VizWorld.com

A new product breakdown in the Autodesk Area discusses how several Autodesk products were instruments in bringing the 2D world of Street Fighter IV into 3D.

When developing the texture of the graphics, the team created a real-time shader based on a mental ray® software image prototype they developed on the Autodesk Softimage Render Tree and FX Tree. FX Tree is a 2D compositing feature which the team said was helpful not only for compositing with backgrounds, but also for material compositing with shader elements. A shader prototype was created on Render Tree using a graphical user interface (GUI). This enabled the designers and programmers to operate with the same mindset, meaning that instructions for graphic processing, which usually tend to become abstract, could be communicated more clearly between them.

via The Area :: Customer Story.

Graphics autodesk, capcom, video game

AMD/ATI (I never know what to call them anymore) has updated their Stream GPGPU library, and released the new “2.0 Beta” for registered developers.  The big feature in this version is OpenCL support, but that’s not all.

What’s New in v2.0-beta3

• ATI Stream SDK v2.0 OpenCL™ for x86 CPUs is now certified conformant by Khronos on September 3, 2009.
• 64-bit atomic built-ins are now recognized.
• Fixed some compiler assertion issues.
• Fixed some incorrect compiler warnings.
• Fixed some incorrect compiler assertion failures.
• Fixed some code generation issues.

via AMD Developer Central – ATI Stream SDK v2.0 Beta Program with OpenCL 1.0 Support.

Hardware, Science amd, ati, gpgpu, stream

If you have Adobe’s Pixel Bender, then you can go download the “4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer” plugin for Photoshop and After Effects.

For Pixel Bender open the QuaternionJulia.pbk file with the Adobe Pixel Bender Toolkit or copy it into the Pixel Bender Files folder in your Photoshop CS4 installation directory (you will need to have installed the PB plugin for Photoshop first).

via 4D Quaternion Julia Set Ray Tracer • subblue.

Graphics after effects, photoshop, plugin

In response to the recent rumors of the abysmal 2% yield of the GT300 silicon, NVidia has come out swinging with reports that the GT300 will begin production next month (October) with a launch near the end of November.

A recent post at Fudzilla suggests that GT300 has been taped out, and the mass production may start in the middle of October. It’s very likely that NVIDIA will launch the new GPU around November 27th, and start shipping in December.

The company will probably show the card in the next few weeks to make the fanboys more comfortable when waiting for their DirectX 11 offering, as the positive reviews of Radeon HD 5870 have spreaded quickly around the internet.

via NVIDIA: Our 40nm Yields Are Fine – Expreview.com.

Hardware gt300, nvidia

Last time we talked about Jack Pien he was trying out AMD’s OpenCL CPU drivers on Intel processors with surprising results.  He’s back again with another great test, pitting OpenCL against OpenMP in a 2D Convolution algorithm, mainstay of several image and signal processing algorithms.

In this post, I will compare OpenCL with OpenMP performance for the same convolution configuration. I did make one minor tweak in both the CPU reference implementation and CL kernel code. AMD’s convolution sample has an outer loop that walks in x-steps and inner loop that walks in y steps. For untiled images stored row/width major, this is a big no-no for cache coherency. The inner loop should iterate in x-steps.

via Jack Pien» Blog Archive » AMD’s x86 OpenCL versus OpenMP.

Science algorithm, benchmark, opencl, openmp

Time has a new infographic online as part of their “Assignment Detroit” that shows how the city expanded geographically but lost overall population over the last 50 years.  They’ve compiled data on people per square mile, shown across the top, and a huge chart showing vacancy rates in 2009.

Detroit: Now a Ghost Town – TIME. via ChartPorn.

Update: A sharp-eyed reader let me know that the photos accompanying this story (not the infographic, just the photography) are currently in the middle of some arguments over authenticity, calling it “ruin porn”

“This is the visiting reporters’ favorite thing to see,” James said. “The people all come here to shoot the story of the auto industry and they love this shot because they can be like, ‘See that? That’s where they made the cars,’ and then forget to add the footnote that the plant’s been closed since 1956.”

via “Lazy Artists love Pictures of Abandoned Stuff”.

