VizWorld.com

Hit the Pixar booth at SIGGRAPH promptly at 1pm for a chance at a beautiful little Teapot.  Dressed up in classic Pixar Style, these things will go fast.

Graphics

Fusion IO is at SIGGRAPH showing off their 320GB Solid-State IO Card.  I talked to them for a few minutes, and got some info on how the card works.

One common problem you hear about alot from other SSD systems is the problem of “silent failures”.  As the cells die in the SSD chips, eventually you lose the ability to write data to them.  Even with the best parity & error checking systems, it’s possible that groups of cells can fail at a time and result in bad reads.  FusionIO has addressed this problem on several fronts:

• They’ve implemented a RAID controller into the chip so that reads & writes are dispersed among several chips, improving bandwidth and reducing the number of writes required to a single chip
• 11-bit Parity for error checking
• “Real Only” checking. In the event that a portion of the memory dies, that section becomes “Read Only”, allowing safe reads of your data back for backup.

It’s an impressive card, but not cheap.  Currently selling for approximately $30/Gig , it’s not for the faint of heart.  SSD prices are falling fast, and showing up in more and more systems so things like the FusionIO will become more prevalent (and cost-conscious) in the near future.

Hardware fusionio, siggraph, storage

For anyone looking for information on SIGGRAPH, here’s a simple post with links to all the VizWorld articles yesterday.

• SIGGRAPH Posters (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5)
• Splashing in Pipelines
• Making it Move
• Information Aesthetics: Designing Interactions

And that’s it for Day 1.  If anyone else attending would like to write up a session, feel free to send it to [email protected] and we’ll be happy to publish it for you!

Website

Today’s the day for the big InterSense announcement:  On the show floor of SIGGRAPH they’ll be demonstrating a proof-of-concept new product called the “VCam Lite”.

The VCam Lite will combine the same patented motion tracking technology and powerful virtual production software that made the original VCam so distinctive, creating a precision, inertial-ultrasonic system with an intuitive user interface.  An alternate version of the VCam Lite will be available with InterSense’s InertiaCube technology which, when combined with optical motion capture position tracking systems, will enable its use on large optical mocap stages.

Definitely great stuff, and the new smaller form factor with InertiaCube integration makes it perfect for use at sites that already have big motion-capture stages onsite.

Read the full anouncement after the break.

Read more…

Hardware

The last session I took in today was a more production focused session “Making it Move”.  Again, there were four session:

• Geometric Fracture Modeling in “Bolt”
• Simulating the Balloon Canopy in “Up”
• Fight Night 4: Physics-Driven Animation and Visuals
• B.O.B.: Breaking Ordinary Boundaries of Animation in “Monsters vs. Aliens”

Read some cliff-notes of these presentations after the break.
Read more…

Graphics

After lunch, I went back to Auditorium B to take in the “Splashing in Pipelines” Taslk.  There were four presentations:

• Non-Reflective Boundary Condition For Incompressible Free-Surface Fluids
• An Efficient Level Set Toolkit for Visual Effects
• Water-Surface Animation for “Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa”
• Underground Cave Sequence for “Land of the Lost”

The talks were far more technical than I had expected, but I took notes to share the knowledge with all of you.  Read the details after the break.

Graphics, Science recap, siggraph

Posters are always a big part of SIGGRAPH, showcasing work that’s not far enough along for a full paper but still worthy of showing off and discussing.  The posters are still going up at SIGGRAPH, but I snapped pics of the existing ones and I’m gonna show them here.   There’s alot of them, so I’ll be putting them up in batches.  See the gallery after the break.

Also, if any of these posters are yours then give us more info!  Names, details, links to your own webpages!

Read more…

Science poster, siggraph

Posters are always a big part of SIGGRAPH, showcasing work that’s not far enough along for a full paper but still worthy of showing off and discussing.  The posters are still going up at SIGGRAPH, but I snapped pics of the existing ones and I’m gonna show them here.   There’s alot of them, so I’ll be putting them up in batches.  See the gallery after the break.

Also, if any of these posters are yours then give us more info!  Names, details, links to your own webpages!

Read more…

Science poster, siggraph

Posters are always a big part of SIGGRAPH, showcasing work that’s not far enough along for a full paper but still worthy of showing off and discussing.  The posters are still going up at SIGGRAPH, but I snapped pics of the existing ones and I’m gonna show them here.   There’s alot of them, so I’ll be putting them up in batches.  See the gallery after the break.

Also, if any of these posters are yours then give us more info!  Names, details, links to your own webpages!

Read more…

Science poster, siggraph

Posters are always a big part of SIGGRAPH, showcasing work that’s not far enough along for a full paper but still worthy of showing off and discussing.  The posters are still going up at SIGGRAPH, but I snapped pics of the existing ones and I’m gonna show them here.   There’s alot of them, so I’ll be putting them up in batches.  See the gallery after the break.

Also, if any of these posters are yours then give us more info!  Names, details, links to your own webpages!

Read more…

Science poster, siggraph