VizWorld.com

A new video on YouTube gives a very brief description of the Big Bang, what it could mean for the universe, and overlays a few interesting infographics over it in a fantastic animation narrated by Dr Janna Levin.

We made this video about the Big Bang because the theory is important and amazing, but often misunderstood.

This video was produced without any funding from any outside sources. It was put together with donated creative time from a group with a desire to further public cognition of science.

Science has many amazing stories to tell, this is the first. The Big Bang Briefly.

Watch the video after the break.

Read more…

Science bigbang, video

Jon Peddie has plotted the attendance number of the last 36 years of SIGGRAPH conventions and compiled the little chart you see above along with some other interesting statistics for this year’s premiere graphics conference.

If measured by attendance, this year’s event had the poorest showing since my first Siggraph in Seattle in 1980. However, since the first New Orleans event in 1996, the ratio of exhibitors to attendees was higher this year (1.7% compared to 1.1% then.) Now, that may not be what an exhibitor wants to hear. They want the ratio to be smaller, and the lowest it ever hit was 0.79% at the glory year of peak attendance (49k) in Los Angles in 1997. This year it was just 11K, although it really felt like more.

via So many pixels and so much Andouille – Jon Peddie Research—The Back Pages.

Graphics, Hardware, Science conference, siggraph

A new tutorial on Tuts+ shows how to create the OSX Intro Video, the flying text through space, with Cinema4D.  It’s from Satya Meka and will be split over 2 days, the first day is online now.

As the penultimate nugget of goodness in our Mac Lover’s Week, Satya created a 2 day tutorial that everybody will enjoy! In day 1, he will walk us through Cinema 4D and how to create the 3d text in this effect.

via Create Mac OSX Intro Video with C4D – Day 1 – Aetuts+.

Graphics cinema4d, osx, tutorial

Nina Paley has just taken a major step with her fantastic “Sita Sings the Blues” by placing all of the original assets (FLA files) online at archive.org under the CC-ShareAlike license.

“All the Flash authoring (.fla) files I used to make Sita Sings the Blues have just been posted on archive.org, under a Creative Commons Share Alike license. Want to know how I got a certain animated effect in Sita Sings the Blues? Open up the .fla files and find out. Want to put flying eyeballs and demons in your next music video? Now you can.

via Sita Sings the Blues sourcefiles online.

Graphics animation, assets, flash, vfx

A new website aims to map the price of some of the internet’s expensive domains onto a map by category.

The goal of the infographic is to reveal some of the most expensive domains ever purchased. The distance of the bubbles to the start of the chart is related to the average visitors per month a specific domain receives. The circle size represents the amount of money paid for that domain. The colors symbolize categories that each site is in.

via This Was Expensive: The Most Expensive Web Domains Mapped on a Wall – information aesthetics.

Science infographic, internet, web

Every VFX studio needs a render farm, but the specs are typically considered a bit of a secret.  Not so at The Molecule, who has just posted a nice article on their blog detailing both the hardware and software configuration they use.

Over the last 6 months our render farm has gone through a full body remodeling. Over 100 processors are logged into the system at once. The new server, written in php, features a virtual file system that links together functions and resources into a read-write space that connects the interface to the back-end components, offering a pretty cool thin client set-up. Some other interesting and different features are the render farm’s graphical interface, written in Flash AS3 and containing 21,000 lines of code, and its node-based design allowing for the creation of dependency trees (a means by which processes can be organized).

via Everything looks better after The Molecule.

Graphics, Hardware renderfarm, the molecule, vfx

John West at insideHPC has a scathing commentary on Mark Barrenechea’s latest blog post, which we covered last night, in which he says the big problem is not that they axed the graphics division, but that they are not being honest with their customers.

The problem here is not that the company has changed direction. It is hard to argue that the old SGI didn’t need retooling, and in that process a “not doing list” will surely have to be executed. The problem is that the company is not communicating honestly with its customers or the community.

via CEO manages to not comment on termination of graphics division at SGI | insideHPC.com.

Hardware sgi

The NSF has created some new visuals for the Hayden Planetarium, a fantastic 3d simulation and visualization of the sun made using VAPOR.

Toomre’s doctoral student Benjamin Brown used VAPOR (Visualization and Analysis Platform for Ocean, Atmosphere, and Solar Researchers), a tool developed by NCAR in collaboration with the University of California, Davis, and Ohio State University, to generate visualizations of the Sun and to create image sequences for the movie.

You can see “Journey to the Stars”, the 25-minute journey through the universe, on the 87-foot seven-megapixel dome of the Rose Center for Earth & Space in New York City.

via HPCwire: NSF TeraGrid Helps Hayden Planetarium Create Advanced Space Show.

Science astronomy, nsf, teragrid, vapor

Wired Magazine has rounded up the winners of the SciDAC2009 Visualization Night awards, and has pictures and their videos (where possible) onlien for your viewing pleasure.

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference SciDAC in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful and descriptive visual data can be.

Disclaimer: I was on the team that did the Kevlar Penetration (shown above, video not available) and the “Breaking Waves” video on the site.

via Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009 | Wired Science | Wired.com.

Science contest, scidac, visualization

I’ve been waiting for an official response from SGI about the recent elimination of their graphics division, and just got word that there won’t be one aside from the most recent blog post over at the SGI site.  Here’s a few choice quotes from it:

SGI’s mission focuses our engineering at the extremes of scale, speed, power, density, and latency. SGI customers use our solutions for many diverse applications: strategic science, national defense, modeling climate change, designing safer, more energy efficient cars, powering the Internet, to visual computing.

….

SGI has a long and successful history of helping our customers advance at the key junctures of “technology shift.” We have helped customers migrate from custom MIPS-based CPUs to Itanium and then to 64-bit x86 processing, from UNIX/IRIX to standard Linux, and now, to GPU technology.

….

This is why we are focused on working closely with nVidia and ATI/AMD and Intel many-core Larrabee, integrating their advanced graphics technology into our core platforms versus writing software to replace the GPU. When speed truly matters, put it in hardware.

So there you have it.  Without saying it directly, they essentially admit they are going to begin working with nVidia, Intel, and AMD on integrating their graphics technology into future systems, and abandon their own internal efforts.  It’s a smart move from a business perspective, but I’m still saddened that SGI decided to exit the graphics market entirely rather than innovate on something new.

SGI: CEO Blog.

Hardware sgi