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Trevor Hogg has begun a 3-part series on the rise to prominence of Pixar Animation Studios, and in the first part gets into amazing background on the creation of the company and their near collapse in 1991.

After five consecutive years of financial loses, Pixar laid off 30 of its 72 employees in 1991. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that a major problem for the company was “that its software technology exceeds the capabilities of the available hardware.” Pixar was too advanced for its time. Attempting to stop the monetary bleeding, Steve Jobs shutdown all of the company’s projects outside of commercials and the development of RenderMan.

On the verge of an economic collapse, Pixar was thrown a fiscal lifeline when it was approached by Disney about transforming Tin Toy into a big screen production.

via Animated Storytellers: A Pixar Animation Studios Profile (Part 1) | Flickering Myth Movie Blog.

Graphics history, pixar

InConcert3D, AEG Live, Action 3D Productions, and RealD have partnered up to bring the latest concert of the Dave Matthews Band nationwide in stereoscopic 3D using some new technology that brings the production costs down significantly.

“With the Dave Matthews [movie], the idea was to mimic a concert,” explains AEG Live’s John Rubey, who is executive producer and president of AEG’s Network LIVE. “The movie features Dave Matthews at the Austin City Limits festival, Ben Harper from the Mile High Music Festival and Gogo Bordello from the Pine Music Festival.”

via Studio Daily Blog » Dave Matthew Band in 3D on December 11.

Graphics, Hardware 3d, concert, reald, stereoscopic

Here’s something I definately hope to check out next week at SC09, a live demonstration from NASA and Obsidian Strategics of remote visualization across a pair of 10GB Ethernet circuits, carrying 20Gbits/s of visualization traffic from Mountain View, CA to Portland, OR.

Obsidian’s Dr. David Southwell observes “Remote visualization applications are very demanding on the network, being bandwidth intensive and sensitive to latency, loss, arrival time jitter and quality of service. NASA’s InfiniBand-based supercomputers interface naturally to Obsidian’s Longbow E100 products, which transparently extend InfiniBand over 10 GbEthernet WAN connections in a manner that preserves all of InfiniBand’s properties (such as determinism and lossless flow control) while simultaneously applying standards-based AES-192-GCM cryptography”.

via NASA Launches Remote Real-Time Visualization Demo at SC09 Over Fully Encrypted 20Gbit/s Link Using Obsidian’s New E Series Longbow | Press Releases @ Your Story.

Hardware, Science nasa, remotedisplay, sc09

A new Cinema4D plugin has just entered public beta, and offers a true polygonal alternative to the built-in symmetry operation.

This plugin is meant as an alternative to cinema’s own symmetry object, but you will have the benefits of a real polygon object.

That means you can texture both sides for example, and model on both sides of the symmetry plane without having to make the symmetry object editable.

It’s still a windows-only early-beta, so handle with care.  Download instructions are at the website.

via C4D Avenue – Cinema 4D support site with tutorials, downloads, challenges, forums, member galleries, and our own C4D Magazine..

Graphics cinema4d, plugin

Sorry, this was supposed to post yesterday.

This week’s recommended resource is a book from Chaimei Chen called simply “Information Visualization“.  Covering virtual environments, visualization, integration and more, it’s a great book for researchers and graduate students getting started in the field.

The last five years have produced increasingly sophisticated techniques within Information Visualization, which in turn instrumentally improved our understanding of many complex phenomena. Virtual environments provide a particularly stimulating context for us to understand theoretical and practical implications of various information visualization features and fundamental issues. Information visualization is not only accessible to the user from a computer screen, but also embedded in a collaborative, systematic, and integrative environment. Information Visualization and Virtual Environments is the first book that examines information visualization in a broader context. This 2nd edition continues the unique and ambitious quest for setting information visualization and virtual environments in a unifying framework. The new edition is particularly updated to meet the need for practitioners, including new chapters and thoroughly updated chapters on the latest advances and potentially fruitful challenges to pursue. The book is also a valuable source for researchers and graduate students.

via Amazon.com: Information Visualization (9781852337896): Chaomei Chen: Books.

