VizWorld.com

Every major concert or awards show these days has an animated backdrop, typically of some basic color shifts and effects.  Mantra Design, specifically Anna Toonk, got the job of creating the backdrops for the Country Music Awards Music Festival last June and discusses how they did it over at LiveDesign.  It’s a great ‘best practices’ writeup of working with large multi-screen systems.

After reviewing the artists and tracks, we decided to do the screen animations and other elements primarily in Adobe After Effects, as it keeps our render times down and allows us to be flexible when needed. We did 3D components for two artists using Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D, and the rest were done in After Effects.

…

As each screen begins to take shape, we add it to the pixel map of the screens themselves that we drop into After Effects to create our canvas so we know exactly what space we have available to us. It’s an essential part of the entire process, because it gives us a big picture view of the screens and allows us to troubleshoot anything before the content goes live on the actual screens themselves.

via How I Did That: Screen Savers At The CMA Music Festival.

Graphics aftereffects, cma, howto, makingof, mantra design

engadget is over at IDF and managed to scope out some great pics of the next generation Atom “Pine Trail” CPU/GPU hybrid chip.

See that tiny little thing? That’s not just a CPU, it’s Intel’s next-gen Atom Pine Trail CPU / GPU hybrid, and it’s set to pop in all sorts of devices here at IDF. Intel was demoing it in a nettop running 480p video, but they assured us it was capable of 1080p playback — we’ll believe it when we see it, obviously.

Check out their gallery for additional pics of Arrandale and Gulftown.

via Eyes-on with Intel’s Pine Trail CPU/GPU hybrid and new Gulftown gaming chip.

Hardware atom, idf, intel

Stateless Systems has created a new twitter visualization tool called “TrendsMap” which correlates trends in the massive fire hose of tweets with their geospatial location to overlay them onto a US map.  Then you can interactively drill down into areas and see what the popular topics are.  For example, if I look at the Southeast right now I see Atlanta talking about the Flooding, Damage, and emergencies related to the current rain.  Over in Texas I see people talking about the autumn weather, and Florida is an even mix of Autumn, flooding, and the Dolphins.

Check it out and see what you can find.

Trendsmap – Real-time local Twitter trends.

Science interactive, realtime, twitter

The recipients of the prestigious MacArthur fellowships for 2009 have been announced, and one of them is computer vision researcher Maneesh Agrawala.

Working at the intersection of visualization, human-computer interaction, and computer graphics, Agrawala, aged 37, draws on cognitive psychology to identify the key perceptual and design principles underlying graphic illustrations.

Agrawala’s novel approach to visualization and computer communication in these and many other projects is transforming how we use, synthesize, and comprehend the ever-increasing volume of digital information we encounter in our daily lives.

I look forward to seeing what his half-million will produce.

via 2 Indians win MacArthur’s ‘genius’ fellowship: Rediff.com news.

Science macarthur, vision

Tyson Ibele has a great 3ds Max Script (requires Max9 or newer, which shouldn’t be a problem honestly) that generates high-resolution buildings.  He has just updated it with several new features that improve building generation time to the point where now you can generate entire cities, as shown above.

This means that combined with both quick build functions, and a shape object that has multiple sub splines….you can literally create a whole city in several seconds. Here is an example of what I mean….this has a window quick build value of 4 (4 variations of windows per buiding) and a path quick build setting of 10 (10 versions of buildings per sim) and this setup only took 12 seconds to generate!:

Best of all, it’s free.  Download it from his link below.

via CGTalk – Free procedural building generator: Building Generator v.01.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, script, software

We first covered this back in July but it’s back in the news again with more fancy reconstructions.

It took 500 computer processors 13 hours to match 150,000 photos for Rome’s landmarks, and eight more hours to construct a 3-D image of them. Venice involved 250,000 images, which took 27 hours to match and 38 hours to reconstruct. By contrast, using the algorithms on which Photosynth is based, it would have taken 500 processors at least a year to match 250,000 photos.

Not only is it just pretty and fun, one could easily imagine the same algorithm being applied to a wide variety of uses: Accident reconstruction, Military planning, Urban environment mapping and study.

via Algorithm Generates a Virtual Rome in 3D from 150,000 Flickr Users’ Photos | Popular Science.

Science algorithm, flickr, geospatial, imageprocessing

A bit off the beaten track of our usual material but of utmost importance to all you freelancers working in the VFX industry, how do you decide what to include in your portfolio (or Demo Reel) when approaching new clients?  Over at FreelanceSwitch they discuss a 5-pronged approach, somewhat targeted towards programmers but made from principles that apply to a broader audience, that might make the decision a bit easier.

The importance of having a professional portfolio website has been discussed on FreelanceSwitch – it is essential for the modern freelancer. But how do you decide what to include in your portfolio? If you fill your site with only your favorite work it could be focused in the wrong direction and not attract business. If you only display giant commercial projects it may feel like a sterile presentation with no heart. Somehow you need to show that as a freelancer you are both capable in your skills and able to produce high quality, creative results.

via How to Decide What to Include in Your Portfolio – FreelanceSwitch.

Graphics howto, reel

Autodesk has launched a new 3dsMax certification program to accompany their existing certifications for other applications, giving you another way to fluff your resume with your amazing graphics capabilities.

Autodesk certifications are a reliable validation of an individual’s skills and knowledge that demonstrate expertise in a specific area,” said Paul Mailhot, senior director of Autodesk Learning. “More than just enhancing an individual’s credibility, certification can lead to accelerated professional development and serve as a differentiator that helps people to stand out from the crowd. These differentiators are important in any job market, but never more so than during a down economy.”

If you’re attending Autodesk University, then you’ll have a chance to take the exams there.  Get all the details here.

via CGSociety – Autodesk Certification.

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, certification, training

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The guys at MaximumPC got their grubby paws on AMD’s new 6-monitor monster rig, the Eyefinity, and share the details with us all.  Contrary to my original thought, they do have it all on a single internal card.  The trick: It’s all DisplayPort, not DVI or HDMI.

AMD would only disclose that the card had a single GPU, and was one of the company’s upcoming DirectX 11–capable chips—nothing about the amount of video RAM, clock speeds, or anything else. This particular graphics card also sported six DisplayPort connectors. Attached to each DisplayPort connector was a 30-inch Dell display. The whole affair was configured as a single, 7680×3200 monitor. That’s 24.6 megapixels!

via Six Monitors, One Video Card. Hands-On with AMD’s Eyefinity | Maximum PC.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity