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Here’s the links for today:

• Porter vs Stout
• NVidia Congratulaties the Jim Henson Creature Shop on Primetime Emmy Engineering Award
• Founders Day Dinner on October 23rd to honor Ed Catmull, president of Pixar
• id Software’s new game “RAGE”. Their first original IP in over 13 years.

Science pixels

Just heard through a reliable grapevine a bit more news on the S?I culling of the Graphic Division.  VP of the Graphic Division, Robert Pette (who we interviewed previously) has been hired by NVidia.  No news yet on his new title, position, or responsibilities, just that he’s now proudly sporting an NVidia shirt.  Here’s his professional Bio, if you’re curious, and ironically it’s taken from the SGI Executive Team page.

Bob Pette is leading SGI’s Visualization Group, providing the vision, design, strategy and direction for all SGI’s visualization products and solutions, including the newly released VUE suite of software. The VUE suite of software provides innovative solutions that help high-performance organizations consolidate and maximize their compute and visualization resources to manage the rapidly growing digital universe, anytime, anyplace and on any device. In his 21-year career at SGI, Bob has held positions in Systems Engineering, Application and Solutions Development, Customer Benchmarking, Customer Services, Services/Sales Operations and Corporate Marketing. As vice president of SGI Global Services, Bob expanded the SGI’s visualization practice via the design, development and implementation of Reality Center environments, simulators, CAVE installations, and immersive auditoriums for industries ranging from aerospace design, defense and intelligence sectors to energy exploration. Bob received his B.S. in Aerospace Engineering from Georgia Tech and his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Tampa.

Here’s hoping that NVidia will start to take in some more of the VUE product team.  One other interesting side effect of this is that it could remedy a current limitation of the NVidia Drivers on SGI’s upcoming UltraViolet systems: a limit of 16GPU’s.  With more of the old SGI UV team in-house, maybe they’ll get that remedied.

Graphics, Hardware, Science feature, nvidia, sgi

The Gnomon School of Visual Effects will be hosting a special “Making of 9″ and “The Art of 9″ on September 5th, 4 days before the movie opens!

This exclusive event will focus on the behind the scenes making of “9″. The presentation will go over how the feature was created with incredible efficiency, as well as the design constraints the team had and how that affected their approach to production and character animation. “9″ will not premiere until September 9th, so this is truly a unique and special “sneak peek” at the anticipated feature film. Reserve your seat today!

As usual, the event is free of charge and beings at 6:00pm.

via Gnomon E-News.

Graphics gnomon, movie, vfx

Antonio Bonora has a new tutorial up on CGArena where he uses Autodesk’s 3ds Max and ZBrush to create a stunning model and rendering of the famous Angelina Jolie.

CGArena – Making of the Angelina Jolie.

Graphics 3dsmax, portrait, tutorial, vfx, zbrush

If you’re going to the IEEE VizWeek conference this year, then you might wanna head on over to the website where they’ve just posted a list of all the accepted papers in Vis, InfoVis, and VAST.

Vis Papers: http://vis.computer.org/VisWeek2009/vis/sessions_papers.html

InfoVis Papers: http://vis.computer.org/VisWeek2009/infovis/sessions_papers.html

VAST Papers: http://vis.computer.org/VisWeek2009/vast/sessions_papers.html

Anything there catch your eye?  Share it!

Update: @dr_tj points out that the VizSec accepted papers are online as well:

VisSec Papers: http://www.vizsec.org/vizsec2009/program.html

via Vis, InfoVis, Vast 2009 accepted papers posted « Visualization Blog.

Science conference, ieee, papers, VAST, visweek

Head on over to the VizWorld Forums to answer our latest question: What’s your favorite Compositing package?

• Nuke?
• AfterEffects?
• Shake?
• Combustion?

Or something else entirely? Chime in with your thoughts!

What’s your favorite Compositing Package? « VizWorld.com Forums.

Graphics compositing, forum, software

The Foundry has just announced the latest release of the Nuke compositing systems, version 5.2.  Not just a performance rev either:

Nuke 5.2, now shipping, features new pre-comp tools that facilitate structured and collaborative workflow through referencing of external scripts; Python improvements for the creation of custom user interface panels and script driven actions; metadata support direct in the node graph; and the ability to register multiple ‘Viewer Process’ Gizmos for user-defined viewer processing, including new GPU support for 3D LUTs and GLSL shaders.

