Another week has gone, and it’s time to draw our winners. This week’s winner of a $25 Gift Card from Amazon.com is:
Eric Gusukuma
Congratulations! I’ve just sent you an email, and you have until the next drawing (7 days) to respond.. If you don’t, then the next winner gets it instead!
If you didn’t win, then don’t despair. Just take the survey again and you’ll be entered to win in the next and final round!
Links for today:
The Norrkoping Visualization Center is developing a pair of products designed for visualization of climate related information over the web and on a large scale immersive platform. Called ICEWeb and ICEDome, they are described as such:
ICEWeb
This tool lets researchers exchange and edit climate data through an easy-to-use web application. ICEWeb makes it easy to upload a dataset, visualize it and export to other formats than the original.
ICEDome
This is a software environment for large scale visualization and functions as a framework for development of new visualization techniques. The focus is on using massive multi-dimensional and time variate data as well as on integrating mixed media in highly interactive, immersive, environments.
The products are being developed with help from the Linköping University and Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute, and show great promise in providing a general platform for collaborative visualization and analysis.
See videos of the products after the break.
An impressive result from FX, Ida shows the capabilities of a one-man TV production studio in Mozambique, armed only with MachStudio Pro and ATI hardware who has created and published commercials for the “Arroz Leao” rice in the region. The particularly impressive part of this accomplishment: The entire commercial was produced start-to-finish in a single week.
The tools: ATI FirePro V8750 as the backbone for graphics acceleration; 3ds Max for modeling; MachStudio Pro for lighting and rendering (Pal frames rendered at 1.2 sec/frame!); After Effects for foreground and background compositing; and Premiere Pro for audio and final editing.
See the commercial after the break.
Chris Harrison has published a collection of “Word Spectrums” that show the beautiful duality of some famous opposites such as Men and Women, Good and Evil, and War and Peace. All available on his website as PDF’s, they are as beautiful as they are interesting.
Using Google’s enormous bigram dataset, I produced a series of visualizations that explore word associations. Each visualization pits two primary terms against each other. Then, the use frequency of words that follow these two terms are analyzed. For example, “war memorial” occurs 531,205 times, while “peace memorial” occurs only 25,699. A position for each word is generated by looking at the ratio of the two frequencies. If they are equal, the word is placed in the middle of the scale. However, if there is a imbalance in the uses, the word is drawn towards the more frequently related term. This process is repeated for thousands of other word combinations, creating a spectrum of word associations. Font size is based on a inverse power function (uniquely set for each visualization, so you can't compare across pieces). Vertical positioning is random.
To better achieve a even distribution, I normalized the frequencies of bigrams based on total primary term frequency. So, for example, in the case of war vs. peace, there are 81,839,381 bigrams starting with war and 31,263,375 bigrams starting with peace. If I render the spectrum without normalization, it ends up lopsided toward war (since the usage totals are so much higher). To compensate, I scale down all of war's bigrams so that the overall frequencies are even.
A new test application written using the ATI OpenCL SDK called SmallptGPU shows path-tracing, an optimized variation of ray tracing, shows the impressive performance of ATI cards. The demonstration video below is running on the Radeon 4870, with impressive results, but the newer 5970 should be at least 4x faster. Also, the OpenCL renderer will automatically take advantage and scale across as many cards as you can install in your system.
See the demonstration video after the break.
OpenCL path tracer / ray tracing demo using the AMD OpenCL Beta SDK | FireUser Blog.
GenArts has announced that Sapphire5 will be available for Autodesk users in the first quarter of 2010, boasting hugely improved performance over Version 4. Most of the improvements come from GPU-accelerated algorithms and much improved floating-point support.
Faster Render Speeds
Fully GPU-enabled to provide artists with a completely interactive user experience at HD resolutions and beyond and renders up to 700% faster.Floating Point Support
Delivers true photorealistic image quality with the highest possible dynamic range.Fully Interactive at HD Resolutions
Enables artists to push the bounds of their imagination, even in client attended sessions, without intrusive pauses for screen refresh.
See the performance benchmarks on their website.
There’s still time! The third of our 4 $25 Gift Cards will be raffled off at 5:00pm Central today (Check the time I’m using). Not many entries this week so if you’ve been waiting, Now’s your chance. Go take the survey now and get your results in before time’s up!
Game Developers using Emergent’s Gamebryo or Gamebryo LightSpeed will find a new tool at their disposal: Fork Particle’s Real-time Particle Efffects simulations.
“Fork Particle raises the bar for particle effects technology in video games,” said Katie Morgan, Vice President of Sales & Marketing at Emergent. “Developers who license Fork Particle with Gamebryo or LightSpeed can now utilize additional rapid content development tools for spectacular particle effects, an essential component to leading real time graphics.”
via dBusinessNews :: Daily Business News Delivered to Your Desktop.
SmithMicro has just released a new Service Pack for their Poser8 product which includes everything in SR1 and their recent hotfix, along with several other improvements. The biggest addition is official support of OSX Snow Leopard and Windows7, but the complete list of changes is huge. Just look at some of the changes in the “Rendering” portion:
Get the full list of changes in the Readme (Mac and Windows), and get the new patch on their site.
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