VizWorld.com

Over at VFXWorld they have some more information on Synthespian Studio’s contributions to Surrogates, with some great detail on how the “uncanny valley” isn’t always a bad thing.

They assigned the work to Synthespian Studios, Jeff Kleiser’s company. They scanned a digital double of Willis and Synthespian built a CG model from Eyetronics’ scan and original cleanup work. But most of the work was done in 2D in Shake. “There’s a lot of matchmoving and roto patching,” Stetson continues. “A lot of it was simply to make him look 20 years younger or so. Beyond that, there’s a certain level of perfection that we were dancing with. If we had done everything that Jonathan had asked us to do, we would’ve ended up with something that looks like bad visual effects work. But when you think about it, that look is actually what the movie was asking for. We just couldn’t go all the way with it in the visual environment that we’re in.”

via Surrogates: Definitely Not More Human Than Human | AWN | Animation World Network.

Graphics movie, surrogates, synthespian studios, vfx

One of the technologies that NVidia hinted about when we talked to them at SIGGRAPH was something called ‘iray’ (Incremental Ray), a psuedo-real-time ray tracing solution for Mental Ray.  Well today’s the day that becomes official:

“With iray rendering technology, what used to take product designers, visual effects artists and CAD users hours to render can now happen in a matter of minutes without compromising the quality and detail of the image, said Dr. Jon Peddie, president, Jon Peddie Research. “The advent of iray is changing the face of this industry by increasing the standards in rendering efficiency as we know it.”

iray will  be included by default with the upcoming mental ray 3.8 for free, but no word on how it will be included (or if it will be included) in the mental ray distributions packaged with popular rendering and animation packages like Maya & 3dsMax.

Read the full release after the break.

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Graphics, Hardware cuda, mental images, mentalray, nvidia

The previously mentioned “Nexus” toolsuite for GPU/CPU Debugging inside of Visual Studio was formally announced today at the NVidia GTC to the attendees.  Some new details:

NVIDIA Nexus radically improves productivity by enabling developers of GPU computing applications to use the popular Microsoft Visual Studio-based tools and workflow in a transparent manner, without having to create a separate version of the application that incorporates diagnostic software calls. NVIDIA Nexus also includes the ability to run the code remotely on a different computer. Nexus includes advanced tools for simultaneously analyzing efficiency, performance, and speed of both the graphics processing unit (GPU) and central processing unit (CPU) to give developers immediate insight into how co-processing affects their applications.

The Nexus suite comes with 3 components:

• Nexus Debugger – source code debugger for GPU source code
• Nexus Analyzer – System-wide event viewer for both GPU & CPU events
• Nexus Graphics Inspector – for deep inspection of textures and geometry

Read the full announcement after the break.

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Hardware gpgpu, gtc, nexus, nvidia, visual studio

The age of GPU-computing got another huge boost today as a press release from NVidia shows that their new GT300 “Fermi” chip is more than vaporware and will, in fact, be the foundation of Oak Ridge’s newest supercomputer.

Jeff Nichols, ORNL associate lab director for Computing and Computational Sciences, joined NVIDIA co-founder and CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on stage during his keynote at NVIDIA’s GPU Technology Conference.  (…)

“This would be the first co-processing architecture that Oak Ridge has deployed for open science, and we are extremely excited about the opportunities it creates to solve huge scientific challenges,” Nichols said. “With the help of NVIDIA technology, Oak Ridge proposes to create a computing platform that will deliver exascale computing within ten years.”

I don’t think this has anything to do with ORNL & UT’s latest announcement of their “Nautilus” NSF-funded machine.  There’s currently no real specs for what this new hybrid supercomputer will be, but they promise exascale compute-capabilities.  Read the full announcement after the break.

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Hardware, Science fermi, gpgpu, gt300, hpc, nvidia, ornl

Autodesk and TurboSquid have gone together like PB&J for the last several years, and a new press release indicates that they’ve made it official as TurboSquid is now the exclusive source for user-generated 3D content in Autodesk Seek.

“The user-generated content available through TurboSquid has consistently demonstrated value to the design community,” stated Jeff Wright, Senior Director, Autodesk Content Network. “Naming TurboSquid as our exclusive marketplace provider for user-generated 3D content was the next logical step in our relationship.”

