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Peter Belanger has posted a timelapse video of the creation of the recent MacWorld Magazine cover, showing not only the photography and set design but the Photoshop work in cleaning up the photographs and then manipulating them into what they want.

After working on the latest cover for Macworld Magazine I wanted to show what is involved in making a cover. I focused on the three main areas: the photography, photoshop and design. I chose a time lapse format to convey lots of information in a small amount of time. The only drawback of time lapse is that since half a day goes by in 30 seconds, the whole process seam so easy! Lots of details were left out of the design process (like the cover meetings and rounds of layout options). I began to photograph the design process after the layouts had already been narrowed down to just three cover designs.

Cover creation from Peter Belanger on Vimeo.

Graphics art, design, photography, photoshop

In a response to the “CrossFire” technology that allows AMD processors and ATI graphics cards to uniquely combine in an extremely efficient multi-GPU configuration, Intel and NVidia have announced a partnership to bring similar functionality to their SLI technology.

“Nvidia SLI technology is a perfect complement to the processing prowess of our new Core i7 and Intel DP55KG desktop board,” said Clem Russo, VP and GM of Intel client board division at Intel. “Nvidia and Intel share a combined passion for furthering the PC as the definitive platform for gaming, and this combination will surely be attractive to anyone building or purchasing a brand new PC this fall.”

AMD and ATI are still minor players compared to the likes of NVidia and Intel, but the do have the unique place of being the one-stop-shop of CPU and GPU technology.

via Nvidia SLI Licensed For Intel Core i7, i5 Platforms – Tom’s Hardware.

Hardware intel, nvidia, sli

CryTek, makers of the CryEngine, have posted the powerpoint slides & video of their SIGGRAPH2009 presentation in the Advanced Real-Time Rendering Course.

This is a SIGGRAPH 2009 talk from “Advanced Real-time Rendering Course” about new ligting technique in CryEngine 3. The new technique called “Light Propagation Volumes” is used for Global Illumination and Massive Lighting, which significantly improves the lighting quality. The concept and its implementation are explained in the paper. Slides from the talk with talk notes as well as the video are provided.

And if that’s not enough for you, they also have information on multi-core programming, deferred lighting, and next generation effects.

via Crytek GmbH: Presentations.

Science crytek, siggraph, tutorial

Christopher Horvath from Industrial Light & Magic has an impressive history in the VFX world, working at Weta on ‘Lord of the Rings’ and ‘King Kong’, but had to go in a different direction for the latest work with Harry Potter.

For ‘Harry Potter: The Half-Blood Prince,’ he torched bits and bytes into an amazing 100-foot-tall wall of swirling fire that surrounded Dumbledore, again using the GPU. The system was such hot stuff that SIGGRAPH accepted a technical paper that he wrote with ILM’s Willi Geiger describing the calculus that fueled the fire. It was one of 78 papers accepted from 439 submitted.

via CGSociety – CHRISTOPHER HORVATH.

Graphics harry potter, ilm, interview, vfx, weta

The Gnomon School of Visual Effects will have Gary Bruins, Technical Director for Pixar on ‘Up’, presenting some of the tools and technology used to create the fantastic movie.

Gnomon School of Visual Effects and the VES bring you a fun-filled night with a behind-the scenes look into the creation of this summer’s box office hit, Up.

Special guest Gary Bruins (Effects Supervisor) will share his experience of working on the film and what it took to make this special, animated feature. This event will not be filmed for non-disclosure reasons.

The event is Free and begins Thursday at 6pm.

via Gnomon School of Visual Effects | Professional 3D Training in Hollywood, CA.

Graphics gnomon, makingof, pixar

Today I’m beginning a new feature aimed at reducing the somewhat overwhelming volume of posts that appear on VizWorld every day.  From now on, most days will conclude with a “Pixels” segment posting links, blurbs, and graphics I found throughout the day but didn’t feel like turning into a single post.

