of the Earth, leading to depleted food stores and other dire situations, has been discussed for a long time.  But exactly how long?  And is it even really something to worry about?  A new website named overpopulationisamyth.com claims that no, it’s all just a madeup problem that comes from old data and bad math.  They’ve got a fun infographic setting up the scenario, with more details on their site.

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Science global, infographic, overpopulation, population

The SIGGRAPH organizers have stood up a page listing all of the VFX presentations that will be at the conference.

The annual SIGGRAPH conference is the most important opportunity for the production and visual effects community to show their latest work to each other and to the research and art communities, and to learn the latest techniques from international experts. The Computer Animation Festival shows the latest and greatest work in production and visual effects, and many Courses, Talks, and Panels are directly related to production and VFX.

They have 44 entries on the list so far, enough to keep even the most die-hard VFX fans busy.

via Production/VFX | SIGGRAPH 2009.

Graphics siggraph, vfx

Artist “triayami” has posted a “making of” on 3DM3 for his image “Sleeping Princess”, made with 3ds Max, ZBrush, and Vray.  A beautiful image.

Making of Sleeping Princess – Community for CG Artists.

Graphics 3dsmax, makingof, vray, zbrush

Over the last several years, Tiled Displays have slowly transitioned from costly blended-projection systems to LCD walls.  The LCD walls are typically cheaper to build and maintain, but the bezels are a common source of complaints.  Two visualization professors at Texas A&M University are finally going to settle the debate between the two technologies to see if there really is any perceivable benefit to one vs the other.

McNamara and Parke are in the right place to do the research, they say. Texas A&M’s Halbouty Geosciences Building houses the Immersive Visualization Center (IVC), a 25-foot by 8-foot curved screen that uses three rear projectors to provide a seamless display. The IVC provides advanced visualization capabilities to researchers at Texas A&M through its capability to display images of very large datasets from disciplines such as geophysics, life and physical sciences, engineering and architecture.  During the study, in addition to showing test subjects the IVC’s seamless images, the researchers will use the IVC’s software to introduce seams into the images measuring .75, 1.25 and 2.50 inches wide.

“We want to ascertain if the physical presence of seams actually aids performance,” said McNamara. The researchers will be able to compare any differences viewers experience with the 1.25-inch virtual seams test subjects encounter on the IVC display.

If their hypothesis is proven correct, researchers and educators in many fields, said McNamara, can proceed with the knowledge that using the far more affordable flat-panel screen system will provide viewers with the same experience as the high-end, seamless displays.

I look forward to seeing the results when the study is finished.  Read the full announcement after the break.

Read more…

Science immersive, projection, research, texasa&m, tiled

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have designed a system capable of reconstructed 3D models of cities from images available on Flickr.  By aligning all of the images & performing some 3D registrations, they can extract 3D points.

In their project ‘Building Rome in a Day’ the group considered the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. The aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

Look after the break to see a 3D Flythrough of Dubrovnik (Shown above) built using their software.  Full details of the system are available on their site.

via Digital Urban: Building Rome in a Day: A 3D City via Flickr.

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Science algorithms, flickr, geospatial, imageprocessing, modeling

Take one engineer with a penchant for motion tracking systems, one race-car driver with some spare time, a cherry picker, and a PR firm looking for a viral video hit, and what do you get?  Toyota’s latest idea the “iQFont”.  Pierre&Damien and Stef van Campenhoudt put colored markers on the roof of a Toyota car, and tracked it via a camera mounted far overhead.  This data was fed into some custom software by Zachary Lieberman, and (After alot of postprocessing) the iqFont was born.

You can see pictures of the process on Flickr, and I’ve embedded the making-of video after the break. Download the font at Toyota’s site.

iQ Font.

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Hardware, Science font, motion tracking, toyota