VizWorld.com

The latest E-on Software Newsletter gets into great detail about what you can see in the upcoming Vue 8, due out the first week of November.  First major difference is that they’ve now separated it into 3 product families:

With Vue 8, the product line in now organized in 3 families: Vue for CG Professionals, Vue for 3D Artists and Vue for 3D Enthusiasts. This new organization is designed to better address the different market segments of our ever growing user base.

Each familiy provides Digital Nature authoring with the best blend of capabilites and features:

• Vue 8 for CG Professionals: Vue 8 Infinite and Vue 8 xStream (Ozone 5.0 will follow).
  Offers CG professionals the premiere solution for creating exceptionally rich and realistic Digital Nature environments with seamless integration into any production workflow.
• Vue 8 for 3D Artists: Vue 8 Esprit, Vue 8 Studio and Vue 8 Complete.
  Provides 3D artists and small studios with powerful modular applications to create richly natural 3D Digital Nature scenery and landscapes. Vue 8 Studio, our new mid range application, offers a feature set similar to that of Vue 7 Pro Studio.
• Vue 8 for 3D Enthusiasts: Vue 8 Pioneer & T-Packs and Vue 8 Frontier.
  Features content-filled, easy-to-use scenic nature creation for home and family use, with the addition of the new, cost effective Vue 8 Frontier, specifically dedicated to Poser™ users.

They also list out all of the features you can expect in the new version, including 3D terrain sculpting, procedural sculpting, fractals, and OpenGL shader support.

via e-on software – E-on Software Newsletter.

Graphics e-on, software, vue

ATI/AMD has just released a new beta version (Beta4) of their ATI Stream SDK that adds OpenCL GPU support to the already existing CPU support.

The new ATI Stream SDK v2.0 – beta 4 adds OpenCL GPU support to the existing CPU support. OpenCL is about accelerating applications on heterogeneous systems – ALL the processors in your system. With AMD’s beta 4 OpenCL implementation, you will be able to take one source code base and re-target it to multi-core CPUs or modern GPUs – it will run on both – and take advantage of your entire platform.

OpenCL is the first truly open and royalty-free programming standard for general-purpose computations on heterogeneous systems.  It lets you write data-parallel algorithms data-parallel processing (for scientific computations, video and image processing, game AI and physics, etc.) that spread themselves automatically across available resources, be they CPU or GPU.

Hardware, Science amd, ati, gpgpu, opencl

A new commercial for Traveler’s Insurance shows hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny red umbrellas floating down from the sky to people around the world.  Special mobile rigs were used to suspend a few real umbrellas, but the bulk of them were created in CG and added afterwards.

“Integrating the CG umbrellas into our pan and tilt plates, to make them match the practical umbrellas, presented us with some challenges, as there was a very limited field of sharp focus in the live-action plates,” Murphy said. Using Autodesk Flame’s toolset, a52′s VFX artists were able to address those visual challenges.

via a52 News Release.

Graphics a52, commercial, vfx

Anya Savikhin and Stephen Rudolph presented their “FinVis” product, available for free on Google Code and developed on grant from the NSF, at VisWeek.  The talk was good, but it’s being berated a bit in the Q&A.  The tool looks promising, but very early in development.  What do you think?

PDF Paper

Google Code Page

Science finvis, nsf, visweek

GOOD Magazine has a feature article discussing how easy it is to manipulate data visualizations to meet any end you prefer, showing examples of the CRATX stock listing.

When we introduce impact data to pictures, we tap into a deeply-rooted way humans understand the world, and we can inspire action—which is ultimately the point of measuring impact. But without a factual key or other clear guide that makes the image self-explanatory, data visualization can obscure understanding. All too often such visualizations are used to deceive. This can be hard to see through, partly because people seem to be naturally more skeptical of other people than we are of numbers or images.

They show powerful examples of manipulating axes, scales, and comparisons to make the data look far better or worse than it should.

via Fact and Fiction (and How to Tell the Difference) in Data Visualization | GOOD.

Science education, good, visualization

Equilibrium Networks is in attendance at VisWeek for the SecVis talks, presenting a poster and talking to people.  They’ve got a writeup of the event on their blog and they discuss the possibility of a “scientific theory of security”.

One thing I was pleasantly not surprised by is that the afternoon panel seemed to repudiate the notional equation “Security + Visualization = Science”. As I’ve commented here and there, there can be no truly scientific theory of security. Visualization doesn’t change this. The place where security and visualization can overlap with each other and with science is in the development of frameworks guided by scientific principles, both in architectural and cognitive aspects.

via VizSec09 « Equilibrium Networks.

Science equilibrium, secvis, visweek

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)’s Advanced Visualization Laboratory has announced they are producing some new artful high-definition 3D animations of black holes and other phenomena for the upcoming “Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future” event running from October 15-25.  The real kicker is that the videos will be narrated by Professor Stephen Hawking, honorary Festival President.

Stephen Hawking narrates NCSA visualizations for Canadian festival. via InsideHPC.

Science education, festival, ncsa

An interesting paper presented here at VisWeek, as part of VAST, comes from Christopher Collins Research.  They parsed a database of 600,000 US Circuit Court decisions over 50 years and created a text-visualization tool they call “Parallel Tag Clouds”.

The visualization technique combines graphical elements from parallel coordinates and traditional tag clouds to provide rich overviews of a document collection while acting as an entry point for exploration of individual texts. We augment basic parallel tag clouds with a details-in-context display and an option to visualize changes over a second facet of the data, such as time. We also address text mining challenges such as selecting the best words to visualize, and how to do so in reasonable time periods to maintain interactivity.

The full paper is available at their site.  See their demonstration video after the break.

via Christopher Collins: Research.

Read more…

Science paper, research, tag clouds, visweek

At the upcoming APS DFD conference in Minneapolis, MN (November 22-24th), the Gallery of Fluid Motion will be running again.

The Gallery consists of computational and experimental still images and videos submitted by attendees of the meeting. A panel selects outstanding entries based on artistic value, scientific content, and originality. The award-winning entries will be announced on Tuesday, November 24, 2009 (check back for location and time.). The winning entries will be displayed at the Annual APS Meeting in March 2010 and will appear in Physics of Fluids, September 2010.

The stuff that shows up here is always beautiful, mesmerizing, and impressive.  If you are in the area, definitely make plans to check it out.

via 62nd Annual Meeting.

Science cfd, contest, gallery

Olivie Charbonneaua has published a tutorial on Evermotion detailing the process for creating realistic looking grass using 3ds Max and V-Ray proxies.  The results are impressive, and he writes the whole thing up with incredible detail in the 8-step tutorial.

Grass with 3ds max and V-Ray for flat grounds – Evermotion.org.

Graphics 3dsmax, grass, howto, tutorial, vray