VizWorld.com

The San Diego Supercomputer Center drew a standing-room only crowd when they fired up their connection to the Eureka visualization cluster at Argonne to stream the massive visualization of the universe to the show floor.

This visualization of the Universe as it condenses around fluctuations in the density of dark and ordinary matter is a result from a collaboration between Argonne National Laboratory and the San Diego Supercomputer Center/University of California, San Diego. In a demonstration at SC09 visualizations of a 4096^3 data volume was streamed from Eureka, the graphics cluster at Argonne, over ESnet, filing a 10Gb/s network link, to an OptiPortal in the SDSC booth on the exhibit floor.

You can read an audience account of the event at InsideHPC, and technical details at the Argonne website.

via \Futures \Laboratory » Blog Archive » Project StarGate @ SC09.

Science argonne, astronomy, interactive, sc09

When was the last time you ran a fluid simulation for your visual effects shot and when it was done you sat back and thought “Perfect”.  I’ll bet it’s been a while, if ever.  CG Fluids are notoriously hard, and the reason why is best described in this paragraph from FusionCIS:

CG fluid, especially “SPH” fluid (smoothed particle hydrodynamics), suffers from inaccurate physics at the microscopic level, at the scale of individual particles making up the fluid. Even when simulating with very large particle numbers, this becomes a major problem wherever the fluid becomes splashy since it forms thin sheets and strings — or rather, it should form thin sheets and strings, like we see in real water. Hi-speed macrophotography of fluid spashes classically show how delicate, impossibly thin and continuous sheets of fluid fly thru the air and stay coherent for prolonged periods. These produce tiny droplets and hair-like strings of fluid from their margins but otherwise hold together for a long time, before they eventually and suddenly burst apart. CG fluids on the other hand always break apart immediately, forming very unattractive and distinctly un-real cheese-like holes and webbing, never holding together in thin sheets.

So what do you do?  Most people tend to try and hide the effect with careful camera tricks, motion blur, or just add more particles.  A new technology from FusionCIS called “Smorganic” can fix this by closing the holes created during the simulations, and create amazing new life-like simulated results, as shown in the image above of “honey” pouring over a sphere:

The image below is a render of a simulation of pouring “honey”, where we’ve set smorganic to disallowo any holes in the fluid. The results show the smoothness of the resulting meshes despite the high-spec, high-refractive nature of the shader and lighting, and despite a hard impact with a rigid body.

Hit their website for more pictures and sample movies.

via FusionCIS PR Smorganic.

Graphics, Science cfd, fusioncis, simulation, vfx, water

Houdini has just announced a new product offering called “HQueue”, an artist friendly cloud computing toolkit.  Using it, artists can offload costly rendering or computation processes to local clusters and Amazon’s EC2 compute cloud right inside Houdini.

Mantra includes micropolygon, raytraced or physically-based rendering as well as depth of field, fast motion blur, high dynamic range image support, deep raster files and high quality displacement mapping. Renderings can be distributed on up to 20 machines while simulations can be set up on a single machine. Distributed fluid simulations are planned for a future release of the cloud computing tools.

Costs on the EC2 cloud are reasonable, a mere $1.99 per machine/hour for a 64-bit machine with 7.5GB of ram, and a mere 50 cents for 32-bit machines with 1.7G of ram.

via Cloud Computing for Artists – Side Effects Software Inc..

Graphics amazon, cloud, ec2, houdini, hqueue, software

At the recent Cut&Paste 2009 Digital Design Tournament, Gabriel Smetzer brought home top honors with his amazing creations built using Cinema4D.

“I chose CINEMA 4D as my 3D ‘weapon of choice’ and believe the software gave me the competitive edge to quickly create a quality, original concept that would excite people as well as allowed me to easily 'nail' the lighting before rendering. The NURBSs modeling, splines, deformers and the functions were awesome and helped me shape my images within minutes.”

The contest gives competitors a mere 20 minutes to craft their image, constrained onto to a simple theme such as “Duality” or “My Instrument”, but lets them use any tools they choose.  Congratulations to Gabriel!

Read the full article the winning images and more information.

via MAXON – The makers of CINEMA 4D and BodyPaint 3D.

Graphics art, cinema4d, contest, cut&paste, maxon

One of the big booths on the SC09 floor belonged to Microsoft, who opened the event with the announcement of a new 2nd beta of Windows HPC Server 2008 and a related Cluster Aware version of Excel 2010.

Microsoft has been ridiculed by several old-school HPC types with such jokes as “fastest blue screen” or “crashing at a teraflop”, but their HPC Server business has been making significant inroads in industries like finance, insurance, and the stock exchanges. The main reason is that the Windows server tools mesh nicely with their existing windows based systems (Excel, sharepoint, SqlServer, etc).  The newest version of HPC Server adds a few new features that might bring it into a more widespread audience with classical HPC.