In addition to that, it has support for RED R3D Redcode fomat, AJA Kona, and Xena cards.  Read the full announcement after the break.

Read more…

Graphics foundry, nuke, software, vfx

The Alexandra Institute is back with another tutorial, this time pretty math-heavy as they describe a method for warping arbitrary 3D geometry using “Radial Basis Functions (RBF’s)”.  What are RBF’s you ask?

These are mathematical functions that take a real number as input argument and return a real number. RBFs can be used for creating a smooth interpolation between values known only at a discrete set of positions. The term radial is used because the input argument given is typically computed as the distance between a fixed position in 3D space and another position at which we would like to evaluate a certain quantity.

The tutorial contains descriptions of all the Linear Algebra involved, as well as C++ code and a Visual Studio project for you to try it out yourself.

via Noe’s tutorial on deforming 3D geometry using RBFs « Computer Graphics – Alexandra Institute.

Science geometry, sourcecode, tutorial

Details of the massive VisIt run announced a while back, are starting to come out, and while they still aren’t publishing any concrete details, you can find some interesting details about the systems and testing procedures used:

The VACET team ran the experiments in April and May on six world-class supercomputers (latest TOP500 rankings noted):

• Franklin — a 38,128-core Cray XT4 located at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Berkeley Lab (No. 11)
• JaguarPF — a 149,504-core Cray XT5 at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at ORNL (No. 2)
• Ranger — a 62,976-core x86_64 Linux system at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas at Austin (No. 8 )
• Purple — a 12,288-core IBM Power5 at LLNL (No. 50)
• Juno — an 18,432-core x86_64 Linux system at LLNL (No. 19)
• Dawn — a 147,456-core BlueGene/P system at LLNL (No. 9)

One thing I quickly noticed from this list: Nothing from SGI.  (I would say Nothing from SUN as well, but I think the Ranger system is SUN).  But, aside from “because we can”, why did they do this? First is the following claim from Wes Bethel:

“The results show that visualization research and development efforts have produced technology that is today capable of ingesting and processing tomorrow’s datasets,” said Berkeley Lab’s E. Wes Bethel, who is co-leader of VACET. “These results are the largest-ever problem sizes and the largest degree of concurrency ever attempted within the DOE visualization research community.”

But more to the point is this:

Another purpose of these runs was to prepare for establishing VisIt’s credentials as a “Joule code,” or a code that has demonstrated scalability at a large number of cores. DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research (ASCR) is establishing a set of such codes to serve as a metric for tracking code performance and scalability as supercomputers are built with tens and hundreds of thousands of processor cores. VisIt is the first and only visual data analysis code that is part of the ASCR Joule metric.

via Smashing the Trillion Zone Barrier.

PS: The comment about “nothing from SGI” is meant as a bash against SGI, as in the DoE knows better than to run any SGI’s, not a bash against the credibility of the test.

Science doe, hpc, simulation, vacet, visit, visualization

Over at Information is Beautiful, David McCandless has created this fantastic chart of all the major time-traveler timelines showing how they might fare against each other.  Unfortunately, the Time Lord himself (Doctor Who) was omitted to preserve our sanity, but it’s still a fantastic chart.

David McCandless created this visualization as part of his upcoming book of chart porn, The Visual Miscellaneum. Here, he charts the temporal paths of different TV and movie time travelers (Doctor Who was omitted for the sake of sanity, though he hasn’t ruled out making a separate chart for the Time Lord), and, just for fun, imagines what might happen if time travelers who landed in the same year happened to meet up (I suspect that, despite his ingenuity, Marty McFly would not fare well against the Terminator). McCandless did feel that his research revealed one key deficiency in time travel stories: nearly all time travel journeys he mapped originate and land between the years 1900-2100.

Information is Beautiful via A Twirling Timeline of Fictional Time Travel – Chart porn – io9.

Graphics, Science chart, fun, graph, timetravel