One of the many natural disaster you get to see in the upcoming 2012 is Tidal Waves caused by undersea earthquakes. In a new video on Yahoo, Roland Emmerich and his visual effects team talks about the difficulties in modeling and animating water on that scale. The work was done by Scanline (website).
See the video after the break.
“Defying Gravity” follows the lives of a small group of astronauts onboard an international spaceship in the year 2052, and obviously contains hundreds of special effects shots due to the environment. Several of those shots were done by Stargate Studios, and fxguide sits down with visual effects supervisor Sam Nicholson about some of the more impressive effects.
All the ships – the landers – were computer generated. So a lot of these shots included visual effects photography rather than having everything computer generated. Then matte paintings were done in Photoshop, 3D ships were done in Maya with everything blended together in After Effects. We like to try and put as many different techniques into a shot as we can so that it doesn’t look too sterile. If you computer-generate clouds they can be too predictable. But if you use a liquid nitrogen tank you have no idea what that thing is going to do!
via fxguide – visual effects news – Grey’s Anatomy in Space: Defying Gravity.
That’s right folks, just saw it on the iTunes Store (via Gizmodo). Featurewise it’s pretty stripped down, and it’s tied into their online service, but the interface is pretty nice and clean. It’s called “PS Mobile”, and (I just installed it) it looks like edits are limited to applying filters, color manipulations, cropping, rotating, and “Sketching”. So no warping or fancy layer-work.
If you’re viewing this on your iPhone, then you can download the app via iTunes.
Hey Look, It’s Adobe Photoshop on the iPhone (And It’s Free) – Photoshop – Gizmodo.
Battlestar Galactica may be over, but the awards keep coming. This time it’s the 2009 Television Critics Association Award for Program of the Year. NewTek shares in the success as their Lightwave3D was used extensively.
NewTek Inc, manufacturer of industry-leading 3D animation and video products, congratulated “Battlestar Galactica” as the recipient of the 2009 Television Critics Association (TCA) Award for Program of the Year. The program, which relied on NewTek LightWave 3D to create award-winning visual effects, was recognized at the 25th annual TCA Awards in Los Angeles after its final season.
Running a little experiment here for those of you lucky enough to get into the Google Wave beta. Even if you didn’t get in then maybe you can watch and see what it’s kinda about.
After the break I’ve embedded a public Wave that anyone can edit. Stop on by and leave a comment, and see what the fuss is about.
I’m considering setting up a Wave for VisWeek next week where attendees can meet & chat about the events, maybe plan get-togethers. What do you think? How can we use Wave effectively?
Update: Looks like Google hasn’t actually enabled “Public” waves.. So before you can do anything you’ll need to give me your Google wave address so that I can add you to the wave. Simply post it as a comment, and I’ll add it to the wave (And if you like, automatically delete your comment).
Update: Looks like they have actually.. If you have a Google Wave account and you’re signed into it, you should see the wave below. Enjoy!
At the recent GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, NVidia’s Principal System Software Engineer Mark Kilgard spoke about what you can expect to see in the upcoming OpenGL3.2 and some of the other things NVidia has in development, such as:
And much much more.. The 84-slide presentation is available on SlideShare, and I’ve embedded it after the break for you to see.
VisWeek is the annual Visualization conference where researchers, users and enthusiasts of data visualization meet to present their work and discuss new ideas. This year the conference will be in Atlantic City, NJ from October 11th-16th and promises to be a very exciting event.
In this post, I focus more on a preview from the ‘Vis‘ side of things for VisWeek. I have previously posted previews for the InfoVis conference and for the VAST conference.
There are so many events that instead of listing all of them, I have categorized them by day. It includes Workshops, Panels, Tutorials and Paper talks.
Read Alark’s recommended events after the break.
The Ignite Presentation series is an interesting idea where presenters get 5 minutes to give a presentation on any topic, using slides that autoadvanced at 15s intervals. A recently published talk from Matthias Shapiro discusses information visualization and how to extracting understanding from information.
We are swimming in data. Too much to comprehend, at times. Matthias Shapiro walks us through the visualization techniques that can be used to figure out what a data set is trying to tell us.
Watch his talk after the break.
Ralph Lauren has been the laughing stock of Photoshop users this week, and under the scrutiny of women’s advocates everywhere, because of this horribly mangled photo on their latest magazine advertisement (shown right). After initially trying to use the DMCA to stifle the discussions on various websites, they’ve finally decided the best move is to just `fess up and move on.
“For over 42 years, we have built a brand based on quality and integrity,” reads the company’s statement. “After further investigation, we have learned that we are responsible for the poor imaging and retouching that resulted in a very distorted image of a woman’s body.
“We have addressed the problem and going forward will take every precaution to ensure that the calibre of our artwork represents our brand appropriately.”
via Ralph Lauren says sorry for incredible shrinking pelvis • The Register.
This morning, the culmination of months of work was completed as the LCROSS (Lunar Crater Observation & Sensing Satellite) smashed into the moon’s surface. Planning the mission was no small task, and the folks at NASA Goddard previsualized various landing sites prior to the mission.
“Visualization aided two aspects of the LCROSS mission,” said Ernie Wright at the SVS. “It helped us understand how visible the plume will be from Earth and whether the targeted terrain was flat and in shadow.”
What exactly did this do?
On September 11, LCROSS mission planners announced that they had targeted a smaller, more northerly crater named Cabeus A. But later that month, analyses of new data from instruments aboard LRO, together with archival measurements from NASA’s Lunar Prospector mission of the late 1990s, indicated that the larger Cabeus crater was a better bet.
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