Another great source of infographics and posters, this time covering environmental information from around the world, is the “Geo Data Portal”. Part of the “United Nations Environment Programme”, they’ve collected over a dozen great infographics and posters that you can download.
GEO Data Portal – The Environmental Database (search | map | graph | download).
AutoDesSys has just announced the beginning of two new beta-test runs: Bonzai3d 2.0 and a new RenderZone plugin for bonzai3d. The betas are watermarked, but if you plan to do some serious testing then you can contact then for a license to remove it. Some of the new features to check out:
- b3d 2.0 offers 3D dimensions, 3D clipping planes (non-destructive sectioning), a Walk-through tool, six new NURBS tools for blending, merging, and extending curves and surfaces, overhauled printing, adjustable size of tool icons, improved view navigation work-flow, and more.
- The RenderZone plug-in offers photorealistic rendering, including global illumination and ambient occlusion. It is compatible with formZ RenderZone Plus and allows the smooth transfer of rendering information between the two applications.
In addition to the testing, users that make significant contributions to the testing effort may be rewarded with free licenses to the new version. Find the registration forms and download links on their site.
via bonzai3d | Support.
Crytek, creators of the CryEngine gaming engine used in Crysis, have just announced CryEngine3 which brings the spectacular graphics familiar on the PC to the XBox360 and PS3. To help get the word out, they’ve stood up a dedicated portal for all things CryEngine called “MyCryENGINE” where you can read up on the technology and licensing, and see examples of how to use it in games, simulations, and visualization.
The National Science Foundation has just connected India, Singapore, Vietnam, and Egypt to the “Global Ring Network for Advanced Application Development” (GLORIAD), a dedicated fiber-optic network for high-speed large-bandwidth communication.
Among other uses, the network is employed to remotely operate telescopes and microscopes. It’s particularly useful for data-intensive visualizations. Researchers can carve out portions of the network for specific, uninterrupted long-distance collaborations that might include a lot of video conferencing and other intensive data exchange.
“Science is increasingly data-driven and collaborative, and does not respect national borders,” said Ed Seidel, acting assistant director of NSF’s Math and the Physical Sciences Directorate. “High-speed optical networks are critical to both national and international scientific efforts.”
This takes the US-China network from 2.5Gbps to 10Gbps, a 4x increase in bandwidth.
NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer (IBEX) examines the global interactions at the edge of the solar system, and has discovered a previously unknown solar wind flinging “pickup ions” at an impressive 0.5 to 2.5 million miles per hour.
“The IBEX results are truly remarkable, with emissions not resembling any of the current theories or models of this never-before-seen region,” says Dr. David J. McComas, IBEX principal investigator and assistant vice president of the Space Science and Engineering Division at Southwest Research Institute. “We expected to see small, gradual spatial variations at the interstellar boundary, some ten billion miles away. However, IBEX is showing us a very narrow ribbon that is two to three times brighter than anything else in the sky.”
The visualizations show this new band quite plainly. Why wasn’t this known before? The band lies perfectly between the flight path of previous satellites.
“The most astounding feature in the IBEX sky maps — the bright narrow ribbon — snakes through the sky between the Voyager spacecraft, where it remained completely undetected until now,” McComas says.
They have videos and pictures on their website.
TecPlot held a special webinar yesterday where they demonstrated some of the new features in the upcoming 360 2009 R2.
Tecplot 360 2009 R2 Sneak Peek Webinar.
Slated for release later this month, the latest upgrade to Tecplot 360 2009 will allow you to handle bigger datasets in less time than ever before. When benchmarked with moderate-size datasets, for example, the time-to-first-image is 2.5 times faster, slicing data is twice as fast; and animations are up to 35% faster than previous versions. Add to that bigger dataset handling capabilities and a variety of user-requested feature enhancements, and Tecplot 360 continues to be the easiest-to-use visualization tool on the market.
But don’t take our word for it.
See the R2 version in action and find out how you can save more time and more data than ever before. This Webinar will feature a brief 15-minute demonstration followed by a Q&A session.
The webinar is now available online for web streaming, and narrated by Durrell Rittenberg, Ph.D. You can view it here.
After a week of science, care of VisWeek, I felt it’s time for a little humor. This one comes from CBS’s “How I met your Mother”, where they have an intervention for one of the characters who has an unhealthy obsession with charts and graphs.
See the video after the break.
If you’re a user of NewTek’s Lightwave 3D, then you might want to check your Downloads section on their website. The beta for v9.6.1 is now open and features a full 64-bit version for Mac OSX, and a hole of stability improvements all around. You will have to agree to an NDA, meaning we won’t hear much about how well it works until much later, but full instructions on how to set it up are available on their site.
LightWave 3D v9.6.1 Open Beta Launched – NewTek Discussions.
Over on ubergizmo they take the new game Iron Fist Boxing 3 for a spin and get a quite obvious introduction in the differences between the iPhone 3G, which only implements OpenGL|ES 1.0, and the iPhone 3GS, which supports the newer OpenGL|ES 2.0 . The newer implementation supports things like shaders and a programmable pipeline, which they implement in features like shadows, bump maps, motion blur, and bloom. The results are a much more visually compelling game (as evidenced in the screenshot).
Head on over to their site to see some video of the differences as well.
Iron Fist Boxing 3 – Iron Fist Boxing 3 on iPhone features GL 1.x and GL 2.0.
ZBrush users eagerly anticipating version 3.5 for Wndows will definately want to head over to CGSociety to see some of the work done by some of the early beta testers. In the article, they talk to Joseph Drust ( Senior Character Artist for Vicious Cycle Software), Scott Spencer (Character Designer for Weta Workshop), Ryan Kingslein (The Gnomon Workshop), Mia Lee (Creature Modeler at ILM), and several freelancers. They show videos and screenshots of some of the new features as well.
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