• Mountains out of Molehills – A visualization of various media ‘scare stories’ (including swine flu, Y2K, and videogame violence) .
• Top 10 fun computing films – Partly for the VFX work, partly for the geek-cred
• The UK’s first Road Map, from 1675 – Beautiful in so many ways.
• Panasonic’s “End of Summer” Giveaway on LivingInHD - Upload an inspirational summer wedding photo to win
• CGArena Aug/Sep 09 issue now online

Graphics, Hardware, Science pixels, vizbits

The Molecule has a new blog post discussing the installation they designed for Barry Diller’s InterActive Corp’s headquarters, unveiled in 2006.  The installation projects a large globe onto a wall and allows users to manipulate it to see real-time information about various IAC-owned companies.

Using the program MotionBuilder allowed us to render the globe in real-time, as well as respond to external triggers. While MotionBuilder is generally used for motion capture it was a good choice for the creation of this installation because of its ability to receive information from multiple sources (i.e. the network, the mouse, etc.), and it runs a real-time node based math and animation engine called relations. In the final design there are multiple shading layers involved, including a land layer, 2 light layers. a haze layer and cloud layers. The “twinkling light shader” used was written in an open GL shading language (CgFX) which created a cool real-time effect that’s not possible out of the box.

via Everything looks better after The Molecule: Spinning Interactivity.

Graphics, Hardware installation, realtime, the molecule

Surprised they didn’t get this out in time for SIGGRAPH, but Supermicro has raised the bar by announcing a new workstation that can hold four of NVidia’s Tesla C1060′s in a single towercase.

The new 704GT-TRF SuperWorkstations are based on Intel Xeon 5500 [Nehalem] core processors and support up to four NVIDIA Tesla C1060 GPUs. They also support up to three additional PCI-e add-on cards for additional expansion. In order to keep such a beast fueled, they feature redundant Gold Level [93%+ efficiency] 1400-watt power supplies.

via Supermicro Announces 4TF GPU Computing System | insideHPC.com.

Hardware nvidia, supermicro, tesla

In an attempt to keep 3D Stereoscopic gaming from going the awkward route of the several virtual reality technologies before it, the industry has formed the “S-3D Gaming Alliance” (S3DGA).

According to the U-DECIDE Initiative, a well received study of modern gamers, 93% of survey respondents want to see game developers support stereoscopic 3D technology. The industry’s answer is to start development of The S-3D Gaming Alliance, an organization that is 100% focused on making stereoscopic 3D gaming possible through standards, education, and product adoption.

Some of S3DGA’s founding companies include Blitz Games Studios, DDD, iZ3D, Jon Peddie Research, TDVision Corp, XpanD, and more. The President and CEO of S3DGA will be Neil Schneider, best known for his pioneering work on Meant to be Seen (www.mtbs3D.com), the world’s leading website focused on stereoscopic 3D gaming and entertainment.

Personally, I would think the real problem is not in game support, as NVidia has had drivers that would make any DirectX game work with shutter glasses for several years (I had an old ELSA card that did it back in 2003).  The problem is in getting the costs down to where people are willing to pick it up, and adding value to make it worth it.

It also wouldn’t hurt to add a graphic designer to the team, I mean what is up with that logo?

via Press Release – S-3D Gaming Alliance (S3DGA) Announced.

Graphics, Hardware 3d, s3dga, stereoscopic, videogame

The folks behind the VIEW “Digital Convergency” conference, to be in Turin Italy, have made some announcements about what all you’ll be able to see this year:

• Johnatan Knight from EA will talk about Dante’s Inferno
• Henry LaBounta from EA will talk about Art Direction in Photo-Real Games
• Travis Hathaway from Pixar will talk about Finding Nemo, The Incredibles, Cars, and Up

And more!  Check out their site for the details.

VIEW Conference 2009 | 10th Edition | Digital Cinema, Virtual Reality, Computer Graphics, (3D) Animation, Video Games & Visual Effects » Blog Archive » 10th edition highlights.

Graphics, Science conference, view