Science feature, infovis, resource of the week

Next week is the SuperComputing 2009 conference in Portland, OR, and VizWorld will be there.  We’ve already got several meetings planned, so tune in next week for (hopefully) news including:

• Microsoft’s HPC & Visualization Offerings
• NVidia’s new technology, including a peek at Fermi
• SGI’s newest offerings
• Details of the Graphics Focus at SC09
• And much much more..

All of the news will be under our SC09 tag, so you can follow along if you like!  Also, we’ll be hosting the usual #SC09 Twitter Hashtag results in the sidebar.

If you’ll be at SuperComputing 2009 and want to meet up, drop us a line here or via any of the means on our About page, we’ld love to meet you!

Science, Website conference, sc09

Lockheed Martin is holding the opening dedication ceremonies today for their new NexGen Cyber Innovation and Technology Center in Gaithersburg, MD.  Designed to “foster innovation and collaboration”, the facility features cutting-edge technology, including some great visualization and telepresence technology.

The 25,000 square foot facility is designed complete with a global cyber innovation range to solve technology challenges in real-time while simulating customer environments. NexGen leverages partner and Lockheed Martin technologies to create rapid prototypes to speed the innovation of solution delivery while providing seamless security. Features of the center include: seven collaboration areas, a green IT data center, cloud computing platforms, telepresence and high definition video teleconferencing, and site connectivity to other Lockheed Martin facilities around the globe.

Read up more on the facility here.

via Lockheed Martin IS&GS Opens New NexGen Cyber Innovation And Technology Center | Lockheed Martin.

Science event, lockheed martin, telepresence

A video on YouTube from Instinct Tech shows the potential of a game engine used in an upcoming title from Dark Water Studios as 4000 planes operate in a flocking simulation with full collision detection & avoidance, in real-time with high resolution graphics.

The demo shows 4096 bot planes handled solely on a single GPU parallel to game rendering. The bot planes use steering behaviours for flocking, navigation and obstacle avoidance. The planes are fully lit and rendered (with shadows). The demo runs with interactive frame rate on main stream CUDA enabled graphics cards. In comparison the same simulation without utilizing CUDA achieved a similar frame rate on a decent machine with only 512 planes in our tests. The steering computation for 512 planes requires about 260.000 neighbour queries while for 4096 planes this grows to a whopping 16 Million queries. The algorithm can be easily parallelized, explaining the advantage of technologies like CUDA for this kind of problem. Even if there is a potential to optimize the algorithm for CPU the clear benefit for us is a heavily reduced development time.

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Science cuda, nvidia, simulation, video game

Someone identifying themselves as “Pantural” has posted a fantastic video on Youtube showing the result of his lonely effort taking 5 days of animation work, 110 days of rendering, and some incredible skill.  Four cars and a helicopter pose for some great stills, then combine into one carnage-filled crash.

All animation working time: 5 days…
Rendering time: 110 days…
Used: 3ds max 2008 – Vray, Mudbox, AE, PS, Sound Forge, Vegas

See the video after the break.

Read more…

Graphics 3dsmax, mudbox, short, vfx, vray

A new press release from Maxon reveals that their CINEMA4D and BodyPaint3D products were a big hit in several of this summer’s biggest films.

Newbury Park, CA – November 12, 2009 – Some of this year’s hottest movies, including G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, Surrogates and District 9, all have one thing in common – they feature spectacular CG animation and visual effects sequences created with MAXON’s CINEMA 4D and BodyPaint 3D, the leading 3D animation software celebrated for its intuitive interface, powerful toolset and positive impact on productivity.

Read the full release after the break, and see some great pictures of their work.

Read more…

Science bodypaint3d, cinema4d, district9, maxon, movie, surrogates, vfx