Graphics, Science detroit, infographic, time

R.C.Hoetzlein has a great timeline infographic that shows the evolution and relationships of art, new media, science, technology, and war.  It shows alot of great details, like:

• Consumer Art, including comics, animation and video games
• A few key artists are shown for each movement.
• Rise of the avante-garde in Europe, and Rise of science in America, shown as increasing gray bars.
• Major wars shown in red, with thickness roughly indicating number of lives lost. (Eg. World War I = 16 million. World War II = 65 million)
• Major theories in other fields impacting art, including Saussure’s linguistics, Freud & Jung’s psychology, and Barthe, Strauss & Burnham’s semiotics.
• Media theorists (at top), including Walter Benjamin, Marshal McLuhan, Greenberg, Virilio and Manovich.
• Important moments in 20th. science (at bottom)
• World population increases for every 1 billion people.

ART Timeline via ART Timeline – Chart Porn.

Graphics, Science art, history, infographic, timeline

Touchstone Picture’s “Surrogates” showcases some of the fantastic photoreal CG robots done by Synthespian Studios.  Over at Millimeter they have a great writeup on one scene in particular showcasing the loaner surrogate of an apartment landlord who’s primary surrogate is under repair.

“It was an opportunity to expose that she was in fact a machine,” says Surrogates Visual Effects Supervisor Mark Stetson (whose many credits also include the cyborg classic Blade Runner). Stetson collaborated with Synthespians’ Concept Artist Diana Walczak to develop a new look for the robot, creating iterations of concept art done with Adobe Photoshop. “I did a sketch rotoing around the actor’s mask and using a bit of a CG skull that Synthespians had developed,” Stetson says. “Then we added bits of a robotic neck to the concept and developed a ‘homemade’ previz. We put a little repair sticker on it to emphasize that it was a rental unit. Jonathan Mostow approved that, and Synthespians took it from there.”

Surrogates opens today nationwide.

via Surrogates Step by Step.

Graphics movie, surrogates, synthespian studios, vfx

Verifiable.com offering data visualization and sharing capabilities for the low-low price of $30/year and has been selected by the Miami Herald to display their website infographics.

The MiamiHerald.com will be the first major media client to deliver Verifiable.com’s sophisticated data visualizations to its readers. MiamiHerald.com is using the Verifiable platform to provide its readers with a variety of interactive visualizations designed to complement the Herald’s award-winning content.

You can see the graphics at www.MiamiHerald.com/econgraphics .

via PR-CANADA.net – Tired of Numbers Without Any Context: Verifiable.com has the Answer.

Graphics, Science infographics, verifiable

In the latest “nTeresting Newsletter” from Brian Burke, PR guy for NVidia, he discusses the recent forays by AMD/ATI into GPU Accelerated Physics. I disagree that there hasn’t been “a peep” from AMD, as we covered the GPGPU accelerated Havok back in March and then the demonstration video.  But I do agree that NVidia has a far lead in OpenCL develoment over.. well, over everyone.

Right before mourning ‘the death of GPU physics’, AMD had the great idea that they would partner up with the Intel owned Havok Physics engine (I told you that was a bad idea).  Since then over a year has past and not a peep.  Until now.  Now their plan is “Bullet”.

“Bullet Physics Library is an open source physics library that is now getting translated into OpenCL, thanks to the effort of companies such as AMD [who offered support to developers]. Somehow, we feel that this announcement was the highlight of the launch event for the upcoming Evergreen generation of graphics cards.”

Reality is that AMD has no GPU driver for OpenCL and NVIDIA has had one for some time.  What does that really mean to people developing Bullet Physics for OpenCL?  Fudzilla asked the creator of the Bullet Physics, Erwin Coumans:

“Bullet’s GPU acceleration via OpenCL will work with any compliant drivers, we use NVIDIA GeForce cards for our development and even use code from their OpenCL SDK, they are a great technology partner.”

NVIDIA is the leader for stereoscopic 3D, GPU physics, OpenCL, DirectCompute and GPU Computing. #1 with a Bullet.

NVidia is getting rave reviews for their amazing graphics & the PhysX support in Batman: Arkham Asylum.  I got to give NVidia credit for actually having their product (PhysX) in a game that’s actually available.  What’s your thoughts?

Hardware amd, havok, nvidia, opencl, physx