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While it’s not the solution many people want, Autodesk has taken a huge leap today by announcing official support for 3ds Max on Mac, via Boot Camp.  Boot Camp is Apple’s dual-boot solution to allow Mac’s to boot newer version of Windows on the new intel-based Mac Hardware.

Autodesk® 3ds Max® 2010 and Autodesk® 3ds Max® Design 2010 is supported running on a Windows partition of an Apple computer using Boot Camp to manage a dual OS configuration.

Boot Camp is a utility provided with the Apple OS X v10.5 operating system (aka “Leopard”) that enables you to create a separate hard drive partition (on Intel-based Apple computers) on which you can install a Microsoft Windows OS.

Now, you still have to go out and buy a copy of Windows for this, but it’s far better than running it inside of something like VMWare.  Not as elegant as an OSX Native, but at least it’s officially supported now.

Autodesk – Autodesk 3ds Max Services & Support – Apple® Boot Camp Support for Autodesk® 3ds Max®.

Graphics, Hardware 3dsmax, apple, autodesk, boot camp, mac, osx

Just got this in from the folks at MachStudio Pro, but if you head on over to the StudioGPU Downloads page you’ll see a few new free export plugins for Rhino 4 and SketchUp Pro7.  These export native MachStudio GXB formats, that can then be manipulated within MachStudio Pro as native objects.

The exporters can be downloaded at their website, http://studiogpu.com/downloads/, and are free!

Graphics machstudio, plugin, rhino, sketchup, studiogpu

News from NVidia about the new CUDA 2.3 toolkit is out, and there’s a huge list of changes.  Some big ones to catch your eye:

• CUFFT now supports double-precision
• CUDA-GDB and Visual Profiler are included
• Improved support for fp16-fp32 conversion allows fp16 memory storage with fp32 computation.

And alot more.. Hit up their site for the full list, and downloads.

Version 2.3 of NVIDIA CUDA toolkit released | insideHPC.com.

Science cuda, library, nvidia, software

Jess Bachman’s Death & Taxes posters are an annual favorite, and he’s just now introduced the 2010 edition.

I must say I was very excited to get this project finished because it wasn’t just the same old Bush administration budget this year. This is Obama’s first official budget. This is his plan for the future, beyond the headlines, beyond the press releases. The federal budget is where the true story, once the rhetoric falls away.

In addition, he’s running a contest this year to give away a poster a day to someone mentioning it on TWitter.  If you’re not a lucky winner, or just feel like doing your part to keep the project alive, you can buy it for $24.

via Death and Taxes: 2010 Released!!! | WallStats.com The Art of Information.

Graphics, Science death&taxes, economic, government, infographic, poster

A new project is beginning that takes students at Texas A&M, Germany, UT Dallas, and San Antonio, and gives them a single goal to complete over the course of a few years.  The hope is to find new ways to deal with distributed workforces and find new ways to use collaborative technology to make it more efficient.

In the first year of the study, students will be assigned a task and a goal, with the work separated into components.

“For example, the group at Texas A&M might do the modeling, a group at UT-Dallas the animation and the group in Germany the final lighting and rendering,” says McLaughlin.

In the study’s second year, McLaughlin notes that students at each location will collaboratively tackle one task at a time, such as modeling, then animation and then rendering, while interacting asynchronously via e-mail and file exchanges.

“In year three we’ll use the same team structure, but we’ll change the way they connect with one another,” he continues. “We’ll use technology to create synchronous immersive connections whenever possible.”

The distributed model they are using is modeled after the current state of the Visual Effects industry, where studios in California, India, and Europe typically collaborate on a single film.

via Study Measures Technology’s Impact On Creativity In Long-Distance Collaborations.

Graphics, Science collaboration, research, vfx

In an effort to locate a genetic basis for schizophrenia, the National Center for Genome Resources (NCGR) in Santa Fe, New MExico established the Schizophrenia Genome Project.  Taking genetic data from 14 patients and 6 controls, they found themselves searching for 11,500 candidate genes amongst 16.7 billion bases.  How to find them?  Statistical analysis and visualization.

NCGR analysts used principal components analysis and hierarchical clustering to assess the data. The variance attributable to disease status was higher for the Illumina digital expression data than from conventional array analysis. “Visualization tools, such as Principal Component Analysis, readily separated the cases and controls, we spotted differences right away,” says Schilkey.

via Bio-IT World.

Science biomed, genome, ngcr, pca, research, statistics, visualization

The South Tyneside College has just won a contract to create a 3D Simulation model of New North Yorkshire’s Whitby Port.  The model is to be used in a new training simulation for ship pilots.

“Our simulation unit provides an experience as close to real life as you’ll ever get, and gives pilots a unique opportunity to test out their skills in a safe and controlled environment.

This isn’t South Tyneside’s first time to model a port, they’ve done previous work modeling the Port of Blyth (shown) and various installations at the Firth of Forth, lik the Houndpoint jetty.

via College chiefs create new 3D port – Shields Gazette.

Science modeling, simulation, south tyneside, training

The Herald-Tribune has spent the last year investigating house sales fraud in Florida, and has spent this week publishing their discoveries.  In what is currently a 3-part series, they discuss how home prices were arbitrarily inflated by crooked real estate developers.

Unscrupulous property flippers would buy houses or condos, then drive up the price in a few days or weeks by selling it to someone they knew. Buyers used the inflated price to get bank loans for more than the property was worth, leaving money for flippers to split as profit.

They’ve reviewed nearly 19 million Florida real estate transactions to compile an impressive infographic (a piece of which is shown above) plotting flips over the state, separating the data by county, by cluster, and adjusting for population.  While most of these developers will never be prosecuted (simply too many to chase down), hopefully they’ll at least never be looked at the same way again by banks and customers.

via ‘Flip that house’ fraud cost billions, Flippers’ Toll: On Gulf Coast, half a billion in defaults, and The King of the Sarasota Flip

Science florida, home, infographic, real estate, sales

Valentin Yovchev is a 20-year old freelance designer with a self-described passion for 3D modeling and Robots.  He took the time to channel his energies into converting an old Travant automobile into both an Autobot and a Decepticon transformer, and wrote the entire thing up for an exclusive “Making Of” here at VizWorld.

Read more…

Graphics 3dsmax, feature, hypershot, makingof

I just found this gem of a conference announcement buried in the VizWorld.com Forums, accidentally marked as Spam.  I’ve resurrected it for you all to view, the announcement of the SPIE and IS&T’s International Conference on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging in San Jose this January.  Of interest:

This year, there will be a special session on Visualization and cognition in the interactive exploration of massive data sets. Papers will be welcome in these and related areas:

• Visual Data Mining
• Visual semantics
• Visual identification and encoding of features
• Perceptual comparisons of different visualization methods
• Finding patterns across different data types (e.g., image, video, text, GIS)
• Directing visual attention
• Perceptually-based visualization design patterns

Abstracts are due this Friday (July 24th), and the entire conference committee list can be seen in the forum post.

via Perception and Cognition in the Interactive Exploration of Large Data Sets « VizWorld.com Forums.

Science conference, human vision, imaging, is&t, spie