VizWorld.com

If you’re heading to motion09, October 11-14th, then you’ll have the luck of seeing Zoic Studios’ Executive Creative Director & VFX Supervisor Andrew Orloff talking.

Emmy-nominated for his work on JJ Abrams “Fringe” (for which he also earned a 2009 VES award),  ”Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles” and “Jericho”, Andrew Orloff’s television credits also include HBO’s “True Blood,” “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” and the highly anticipated new series “V”.

Andrew established Zoic’s stage and has directed hundreds of motion control shots and other specialty sequences. He also launched the company’s successful animation division and contributed to such high-end projects as the design and creation of a 360-degree experience for EA, the innovative Fox Bot campaign for Fox Sports and the Sprint “Heroes: Destiny” web series.

His talk is titled “Standing on the Shoulders of Giants” and examines creative inspirations past and present. Read the full release after the break.

Read more…

Graphics conference, motion09, zoic

Last night’s House had an unusual addition: a Virtual Reality first-person shooter that showcased some fantastic visual effects work.  The in-game footage was created by Encore Hollywood.

The massive undertaking involved motion capture as well as more than 15 artists working in Autodesk packages 3D Studio Max and Inferno, as well as eyeon Fusion, among other tools, to build the multilayered environment required to bring the world of “Savage” and its chimera-style mutant characters to life.

“These ‘Savage’ sequences presented us with a tremendous opportunity to demonstrate what our visual effects team at Encore can do, and we were excited tackle this amazing challenge,” says Tom Kendall, Encore Hollywood Executive Producer for Visual Effects.

It was a great episode, but the in-game footage had me waiting for the game tie-in promo, which never game.

via Encore Hollywood Builds Unprecedented Visual Effects for House’s “Savage Scape” | The Briefing Room.

Graphics encore hollywood, television, vfx

The big “end scene” for Sony Imageworks’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs” consists of a giant spaghetti tornado destroying the humble city of our heroes.  The effect was done using a tool named “SPLAT” on the new NVidia Quadro GPU’s.

The memorable ‘spaghetti tornado’ scene includes elements rendered using SPLAT, SPI’s proprietary volumetric rendering tool designed to run on the NVIDIA Quadro GPU. Atmospheric effects rendered in SPLAT not only included dust clouds, fire and sparks, but also—for the very first time—tomato sauce.

“For visual effects artists to be most effective using computer animation tools, it’s all about the speed and especially the user experience,” explained Rob Bredow, CTO, Sony Pictures Imageworks. “When an artist can do 10 times as many iterations of an effect in the same amount of time, the quality of the end product will be that much better.”

They also claim that scenes previously requiring 45 minutes to render can now be done in a mere 20 seconds!

via Sony Pictures Imageworks Creates Tornado Out Of Spaghetti Sauce With The Help Of NVIDIA Technology.

Graphics gpgpu, movie, nvidia, sony, splat, vfx

The guys at Guru3D pop in one of the new Eyefinity capable ATI Radeon’s and take it for a test drive.  The results are impressive, but I question how many people can really make effective use of 3 monitors?

Why would you want to use more than one monitor ? Well looking at myself, I’m sitting in front of two 24″ monitors right now. More monitors will increase productivity. But also in a more SoHo or personal environment, how nice is it to have a video stream displaying say the news on one screen and your spreadsheet in the other. That idea you can now expand to say three, four or even more monitors.

Also, it may have been a good idea to choose a more “work-safe” background for the demo shots.  On Page 6 they have video showing Crysis, Devil May Cry 4, and HAWX running on the 3 screens.  See the videos after the break.

via ATI Eyfinity review.

Read more…

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity

Hot on the heels of the TACC announcement, University of Tennessee’s National Institute for Computational Science (NICS) have announced they will receive $10M from the NSF over the next 4 years to build a new “Center for Remote Data Analysis & Visualization (RDAV)”.  Just like TACC, first order of business in a new machine:

Much of RDAV will rely on a new machine named Nautilus that employs the SGI shared-memory processing architecture. The machine will feature 1,024 cores, 4,096 gigabytes of memory, and 16 graphics processing units. The new SGI system can independently scale processor count, memory, and I/O to very large levels in a single system running standard Linux. This flexibility will allow the RDAV team to configure a system uniquely capable of analyzing and visualizing petascale data sets, promising TeraGrid users new levels of scientific understanding.

And this impressive quote from Sean Ahern, research associate professor at the University of Tennesse and visualization task lead at ORNL where the machine will sit:

“I believe this will be the largest shared-memory machine for analysis on the planet,” said the project’s Principal Investigator (PI) Sean Ahern, who is currently the visualization task lead at ORNL and will serve as director of RDAV. “No one has ever done this before. The new system will handle data analysis algorithms that can’t be deployed on more traditional distributed memory systems.”

Of course, hardware isn’t all.  The center will also feature a full staff of visualization & analysis experts to aid researchers, and be available to TeraGrid researchers.

Read the full press release from the University of Tennessee and find some information about the organization of the RDAV center and some of the other individuals involved in this project.after the break, or read the announcement from their National Institute for Computational Sciences.

