VizWorld.com

Right on the heels of the NVidia OptiX announcement, a new tutorial from the Alexandra Institute shows how to build your own CUDA accelerated ray-tracing system.

This little tutorial will not state that the GPU thing is the only way to go or try to preach something. But it will hopefully help you to get started using CUDA to accelerate ray tracing. I have been writing a lot of shaders for other applications so it was very natural for me to experiment with a GPU implementation. So the natural choice would be to use Nvidia’s CG or glsl. But i decided to try Cuda, because i wanted to learn what kind of beast it is and second it should be easier to code.

via Triers CUDA ray tracing tutorial « Computer Graphics – Alexandra Institute.

Science cuda, raytracing, tutorial

If you were at SIGGRAPH in New Orleans, you undoubtedly say the unwashed masses wandering the conference in their viking helmets, occasionally stopping only long enough to scream “FJORG!” and then trudge onward.  What was this, you ask?  It was the third annual “iron-animator” FJORG competition, and the winners have been announced:

Prestissimo, comprised of Sasapitt Rujirat, Phon Thiramonkol, and Lee Croudy was chosen as the winner of FJORG! for their animated reel, “Great Expectations.” Team Prestissimo was chosen from a field of 10 three-member teams that competed for 32 non-stop hours to create character-driven animations under extreme pressure and multiple staged distractions. The team is from Thailand and traveled for more than 30 hours to compete in FJORG!

Also, this year was the first “GameJam!” competition, using similar rules and environments to create a video game.

The first annual GameJam! is a newly created competition for teams to create a 3D game using the Panda3D game engine and a 2D game using Flash during a 24-hour period. The team comprised of John Fielding, Rory Riggins, Ryan Neff created the 3D model that was chosen as Best of Show. The team comprised of Laurissa Hughes, Chance Dodd, and Melissa Guldbrand was chosen as Best of Show for their 2D videogame. Prizes were awarded to every team that participated.

Congratulations to all the participants!  See the winning short after the break!

via ….. >> VFXWorld / News << …...

Read more…

Graphics animation, contest, fjorg, gamejam, siggraph, videogame

A new search engine named 3dfilter is currently in Beta, and allows users to scour the net for 3D models and textures.  The selection is fairly extensive, pulling in models from Google’s 3D model warehouse, 3dVia, Fallingpixel, and more.  I had expected a pretty sparse selection or dozens of paid-models, but I was surprised.  A quick search for “aeron” (the Herman Miller Aeron Chair was my goal) quickly turned up about a dozen models, including 3 free ones, and then hundreds of airplanes.

Results can be sorted by format, price, and relevance and then easily downloaded.  Check it out, and see if you find anything interesting.

3DFilter – Search hundreds of thousands of 3d models and textures.

Graphics free, model

Supinfocom has another great animated short answering the great mystery of what happens on the top-shelf at the supermarket?

What is going on above the shelves of a supermarket?

A short adventure directed by Supinfocom Arles students: Laurent Harduin, Delphine Bourgois, Victor Phrakornkham, Pierre-Vincent Cabourg and Fanny Vergne.
Music by Samy Cheboub.

A great little animation, but we’ld expect no less from the likes of Supinfocom Arles.  See it after the break.

Read more…

Graphics animation, miam, supinfocom

Just a quick note to anyone experiencing difficulties, VizWorld is suffering a few growing pains.  In response, I’ve made some changes that might require you to flush your browser cache or do a shift-reload to see things correctly again.  I’ve moved several assets to Amazon’s S3 & CloudFront services, so you’ll see several assets (stylesheets, javascript, etc) pulled from assets.vizworld.com and images.vizworld.com now, so all of you NoScript users take note :)

If you experience any further problems, please let us know!

Website meta, Website

When you start talking about GPGPU, you have two major players in the marketplace:  NVidia CUDA and ATI’s Stream technologies.  PC Perspective takes the two to task and pits them against each other in a battle of the bits:

Since our initial review of five of NVidia’s CUDA-enabled applications back in June, we’ve been chomping at the bit to get our first real look at ATI’s entry into the GPU computing ring called ATI Stream. Both of these platforms use parallel computing architectures to utilize the GPU’s stream processors, in tandem with the CPU, to significantly increase any system’s video transcoding speeds.

Today, we are going to discuss both of these technologies as well as benchmark a couple video transcoding applications from Cyberlink that support both CUDA and ATI Stream platforms. We will also take a brief look at ATI’s Avivo video converter to see what ATI’s own free software has to offer.

via PC Perspective – ATI Stream vs. NVIDIA CUDA – GPGPU computing battle royale.

Hardware ati, cuda, gpgpu, nvidia, stream

Caustic, makers of the real-time graphics card we’ve discussed before, had a huge announcement at SIGGRAPH:  They’ve partnered with the likes of Autodesk, Rhino, Lightworks, and more to bring their card to the masses.  If you’ve seen my latest podcast then you know I spent some time talking to them about the hardware and how it works.  Read on after the break for the details.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware, Science caustic, feature, siggraph

If you couldn’t make it to SIGGRAPH, or couldn’t make it to all of NVidia’s presentations (and they had several), then hit up the NVidia Developer Zone where they’ve posted slides for their talks.

NVIDIA @ SIGGRAPH 2009.

Hardware, Science nvidia, siggraph, training

Abelardo Perez Santiago shows his prowess with 3ds Max by modeling a classic 1936 Mercedes Benz, and describes the process in a new “Making Of” over on CGArena.

Today we have programs that simulate almost everything: aerodynamics, ergonomics and comfort of occupants, safety before an accident, etc… but all this was unthinkable in 1936, the machines were not manufactured in series. Undertake a project like this required a team of authentic master craftsmen who made up a puzzle master, and where each of them left their mark artistic designs printed on it reflected. The attraction that each of these unique work of art has on the observer, is so seductive that induces you to go on the pleasure of the unique details on each model. The choice of this model was motivated by the spectacular design and myriad of details.

via CGArena – Modeling the Mercedes Benz 540k 1.936.

Graphics 3dsmax, makingof, tutorial

The sequel to “SIGGRAPH2009 – Exhibits Day 1” is now online.  In this episode I show some of what was going on in the Autodesk booth and a few others, and focus primarily on the Caustic card and its features.  Be sure to come back for a full writeup on the Caustic Card soon.

Podcast caustic, Podcast, siggraph