The new version boasts a much improved MPI implementation, integrated at the OS level, bringing the performance of their product up to identical levels provided by Linux Solutions for heavily distributed benchmarks like Spec. In addition, they have implemented their own job queueing and control system that works with various other Microsoft products to allow multiple users access to the cluster with a minimum of fuss.

Read more…

Science feature, microsoft, sc09

A new patent application (hasn’t been awarded yet, I believe) from Microsoft bears stark resemblence (in both form and name) to Edward Tufte’s Sparklines.  I don’t think anyone would doubt that Tufte created the popular visualization algorithm, however the inventor list completely excludes him:

Radakovitz, Samuel Chow (Redmond, WA, US) Buerman, Adam Michael (Bellevue, WA, US) Garg, Anupam (Redmond, WA, US) Androski, Matthew John (Bellevue, WA, US) Becker, Matthew Kevin (Kirkland, WA, US) Ruble, Brian S. (Bellevue, WA, US)

Meant to be included in Microsoft Excel as a new charting method, it’s left many wondering what recourse Tufte has (aside from claiming prior art).  Tufte is himself entertaining ideas on his forum.

What do you think?

Sparklines for Excel: United States Patent Application 20090282325.

Science microsoft, patent, sparklines, tufte

For a new product like called “Sidekicks”, DDB Canada needed to create a cute salt shaker that realized his time is up in the face of new low-sodium foods.  AXYZ created the character “Salty”, and discusses the process with SideFX.

“All of the shots with Salty, as well as those including Pepper were created using a Salty asset that contained the rigged character for the animation,” says John. “A matching asset designed especially for shading referenced in the animation data in order to keep the process agile. This way shading and animation changes could happen simultaneously.”

In the shot where a dejected Salty hangs his head in sorrow and grainy tears of salt stream from his eyes, AXYZ used Houdini’s particle and dynamics tools. These grains of salt were created using a simple Particle operator which was simulated inside integrated dynamics environment. The effects team also added raindrops for scenes where Salty wandered outside.

via AXYZ Salty – Side Effects Software Inc..

Graphics axyz, commercial, vfx

Baseball fans, especially Yankee fans, will want to head over to The New York Times to check out a fantastic time-lapse created by Robert Caplin using a collection of 12,000 photographs taken before and during the game.

Mr. Caplin, who is just 26, said he wanted the montage to seem as if it had been made a hundred years ago — “You know when you look back at old movie footage and they were cranking it? And it was really jumpy and slightly faster than normal?” The game is played to Chopin’s Waltz No. 5, a score Mr. Caplin chose to complement the antique sensibility of the piece.

Most of the actual game footage is taken with a tilt-shift lens, giving the entire thing a fun look as though you’re watching a model recreation of the event.

I’ve embedded the video after the break for your viewing pleasure.

via Showcase: 12,000-Faceted Diamond – Lens Blog – NYTimes.com.

Read more…

Graphics baseball, photography, sports, time lapse, yankees

Business are slowly adapting to virtual worlds like SecondLife and ScienceSim as ways to hold collaborative virtual meetings and share information, especially as the economy makes air travel and meeting room rentals cost prohibitive.  But as these virtual spaces grow, it becomes an increasingly popular question as to what’s appropriate in these spaces that have traditionally thrived on the “anything goes” attitude.

“Companies need to have behavioral guidelines for the business use of an avatar if you’re representing the company,” he said. “Just like in real life, you have dress codes. This is kind of like an avatar dress code.”

That means no animal tails on your virtual self. “Engineers may think that’s kind of cool and show up at a meeting dressed that way,” Mr. Lundy said. “You would never want that person to represent you — or even be at an event.”

Most of these guidelines are relics of older businessmen entering the space and not being completely familiar with the environment or technology.  As the younger generation grows into the higher management positions, will these rules change?

via Your Second Life Avatar Is Dressed Inappropriately – Digits – WSJ.

Photo from Fabio Metitieri (Flickr: yukali)

Graphics secondlife, virtual worlds

Google has rolled a new visualization tool for their powerful image searching system that combines technology available in some of their other products with powerful image recognition technologies to allow you to view images in a graph-layout mapped by similarity.

Image Swirl expands on technologies developed for Similar Images and Picasa Face Recognition to discern how images should be grouped together and build hierarchies out of these groups. Each thumbnail on the initial results page represents an algorithmically-determined representative group of images with similar appearance and meaning. These aren’t just the most relevant images — they are the most relevant groups of images.

Currently, it only seems to work for a fixed number of pre-selected queries (200,000 at time of writing).

via Official Google Blog: Explore images with Google Image Swirl, now in Labs. via Infosthetics

Science google, image processing