Home » Archives for August 2009
COLLADA is picking up steam, and at SIGGRAPH they has some major announcements from big names like Maya, EA, and Google. The Khronos Group’s latest specification, COLLADA 1.5, now has support from a wide variety of vendors:
Among the wide range of CAD/CAM/CAE, gaming, consumer and professional 3D leaders supporting COLLADA at SIGGRAPH this year are Google®, through the company’s O3D plugin for the viewing of 3D objects on any Web page; Maxis®/EA® via their award-winning Spore® game, and Blender(TM), being showcased in the Blender Foundation booth #3701.
Also, they have new plugins to add support for COLLADA into Max and Maya:
After one year of Beta, NetAllied Systems finally released the next generation of COLLADA exporters and importers for Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya built on the latest OpenCOLLADA SDK. OpenCOLLADA plug-ins are available for immediate download at http://www.opencollada.org
The OpenCOLLADA plugins support all major versions for 3ds Max (8 to 2010, Win32, Win64) and Maya (2008, 2009, Win32, Win64, MacOSX). The most important new features include:
- First available tools that fully supports COLLADA 1.5.0
- Embedded into 3ds Max is a 3d Google Warehouse client that allows seamless import of hundreds of thousands of 3d models (see http://www.youtube.com/netallied)
- Performance boost up to five times for importing and exporting compared to any other solution available
- Interoperability has been tested with many tools, including the newly released Electronic Arts Spore and Daz Studio exporters or Bentley Microstation 8i
- Plug-in installers are available on www.opencollada.org under a freeware license that allows commercial usage
Read the full announcement after the break.
Read more…
Graphics collada, khronos
NVidia had a pretty good presence at SIGGRAPH, bolstered by the numerous press releases and announcements they’ve obviously been storing up to overwhelm attendees. A quick recap:
And more, just look up VizWorld’s NVidia tag. We paid them a visit and sat down to talk about some of their stuff, and broke down the conversation for you after the break.
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Graphics, Hardware, Science feature, nvidia, siggraph
If you’re interesting in GPGPU or Shader development, you definitely want to check out the supplementary materials for the full-day SIGGRAPH “Beyond Programmable Shading” course. It contains examples, slides, and papers detailing several topics from leaders in the field.
The first half of the course introduces the trends and directions in this emerging field. Topics include: parallel graphics architectures, parallel programming models for graphics, and game-developer investigations of the use of these new capabilities in future rendering engines.
The second half of the course has leaders from graphics hardware vendors, game development, and academic research present case studies that show how general parallel computation is being combined with the traditional graphics pipeline to boost image quality and spur new graphics algorithm innovation.
via Beyond Programmable Shading 2009.
Graphics, Science gpgpu, shader, siggraph
I will never understand this irony: I’m a card-carrying member of ACM SIGGRAPH and this year’s conference was held in the gorgeous city which I only recently moved away from, but I could not make it back for the conference. Good thing Randall was there and diligently reported on the proceedings each day.
The USGS has just published a geo-visualization geek’s dream: an interactive map of newly-standardized terrestrial ecosystems, bioclimates, topo moisture, landforms and lithology of the continental United States. (Granted, our nation is dominated by three outstanding Holocene lithologies – glacial, fluvial/alluvial and aeolian – but it’s nice to see them subdivided further properly). Mapping criteria are provided in the link below.
USGS | A New Map of Standardized Terrestrial Ecosystems of the Conterminous United States
Science
VizWorld has left SIGGRAPH, headed home to work on the rest of the world’s news. But we’ve still got alot of videos, photos, and news to post! It’s going to take us a few days to dig through all of it, but to satiate your appetite we’ve gathered up a collection of booth photos from around the conference. In here you can see some of the most impressive booths, hardware, displays, and babes (Can’t be a conference without a few booth babes can it?) from SIGGRAPH2009.
We’ve got pictures of booths (See Autodesk, Pixar, Rhythm & Hues, etc), we’ve got pictures of hardware (See the CausticOne, dual NVidia Quadroplex’s, Bluearc storage, etc), and see just random pictures around the show.
See the gallery after the break.
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Graphics, Hardware feature, siggraph
Tony DeYoung over at FireUser has a guy on the floor of SIGGRAPH that took the time to get some great interviews with the guys from ATI in their booth. I have no idea how he got such clear audio (but I’m going to find out!) , but it’s a great collection of news.
You can hit his site for synopsis and details, or see the videos after the break.
Read more…
Hardware amd, ati, siggraph
Best Buy is trying a new gimmick to get free press and publicity, and since I’m writing this I guess it’s working, by adding Augmented Reality markers into its Sunday flyers to see 3D versions of the week’s sale items.
Once that gets straightened out, you hold the front page of Best Buy’s Sunday newspaper ad up to your webcam’s lens, and it appears that the Toshiba laptop pictured on the front jumps off the page. When you tilt the page from side to side or from front to back, the laptop appears to move around in different angles.
While this is a clever toy to play with on a Sunday morning, it sure as hell didn’t make us want to buy a laptop from Best Buy. However, it did get us to write about it, so there’s that.
via Best Buy ads a-poppin’ in 3D via your webcam | DVICE.
Graphics advertising, augmented reality
Wednesday’s Keynote talk at SIGGRAPH was from New York Times Graphics Director Steve Duenes, and information aesthetics was there and has a great writeup on it.
In his talk titled “A Visual Response to the News”, he addressed the “brute reporting” power behind a typical NYTimes infographic, for instance all the background research that was involved in creating the “1 year after 9/11″ map. He described the considerations behind the 3D rendering showing how Saddam Houssein was captured. Next, the graph shootings of Virginia Tech, which involved scraping the website of Virginia Tech university to find staff members, and identify the ones that were probably teaching in the building.
via SIGGRAPH’09: Steve Duenes (NYTimes Graphics Director) Keynote Talk – information aesthetics.
Graphics, Science nyt, siggraph
Here at SIGGRAPH, Blender is on hand and has issued a press-release announcing what we can see in the upcoming Blender 2.5 and that we’ll be available in October.
During an almost two year process of design, review, and artist feedback, the Blender team has implemented a new core architecture for Blender. The key changes involve a high level of configurability of the interface and the ways tools are used, and a further elaboration of the original non-overlapping and non-blocking parallel working UI system. All of the interface elements in Blender are now defined using a scriptable layout engine, with scripted access to all of the data
Hit their site for details and the full press release.
blender.org – Siggraph 2009.
Graphics blender, software
A new paper from the Finnish Geodesic Institute and the Helsinki Institute of Technology discusses a new method for computed 3D models of an environment using photogrammetry and laser scanning but adds in compensation for orientation problems.
Comprehensive 3D modeling of our environment requires integration of terrestrial and airborne data, which is collected, preferably, using laser scanning and photogrammetric methods. However, integration of these multi-source data requires accurate relative orientations. In this article, two methods for solving relative orientation problems are presented.
The entire paper is available as a PDF.
via Abstract: Orientation of Airborne Laser Scanning Point Clouds with Multi-View, Multi-Scale Image Blocks – MDPI.
Science paper, photogrammetry
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