Of course, the press release completely avoids the issues raised by the recent changes to the terms of service.  So if you want your models publicly available via Autodesk Seek, looks like you’ll have to learn to live with TurboSquid.

via TurboSquid Named Autodesk Seek’s Exclusive Marketplace Provider for User-Generated 3D Content.

Graphics autodesk, models, turbosquid

It seems the GT300 news was actually under embargo until the GTC keynote was finished (guess BSN decided to ignore it, oh well), and now that it’s over the information is pouring out.  One great resource is an article from John West over at InsideHPC touting the new HPC-centric features of the design.

The new design features a dedicated 64KB L1 cache per Streaming Multiprocessor (GPU cores are organized hierarchically into “Streaming Multiprocessors,” or SMs; 32 cores form an SM, and there are 16 SMs on a board), and a 768KB L2 cache shared among all SMs. NVIDIA calls this the “Parallel DataCache Hierarchy,” and Sumit Gupta, senior manager in the Tesla GPU Computing group, says that this feature is very important not only to sparse matrix and physics calculations (for gaming), but also for traditional graphics applications like ray tracing. Application engineers should now see a much more familiar programming environment when porting code from CPUs.

via NVIDIA’s next generation GPU architecture has a lot for HPC to love | insideHPC.com.

Hardware gpgpu, gt300, gtc, hpc, nvidia

How do you take a pictures of a 300-foot tall tree?  Got an idea?  Ok, now add enough other trees that you can’t stand far away. Not so easy is it?  Well, Nick Nichols set out to photograph one for National Geographic and created a huge camera rig (shown) suspended from the top of the tree.

[Nichols] built the rig to hold three cameras focused to the left, middle, and right of the tree. The frame includes a gyroscope to keep the cameras steady. By lowering the cameras from the top to the bottom of the redwood they were able to capture 84 pictures to assemble the final shot.

See the full-size picture and video of the rig in action at the site.

via Multi-camera rig makes trees say cheese – Hack a Day.

Hardware, Science camera, nature, photography

Scalable Display Technologies and Realtime Technologies Inc have partnered up to deliver a new ultra high-resolution driving simulation to the WEstern Transportaion Institute at Montana State University.  The specs, you ask?

The driving simulator system installed at WTI that was developed by RTI uses five Canon SX7 LCOS-based projectors to immerse the driver in a 240-degree horizontal visual environment. Thanks to Scalable Display’s EasyBlend, RTI’s system is able to offer a stunning, perfectly edge-blended visual display that enables the researchers to conduct realistic safety research before extending the research to test track and open road studies.

This is possible thanks to Scalable’s “EasyBlend” software for edge-blending and color-matching, andRTI’s “SimCreator” product.  Read the full press-release after the break.

Read more…

Hardware, Science projector, realtime technologies, scalable display technologies, simulator

Over at InsideHPC, John West has taken the data from the most recent Top500 list and pushed it through IBM’s ManyEyes and create a collection of visualizations that show how the US has an overwhelming majority in the Supercomputing industry.

The data were gathered as follows: the Top500 website itself provides a list of Rpeak and system count by country. I used the data from the June 2009 list. For the chart that shows distance from the equator, I used the latitude value from the Google Maps centered view that results when you search on a country name.

Check it out, and see if you can come up with any visualizations of your own.

via Pictures of technological imbalance via the Top500 | insideHPC.com.

Science hpc, manyeyes, visualization

Kitware has announced the winners of its 2nd annual Biomedical Visualization Contest at the 12th International Conference on Medical Image Computing & Computer Assisted Intervention in London last week.  The winners, Luc Soler and Jaques Marescaux of IRCAD, got $750 and a Kitware Shirt for their augmented reality computer-assisted-surgical visualization of a pancreas.

Vascular anomaly and pulmonary sequestration diagnosis using IRCAD software applications on a thoracic CT-scan of a 1 month old baby with direct volume rendering (first line) and surface rendering resulting from organ segmentations (second line) in anterior view (left) and posterior view (right). The resulting preoperative surgical planning allows to reach arteries and the lung area to be cut with an optimal back intercostal tool positioning that is perfectly reproduced intraoperatively (last line).

Congratulations to the winners, and be sure to check out Stephen Gerhard & Patric Hagmann’s Brain connectivity visualization which won second place as well!

via Kitware – News.

Science augmented reality, biomed, contest, kitware