VizWorld.com

G-Force, the action/comendy about a government agency of guinea pigs that save the world, opened recently.  It’s a fully-3D movie, but didn’t start out that way.  Four months into shooting regular 2D film, a change of course requiring some fairly extensive rethinking.

So principle photography on G-Force, produced by Jerry Bruckheimer, proceeded as it does on most movie sets—in two dimensions. But four months into shooting the film, Disney asked if Yeatman could make G-Force in 3D. Yeatman turned to VFX house Sony Pictures Imageworks, which was already creating the film’s animated guinea pigs, to figure out how to do it. “We said, ‘there is this technique we can use,’” says Rob Engle, 3D visual-effects supervisor at Imageworks. Known as dimensionalizing, it’s when artists take a 2D image and pick the layers where they want to create depth—and it’s all done by hand. The technique gave Yeatman the control he wanted over the stereo settings in postproduction. “It’s the first time a feature-length movie has been dimensionalized in this way,” he says.

via G-Force Movie 3D Effects – New G-Force Movie – Popular Mechanics.

Graphics 3d, movie, vfx

An interesting art/science exhibit is underway called “Terre Natale (Exit 2)”, where they created a 30-minute immersive visualization of human migration data.

Visitors enter a dark rotunda to discover a mirror-image Earth revolving around the room, printing animated maps and data to the wall’s curved surface. Divided into five narratives, this piece quantifies both voluntary and forced movement across the globe due to political, economic, and environmental factors.

It premiered in Paris in 2008, and combines technologies from a wide variety of sources: Processing for the visuals, ZKM for the projectors, and several hands in the layout.

See videos & pictures of the exhibit at their site.

via Terre Natale (Exits 2) | Stewdio.

Graphics, Science art, exhibit, migration, population, processing

Human genetics research is lengthy and slow, and one primary cause of that is the slow combinatorial algorithms used.  Researchers at Dartmouth have just published a paper where they implemented these algorithms on NVidia graphics cards with CUDA, with amazing results.

One such algorithm is Multifactor Dimensionality Reduction (MDR). Expert knowledge guided evolutionary computing wrappers around MDR have previously been shown to be a powerful way to efficiently analyze datasets for interactions. Evolutionary computing can effectively address some of the challenges these datasets present. Unfortunately examining the statistical significance of results requires permutation testing, which increases the computation requirements by a factor of 1000. Here we implement an expert knowledge guided ant system on graphics processing units (GPUs) and show that the GPU implementation makes the rigorous statistical analysis of large datasets practical.

The paper was recently published in GECCO’09, and can be viewed below.

10.pdf (application/pdf Object).

Science biomed, cuda, genome, gpgpu, nvidia

Over on CGArena, Hamed Sabri has a great tutorial on modeling what seems like a trivial shape: A Soda Bottle.  It’s actually far more complex than you would think, and it’s a great tutorial on using quad-modeling in Maya with NURBS and smooths.

Modeling of Coca-Cola Bottle – CGArena.

Graphics maya, modeling, tutorial

Researchers at the Institute for Neuroscience and Center for Perceptual Systems have managed to locate the area of the brain that is responsible for processing 3D Motion information, and surprisingly it’s an area previously thought only responsible for 2D motion.

“Our research suggests that a large set of rich and important functions related to 3-D motion perception may have been previously overlooked in MT+,” says Alexander Huk, assistant professor of neurobiology. “Given how much we already know about MT+, this research gives us strong clues about how the brain processes 3-D motion.”

For the study, Huk and his colleagues had people watch 3-D visualizations while lying motionless for one or two hours in an MRI scanner fitted with a customized stereovision projection system.

So why is this important?  This sums it up nicely:

“Who cares if the tiger or the spear is going from side to side?” says Lawrence Cormack, associate professor of psychology. “The most important kind of motion you can see is something coming at you, and this critical process has been elusive to us. Now we are beginning to understand where it occurs in the brain.”

The work was published in the July 7th issue of Nature Neuroscience .

via Brain’s Center For Perceiving 3-D Motion Is Identified.

Science 3d, biomed, human vision

The next Adobe After Effects New York meeting has been announced, and it’s a week from today.  This time they’ll have visual effects studio The Molecule on hand, and freelancer Eric Epstein.

Next meeting: Thursday, July 30th, 2009

The Time: 6:45 PM – 9:00 PM

The Place:

P.S. 41

116 W est 11th St., NYC

(corner of 11th Street and 6th Ave.)

via Welcome to Adobe After Effects NY.

Graphics aftereffects, meeting, the molecule

Autodesk has big plans for this SIGGRAPH, and it’s not just big announcements.  They’re offering several Tech Talks and presentations, and (most impressively) the first “Virtual SIGGRAPH”.

Autodesk will be pumping at SIGGRAPH 2009 with several events such as Tech Talks and presentations on approaching film and game projects ’9′ and ‘Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning’. They will also offer the first full Virtual SIGGRAPH. This is an online event that has free MasterClasses, live video streaming from the Autodesk booth presentations (#2201) and others attractions as well. Hewlett Packard and Intel are assisting, as well as NVIDIA, Fusion I/O and Wacom, so it’s sure to be huge.

Sounds like they’ll have reps from every major studio and company you can think of there, mentioned in the article are Microsoft, Digital Domain, EA, ILM, and more, so it’s sure to be a hot-spot at the conference.

via CGSociety – SIGGRAPH 2009 Diary.

Graphics autodesk, conference, siggraph

Samar Vijay, a well-known character artist, sits down and models a hot and sexy ‘CowGirl’ using ZBrush and 3ds Max, and posts the whole thing on CGTantra.

When I was done with that I took the base mesh to zbrush and started sculpting the female body. Once I was done with a decent sculpt which I thought was ready to pose, using zbrush transpose tools I posed the body and gave some final touches to the sculpt acc. to the pose. I mainly focused on the curves of her body to make her look hot and sexy.

via CGTantra.com – Making of ‘The Cow Girl’ – Samar Vijay.

Graphics 3dsmax, character, howto, makingof, modeling, vfx, zbrush

Jon Peddie Research will be attending SIGGRAPH and hosting a luncheon for press and analysts about how changes in graphics hardware and software is effecting the scientific research community.

In the old days (just a few years ago and still today) researchers – in scientific (think molecular studies like protein), entertainment (think amazing movies or games), or industrial (think FEA) would launch or commission a horrendous calculation run that could take from weeks to years depending upon resources and research. When the results came back they would then send the file(s) to the visualizer. Then when the renders were done the researchers would complain and tell the visualizer to do them over and make them look like this…

If you can’t make it, don’t worry.  VizWorld will have staff attending the event, with a full write-up posted afterwards.

via JPR Events.

Hardware, Science gpgpu, jpr, siggraph

A new feature CG movie “The Missing Lynx” is gaining some publicity by being done entirely in Autodesk’s 3ds Max. It’s the story of Felix the Lynx and his animation friends as they fight again an eccentric millionaire, Noah, to gain their freedon.

For the production of the film Manuel and Raúl chose Autodesk 3ds Max. Animation was done using Character Studio’s Biped, and the quantity and variety of animals as well as humans proved to be one of the main challenges for rigging and animation. One of the most complex cases the team faced was rigging birds’ feathers.

Manuel explains that the feathers located at the extreme sides of the wings are generally used as hands or fingers, to help give bird characters more expressiveness. Due to time constraints they solved the issue by doing two types of setups, one for the acting parts, and another one for when the birds were flying.

via CGSociety – The Missing Lynx.

Graphics 3dsmax, animation, vfx