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A new library from the University of Utah and Disney discusses a new UV texture mapping library called ‘PTex’ which can map UV coordinates to models on a fully automatic basis with for models or arbitrary complexity and size.

We propose a new texture mapping method for Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces that requires no explicit parameterization. Our method, Ptex, stores a separate texture per quad face of the subdivision control mesh, along with a novel per-face adjacency map, in a single texture file per surface. Ptex uses the adjacency data to perform seamless anisotropic filtering of multi-resolution textures across surfaces of arbitrary topology. Just as importantly, Ptex requires no manual setup and scales to models of arbitrary mesh complexity and texture detail.

Ptex is now supported in Pixar’s Renderman, and was used in Bolt & “Glago’s Guest”, and an open-source version of the library is coming son.  Videos, slides, and the PDF paper are available on their site.

via Ptex: Per-Face Texture Mapping for Production Rendering.

Graphics, Science disney, library, ptex, texture

MSI already holds the honor of having one of the more impressive GTX275 cards with the N275GTX Twin Frozr OC, and they’ve outdone themselves with the new N275GTX  Lightning.

The impressive-looking card touts military-class components, a 10-phase PWM and a cooling solution comprising of the dual-fan Twin Frozr II and SuperPipe technology.

All that combines for blazing out-the-box frequencies. MSI has seen fit to push the GPU from 633MHz to 700MHz, and the card’s 1,792MB of GDDR3 memory operates at 2,300MHz. Despite the souped-up figures, MSI claims the card will run 23 per cent cooler than a reference design.

Sounds like it would be expensive, but MSI has told Hexus that the card will be available at the end of the month for £209 (roughly $350 US).

via HEXUS.net – News :: MSI announces range-topping N275GTX Lightning edition graphics card : Page – 1/1.

Hardware msi, nvidia

Over at Information Is Beautiful, they’ve built a few visualizations of various twitter statistics such as the type of tweets, number of accounts, tweets per day, and more.  Interesting stats, but great visuals.

Information Is Beautiful | Ideas, issues, concepts, subjects – visualized!.

Science infographic, twitter

ESRI has upgraded the ArcGIS Explorer sotware and released it as a free download on their website, providing a great way to borwse geographic information and GIS data.

“This release introduces some very big features,” says Bern Szukalski, ArcGIS Explorer product manager. “We’re always learning from users what they want and need, and we have incorporated some compelling new features as a result. These include the ability to access shared maps, layers, and tools directly from ArcGIS Online; support for layer packages that enable ArcGIS Explorer to leverage state-of-the-art ArcGIS Desktop cartography; the ability to use maps in 2D or 3D; and presentation tools that let users share their geographic knowledge and communicate geographically.”

They also adopted a few new UI features such as the popular “ribbon” interface, and integrated 2D and 3D displays with quick-switching.  An SDK is available for custom plugins, and new maps and layers are available from ArcGIS online, including Bing Maps.  Also is support for Google Earth’s KML and KMZ files.  Check it all out at the ArcGIS Explorer website.

via New Version of ArcGIS Explorer Now Available.

Science arcgis, esri, geospatial, gis, software

QuakeCon2009 is underway, and AMD is allowing certain individuals a chance to see their new “Evergreen” DirectX11 compliant graphics chip in action.

As AMD didn’t allow them to open up the case, we’re unable to actually see the card. But according to the author, he could see a dual-slot cooled card with a pair of DisplayPort outputs and a single DVI output from the back side.

For demos, they’re running the new Wolfenstein game, which is only DX9, and various SDK demos.    Results are impressive, but until they can run it on a real DirectX11 application we’ll just have to remain patient.

via AMD Demos DX11 Hardware at QuakeCon 2009 – Expreview.com.

Hardware amd, directx11

In an attempt to analyze the major trends of Australian online properties and Australian internet usage, a group has created a permanent public record visualizing the results from 2001 to 2008 as an interactive flash-based website.  Bubble colors map to categories (government, social, etc) and the sizes and axes are configurable by the user to metrics such as page views,audience size, and more.

It’s fun just to hit play, tho, and watch a few big sites (facebook, ebay) rise to the top as the smaller players churn quite rapidly.

History of the Australian Web via Information Aesthetics

Science australia, flash, infographic, interactive, internet, Website

So you work for a wildly successful video game company.  You’ve had a good run, but finally just feel the need to do something else.  No ordinary resignation will do, so what do you do?  Tap into your natural assets, and make a game.

That’s exactly what Ubisoft developer William David did with his game ‘Leaving’, to explain the whole move with both literal & subliminal means (“You can’t go back”), and put the whole thing to Frank Sinatra’s “You can’t take that away from me.”.

Leaving. via Offworld.

Graphics offbeat, video game

The new 80 GB ioXtreme from Fusion-io was recently displayed at SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans, LA. The ioXtreme is a solid-state drive (SSD) that fits into a x4 PCI Express slot. The beauty of the using the PCI Express slot is that you can really obtain great performance. Fusion-io is claiming that their drive can achieve a write bandwidth of 500 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 280 MB/s.  The best SSD for a performance comparison is the 64 GB Intel X-25E. The Intel SSD achieves a write bandwidth of 170 MB/s and a read bandwidth of 250 MB/s. The price for the X-25E is currently running about $700. The ioXtreme is favorably priced at $895.

The ioXtreme is meant for home gaming systems, which means there are some limits to the drive. The ioXtreme is limited to 64-bit Windows operating systems. That means a home user can only use 64-bit Windows XP or Vista. (If you are using 64-bit Windows XP for gaming, you need to have your head examined.)

Another limitation is that you can only RAID two of the drives together. This is a limit that is enforced by the driver. It is meant to keep people from putting several of these drives together to compete with the enterprise offerings from Fusion-io. The ioDrive and the ioDriveDuo are their enterprise offerings. These drives offer higher performance, support 64-bit Linux, and have a 3 year warranty. Meanwhile the ioXtreme comes with a 1 year warranty.

There are internal differences as well between the ioXtreme and their enterprise offerings. While it is unlikely that you will lose a chip on the ioXtreme, should that occur, you will lose your data. On the enterprise side, the ioDrives have more memory chips than needed.  If a memory chip fails internally on the ioDrives, they have hardware that will detect the failure, and use one of the spare chips instead. Fusion-io claims that the ioDrives have a lifespan of 16 years, while the ioXtreme will have a shorter lifespan. For all its  increased performance, engineering, and warranty, the enterprise ioDrives comes with an increased price that starts at $3,600 for the 80GB model.

Update 9/17/09: I was recently contact by FusionIO requesting a correction on some of the data in this article.

• Read Bandwidth    697 MB/s (64 KB packets)
• Write Bandwidth      288 MB/s (64 KB packets)

And a short statement:

Though gamers will see incredible performance improvements using the ioXtreme, the market that will likely find the device most useful are content creators, digital media artists and other workstation users. Imagine working on complex 3-D graphics, manipulating massive files, ripping multiple DVDs and installing a new application — all simultaneously.

Hardware feature, fusionio, siggraph

Making realistic looking water is always difficult, no matter what rendering package you use.  If you use Autodesk’s 3ds Max, however, you might want to check out a new tutorial on CGTuts+ by Evan Schaible that demonstrates a great way to do it.

Making Realistic Water in 3ds Max – Cgtuts+.

Graphics 3dsmax, tutorial, water

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With the big news of SGI today, it’s the perfect time to try it out!

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