Read more…

Hardware, Science nsf, ornl, remotedisplay, sgi, visualization

I heard about this a while back but the Press Releases are just now hitting the wire, The NSF has awarded some additional grants.  The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) just got a 3-year contract for $7 million to build a comprehensive suite of visualization and data analysis services for the open science community.

“The capabilities of VDA resources have not kept pace with the explosive rate of data production leading to a critical juncture in computational science,” Gaither says. “Interactive visualization, data analysis and timely data assimilation are necessary for exploring important and challenging problems throughout science, engineering, medicine, national security and safety, to name a few important areas.”

First order of business is a new compute resource, named “Longhorn”, to enable interactive visualization of 1-petabyte datasets.  The gory details:

Longhorn System Capabilities

• Total Peak Performance (CPUs): 20.7 teraflops.
• Total Peak Performance (GPUs): 500 teraflops single precision floating point operations.
• Total Peak Rendering Performance: 154 billion triangles/sec.
• Total Memory: 13.5 terabytes.
• Total Disk: 210 terabyte global file system.

System Components and Technologies

• 256 Dell R610 and R710 servers each with two Intel Xeon 5500 processors.
• 512 CPUs with 2,048 Intel “Nehalem” (2.53GHz) quad-core processors.
• 128 NVIDIA Quadroplex 2200 S4 units each with four Quadro FX 5800 GPUs with 122,880 CUDA processor cores; 2,048 gigabytes (two terabytes) of distributed graphics RAM.

Visualization and Data Analysis Services

• A comprehensive collection of open source and commercial end-user VDA tools.
• Expert visualization support, including advanced interactive user support and training from a team comprising leading visualization researchers.
• A framework for rapidly integrating new visualization technologies from leading research teams to increase user capabilities throughout the project.

Read the full press release after the break.

Read more…

Hardware, Science nsf, remotedisplay, tacc

Alark Joshi has updated his website with a great collection of visualizations showing environmental factors.

In this post, I focus on the use of visualization in conveying information regarding the environment, pollution, population effects on the planet and similar issues. The visualizations are particularly powerful and make us realize how much of an impact we have on the world.

The contents cover the gamut from births and deaths per second, wind velocity, ozone, power generation, and more.  If you like it, be sure to read more of Alark’s articles here at VizWorld :  Visualizing Social Media and Seminal Information Visualization Papers.

via Visualization Blog.

Science environmental, list

Capitalizing on the success of WallStats & the popularity of infographics, Nathan Yao of FlowingData has created a new website, FlowingPrints, where you can purchase large posters of some of his most popular infographics.

FlowingPrints makes original posters — to show you the stories in data — with both traditional and abstract data designs you can appreciate.

We put data in print, because computer screens are too small. Online stuff is great, but it’s fleeting. You glance, scan, and browse when you’re online. You look, examine, and read when it’s in print.

Our prints are not just about aesthetics, however. FlowingPrints is a collaboration between graphic designers and statisticians. We are just as careful in our analysis as we are in our design.

Currently only 2 are available “Education: Enrollment and Dropouts” and “College High”, and you can get them both for $60.

via Posters for People Who Love Data + Design | FlowingPrints.

Graphics infographic, poster

A famous piece of art from Albrecht Durer, the Melancholia engraving, was created in 1514.  Welshman Roger Davis has spent the last 3 years closely analysing the picture and believes it may actually be a photograph of a much larger, and older, Da Vinci painting.

The former contractor for the Atomic Weapons Establishment – whose job gave him experience in optics – claims that the 9in high Dürer masterpiece was no such thing. Rather a photograph of a much larger Da Vinci drawing – perhaps eight feet tall – exposed and then fixed onto a ‘light-sensitive’ copper plate, placed inside a camera obscura.

His primary argument is that the lines are so straight and so close together that it’s not humanly possible to create, only through some mechanical process (reducing & photographing) could it be achieved with such perfection.

via World’s first photo: an unknown Da Vinci?

Science art, camera obscura, davinci, history

Microsoft is still a “young” player in the HPC market, so they’ve struck a deal with Nvidia to bring CUDA & Tesla compatibility to their newest operating system, Windows HPC Server 2008 Platform.

“The coupling of GPUs and CPUs illustrates the enormous power and opportunity of multicore co-processing,” said Dan Reed, corporate vice president of Extreme Computing at Microsoft. “NVIDIA’s work with Microsoft and the Windows HPC Server platform, is helping enable scientists and researchers in many fields achieve supercomputer performance on diverse applications.”

NVIDIA Research developed several GPU-enabled applications on the Windows HPC Server 2008 platform, such as a ray tracing application that can be used for advanced photo-realistic modeling of automobiles. Related to this, NVIDIA worked with Microsoft Research to install a large Tesla GPU computing cluster and is studying applications that are optimized for the GPU.

via NVIDIA Collaborates With Microsoft On High Performance GPU Computing.

Hardware, Science cuda, gpgpu, hpc, microsoft, nvidia