Home » Archives for August 2009
Robots are always a popular modeling choice among artists, for the infinite possibilities they allow. Over at DesignrFix they’ve gathered 50 great examples of 3D Robot models into a fun list.
The latest major motion pictures are utilizing 3D graphics more and more these days. With movie like Transformers, Terminator Salvation and Wall-E getting all the attention at the cinemas lately, we have decided to put together a collection of robots, movie and non-movie inspired computer graphics artwork to showcase. These fantastic 3D rendered images display the skills and abilities of talented artists, as well as spark creativity in the minds of the viewers.
Sadly, the Trabant Autobot didn’t make the cut.
via Computer Graphics: 50 + stunning creations of 3d robots | designrfix.com.
Graphics list, robot, vfx
NVidia has partnered with TopCoder to roll out the new “CUDA Superher Challenge”, a series of contests targeted to CUDA programmers.
“We have the world’s largest competitive software development community representing more than 200 countries, and they are eager to display their talents in one of the fastest growing programming areas in the industry,” said Rob Hughes, president and chief operating officer at TopCoder. “We anticipate that the CUDA Superhero Challenge will generate many creative approaches to solving computing challenges and will result in game-changing innovations.”
The first contest will begin September 14th and run through September 25th, with $5000 in prizes awarded to five winners to be announced at the GPU Technology Conference. Full details can be found at www.topcoder.com/nvidia
via NVIDIA CUDA Superhero Challenge Sparks Competitive Fire for GPU Computing Developers.
Hardware, Science contest, cuda, gpgpu, nvidia, topcoder
Holographic displays are the ultimate in passive glasses-free 3D, displaying a scene that allows for multiple simultaneous viewing angles based on the actual viewing location without any fancy head tracking, however the details behind making it are incredibly complex. In a new paper in ‘Optics Express’, Japanese researchers reveal a new video card capable of ‘near real-time’ Holographic renderings.
Well, researchers in Japan have created a graphics card, called the HORN-6, that can do this for you. It consists of four Xilinx field programmable gate arrays (FPGA), each of which has about 7 million gates and a bit of memory (less than 1MB). Each FPGA is connected to 256MB of DDR RAM, while a fifth, smaller FPGA is used to manage the PCI bus.
These FPGAs divide the area of a 1,920 x 1,080 LCD and calculate the intensity of each pixel using a ray-tracing algorithm that also tracks the phase of the light—the phase allows the interference pattern to be calculated. In a nice bit of engineering, as the block size that each FPGA can process (e.g., the local storage limit) is completed in just under the time it takes to fetch the next block from memory. This allows the researchers to keep the FPGA load pretty much constant by prefetching data.
It’s impressive, but the ’0.08fps’ isn’t really what I’ld call ‘real-time’, but as an early FPGA prototype, it could run especially faster if dedicated hardware is used.
via Holographic GPU renders at near real-time speeds – Ars Technica.
Hardware 3d, holographic, realtime
Here’s the pixels for today:
Graphics, Hardware, Science pixels
Over at Video Copilot they’ve got a great 25-minute tutorial showing how to use CC Particle World and CC Pixel Polly to create a fantastic exploding text effect in nothing but After Effects.
VIDEO COPILOT | After Effects Tutorials & Post Production Tools.
Graphics aftereffects, tutorial, vfx
Microsoft has been taking a beating all week over the discovery of the advertising image (shown to the right) that shows a black man in the US, and a poorly photoshop’ed white man in the Polish site. People have been accusing Microsoft of racism and other heinous crimes, and Microsoft finally responded:
When asked for comment, a Microsoft spokesperson told CNet that the company was looking into details of the situation and apologized, adding that the image had been pulled from the Polish site.
Of course, “taking it very seriously” is a well-known phrase to any Consumerist reader, but have they really done anything wrong? Bad photoshop, while it probably should be, isn’t a crime and targeted advertising is common in all locales. Thoughts?
via Microsoft Apologizes For Photoshop Blunder – Tom’s Hardware.
Graphics advertising, microsoft, mistake, photoshop
JPR has revealed it’s latest numbers for the Add-in GPU market and the result shows a little bit of growth in the market, up 3% from last quarter, with some particularly interesting numbers from AMD.
The quarter was the first where AMD finally started to gain back some share from NVIDIA. JPR reports that AMD’s unit share rose from 31% in Q1 to 35% in Q2 with NVIDIA seeing their share decline the same 4% to 64% overall. That means that AMD took every bit of its growth from NVIDIA’s marketshare.
JPR Marketshare Results via DailyTech – AMD Grabs Some of NVIDIA’s Add-in GPU Marketshare.
Hardware amd, analyst, jpr, nvidia
Imageworks’ Scott Stockdyk managed a crew of 326 artists for G-Force, overcoming some amazing technical hurdles. He discusses it with Computer Graphics World in a great interview, discussing the new technologies they developed to deal with the various issues during production.
The fur stylists used Imageworks’ in-house hair system. “One of the biggest issues was in getting the hair and fur to interact with all the gadgets,” says Seth Maury, digital effects supervisor. “For that, JJ Blumenkranz, the CG supervisor, and hair lead Dustin Wicke came up with a magnet system.”
via Computer Graphics World – Pushing The Bounds.
Graphics imageworks, interview, movie, vfx
Lots of hardware news today, thanks to the ‘Hot Chips’ conference, but an announcement from Intel claims that their upcoming ‘Arrandale’ chipset will soon be making an appearance in laptops .
Arrandale will come initially under the Core i7 and Core i5 brands, using the chipmaker’s most advanced 32-nanometer technology (Intel chips are currently built on a 45-nanometer process) and will populate consumer and business laptops.
Arrandale is not to be confused with Larrabee. While Larrabee is a completely new architecture, Arrandale is Intel’s standard graphics chip just integrated into a dual-core CPU.
via ‘Arrandale’ chip will be an Intel laptop first | Nanotech – The Circuits Blog – CNET News.
Hardware arrandale, intel
Another list today, this time of 26 amazing realistic 3d computer graphics.
Today i have collected 26 amazing realistic 3d computer graphics. This list includes breathtaking realistic CG portraits, amazing CG compositions and realistic CG characters. I hope you will like and enjoy these and do share which one you like.
Some of these are new to me, and definately impressive.
26 Really Amazing Realistic 3D Computer Graphics | Graphics | PelFusion.com.
Graphics list, vfx
VizWorld.com 
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