A fun new commercial from PLEIX and Digital District for Duracell Ultra batteries tackles the classic Energizer Rabbit head-on with a massive onslaught of bright pink fuzzy bunnies. Cute, Colorful, and come clever CG.
Bulatov Evgeni, an artist for game devleopment studio Extreme Developers, has a great tutorial over at CGArena on how to use particle editor “Magic Particles” (from Astralax) to create fire effects.
The particles are an integral part of computer graphics. Cinema, TV, video games are using them to create impressive effects. Magic Particles is a powerful and handy tool for creating special effects, we’ve chosen it from several other editors.
I’ll try to give you some basic ideas concerning fire creation (backed by definite directions), so that you could go further in this area by yourself. The particles are not limited to the fire only, there is a whole world of wonderful effects.
Just got a new press release from yU+co discussing the over 550 shots they made for “Gamer”. In the movie there are actually two “Games”. The one most frequently seen in the trailers is “Slayers”, where death row inmates are controlled in a first-person shooter game. The less known one is “Society”, where real people are controlled in a sims-like world. All of this happens from “Simon”, the main character’s, room.
”Our prediction is that the interface is not limited to the desktop but is a virtual world that surrounds the user,” says Johnny Ellsworth, yU+co’s resident game guru. ”The interface is a fully immersive environment with graphics spread out in 3D space. The 360º walls house games, music, photos, video, chats, everything a teenager would access from his computer — like a giant 3D iPhone except it’s an iRoom.’
For yU+co., ”Gamer” provided a great opportunity to envision what the future will look like if we continue with current technology and cultural trends. ”In the future the lines will be blurred between games, films, television, and the internet. The four platforms will merge into one,” says Yu. ”Motion graphics is a storytelling medium that works for any digital platform and it will not be limited to just one. Whether it’s for commercials, films, television or gaming, we have been and will continue to design digital content that can be applied across all of them.”
See the full press release and a few more graphics after the break.
A great new infographic from Jess of WallStats.com shows the environmental impact of Cell Phone usage and disposal, and contains details like:
And much more, all in his classic graphical beauty.
A new RFP from “Invisible Culture” is asking for papers discussing new visualizations of the media and events surrounding the 2005 impact of Hurricane Katrina. They talk alot about podcasts and mass-media, but leave the door open for new information visualizations as wel.
We seek papers that consider visual representations of Hurricane Katrina in a ways unimaginable at earlier points in the intersection between visual studies and cultural studies. From CNN.com’s award winning “Voices from the Gulf Coast” podcasts, to the various discussion blogs that have emerged in the wake of the event, to Google Earth’s satellite imagery overlays of the devastation in the affected region, to the television show “Extreme Makeover: Hurricane Katrina Home Edition,” we have seen in Katrina’s aftermath a plethora of new modes of visual diffusion. Furthermore, the intensification of mass media, both in terms of the sheer quantity of media outlets and in the reach of its dissemination, has given rise to a new experience of historical time and geographic proximity, in which we experience historical events through media representations almost immediately as they happen and regardless of where they occur.
Papers must be in by October 15th.
via Current CFP.
The University of Central Oklahoma is sponsoring a talk from Tony DeRose, leader of the Pixar studios research group and creator of the character “Geri“. It’s a free event beginning at 4pm on October 7th.
“The reality is mathematics is essential for modern technology including cell phones, CDs, DVDs and of course, animated movies. It is mathematics that brings the characters you see in the animated films to life,” said Simmons.
DeRose is one of the major designers responsible for the character Geri, who appears in the Oscar winning short film “Geri’s Game,” as well as in “Toy Story II.”
If you’re heading to SIGGRAPH Asia in December, then you’ll have the chance to hear talks from David Kirk and Jun Rekimoto. David Kirk is a bit of a legend in graphics technology circles, and Jun Rekimoto is the founding director of the Interaction Lab within the Sony Computer Science Labs.
Kirk will speak on “The Power of Heterogeneous Computing,” reviewing the evolution of GPU technology. Kirk also will share his vision of how current work in academic and industrial labs around the world will be applied to future generations of computer graphics systems.
Rekimoto’s talk is on “Enhanced Realities,” and will focus on the shift of human-computer interactions from improving individual devices to the enhancement of more connected activities and communications.
via Tech Pioneers Kirk, Rekimoto to Address SIGGRAPH ASIA | Animation Magazine.
In a conference with various financial analysts, NVidia has come out swinging in saying that DirectX11 will not stimulate sales of Graphics cards. This is a bit of a punch at ATI/AMD who has spend alot of time recently touting the capabilities of their new DX11 GPUs.
“DirectX 11 by itself is not going be the defining reason to buy a new GPU. It will be one of the reasons. This is why Microsoft is in work with the industry to allow more freedom and more creativity in how you build content, which is always good, and the new features in DirectX 11 are going to allow people to do that. But that no longer is the only reason, we believe, consumers would want to invest in a GPU,” said Mike Hard, vice president of investor relations at Nvidia, at Deutsche Bank Securities Technology Conference on Wednesday.
Mr Hard Hara, who is being incorrectly called Mike Hard (See his Bio Here), also goes on record with this eye-opening statement:
“Graphics industry, I think, is on the point that microprocessor industry was several years ago, when AMD made the public confession that frequency does not matter anymore and it is more about performance per watt. I think we are the same crossroad with the graphics world: framerate and resolution are nice, but today they are very high and going from 120fps to 125fps is not going to fundamentally change end-user experience.”
via NVIDIA: DirectX 11 Will Not Stimulate Sales of Graphics Cards – Expreview.com.
Over at EagerEyes, Robert Kosara checks out the fantastic Information Visualization Manifesto and discusses the interesting conceptual differences between visualization for Beauty and visualization for Understanding.
Lima makes the distinction between data visualization and data art. The criteria are not perfectly clear-cut, and it’s easy to discuss a particular example ad nauseam. I did write about possible criteria a while ago though, and think that the distinction is pretty clear. What is the main question: Do you want to communicate the data or a concern? Do you care about perceptual effectiveness or beauty? Is the data a given or is showing the existence of the data part of the point?
A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Well, in the modern age of digital photos, manipulation, and color correction, how many words do you think you can squeeze out of a picture? MyModernMet has a great collection of 12 fantastic pictures from some of the most talented photographers in the industry, some of which are heavy edited for content and color, that tell volumes.
While some may say that every picture tells a story, I’m under the belief that only a few can do it right. These are the masters of storytelling, the ones who can draw out an emotion in us and leave us with a lasting memory. We’ve written about some of these photographers right here at theMET. Like Erik Johansson who stretches our imagination and turns reason upside down and inside out. Or August Bradley, who crafts amazing scenes out of his imagination and who cites authors, such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace, over fellow photographers as his sources of inspiration.
via 12 Masters of Visual Storytelling – My Modern Metropolis.
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