VizWorld Pixels for August 19th, 2009
5:00 pm
Here’s the short-links roundup for today:
Argonne Open House 2009
4:16 pm
Argonne National Labs, part of the US Department of Energy, is holding an open house later this month, August 29th from 9am – 4:30pm, which will include tours of some of the major labs and a chance to see some massive visualizations.
Nearly 100 engaging exhibits, demonstrations, tours and presentations are being planned for a day of fun and education for the entire family.
A program of attractions and events, including a map of the Argonne campus, will be available free at the Argonne gates and is downloadable here.
Personas by Aaron Zinman of the MIT Media Lab
3:00 pm
A fun little online toy called “Personas” allows you to enter a name, preferably your own” and then have it mapped into a collection of categories.
Enter your name, and Personas scours the web for information and attempts to characterize the person – to fit them to a predetermined set of categories that an algorithmic process created from a massive corpus of data. The computational process is visualized with each stage of the analysis, finally resulting in the presentation of a seemingly authoritative personal profile.
The visuals are impressive and the resulting graph has alot of style, however the searching could use some work. With a name like “Randall Hand” it found alot of what I think is NSFW material (“Randall’s hand” was in alot of odd places). Try it out for yourself and see what you get.
via Personas | Metropath(ologies) | An installation by Aaron Zinman.
Chaos Group releases VRay for Maya
2:00 pm
If you’re a VRay fanboy who’s always wanted to try Maya, but been held back by the lack of support, then now’s your chance to jump in! Chaos Group has just announced a fully supported version of VRay for Maya.
The comprehensive set of features provided by V-Ray for Maya includes true 3D Motion Blur, Sun & Sky procedural lighting system, Physical camera for matching life footage, Environment Fog, a set of Sub-Surface Scattering shaders and many others. V-Ray for Maya is supported on Microsoft Windows, Apple Mac OS X, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Fedora operating systems in their 32-bit and 64-bit versions (other distributions also work). V-Ray runs with Autodesk Maya 2008, 2009 and 2010 versions.
It sells for $999 ( €719) per license, and there are volume discounts for farms.
via CGDigg: Your daily fresh CG news – VRay for Maya released!.
Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines
1:00 pm
Game Engines are not a new development, I remember playing with ZZT back in grade-school. However, 3D Game engines with modern graphics support have been growing fast in the last 10 years, and Maximum PC takes us on a wild ride through the various engines of yesterday.
Prior to Doom’s release, programmers found themselves in the stone age of game development. For the most part, building a game meant starting from scratch and compiling all new code, but like the invention of the wheel, the advent of the game engine forever changed the PC gaming landscape.
via Doom to Dunia: A Visual History of 3D Game Engines | Maximum PC.
Effectiveness of Chart Design
12:00 pm
Edward Tufte has long hated pie-charts, for both their aesthetic failings and misleading representations of visual data. Neal Levene backs up the argument with a new post on Simple Complexity that quite simply shows that Pie Charts are just plain harder to deal with than their counterparts.
Can you rank the size of the wedges from largest to smallest? Take a second to write down your answer. (We will reveal the answer later in the article.) When you are finished, click to the next page of this post.
via Effectiveness of Chart Design — InnovaTech, Inc.’s Simple Complexity.
VFX shops share the secret sauce software
11:00 am
Every VFX house has its own internal proprietary “secret sauce” that they use on their projects, be it special compositors or fluid simulators or whatever. However, with a movie using over a dozen different VFX houses and budgets cutting back industry-wide, VFX studios are beginning to see the value in sharing their secrets with other studios.
The “plumbing” Tweak builds includes software for playing back vfx shots still in progress because consumer media players like QuickTime aren’t up to the job.
“All the companies had built their own inhouse playback systems,” he said. “But ILM isn’t going to land a new movie because they have an inhouse playback tool. So now it’s becoming clear to companies that it’s not worth the time and effort to maintain these legacy programs. They’d rather just buy them.”
via Vfx shops cooking up shared recipes – Entertainment News, Film News, Media – Variety.
Ars Says MultiGPU Unlikely, we say Inevitable
10:00 am
Recently, Ars Technica finally found the JPR report on Multi-GPU from the beginning of this month, and smashed it as being pretty unlikely due to manufacturing constraints and consumer interest. Well, I disagree and in this feature I’ll lay out why I think that Multi-GPU penetration of 30% is not only likely, it’s inevitable.
Read the full article and chime in with your thoughts after the break.
modo401 tutorial on re-topologising CAD Data
9:00 am
A new tutorial from Vincent Rice shows the capabilities of modo401 for reformatting badly-tesellated CAD models.
modo 401 is an excellent tool for ‘re-toplogising’ 3D CAD data. That is, the re-purposing of hi-density mesh created on export from NURBS-based engineering programs into a form (subdivision surfaces) useful for high-quality stills and animation rendering. Here’s a simple tutorial to show how I usually approach this task.
via tutorials.
Autodesk Trial Version now Available
8:30 am
If you’re an Autodesk User and want to try the new 2010 versions, now’s your chance. Autodesk has released 30-day trial versions of some of the new apps for you to download and try out!
The trials are 30-days online, require a short registration, and seem to be fully featured. They offer versions for XP, Vista, and Mac OSX. Go get em !
VizWorld.com 
Comments