VizWorld.com

Consider it the flash mob of Building Information Modeling but with a technological purpose. This should be interesting to follow over the next couple of days.

From the Build London Live website (emphases mine):

Building on the success of Build LONDON Live 2008, Asite, AEC3 and BIM Products announce Build LONDON Live 2009 (Bll 2009) will take place from 15th – 17th December and will culminate with an exhibition in Central London on the December 18th.

… For this year’s challenge, a hypothetical site set amongst man-made islands in the Thames Estuary has been established as the setting for a mixed use scheme comprising hotels, offices, residential and retail space. Teams from all over the world will be allocated a unique ‘site’ and design brief and will contribute to an ambitious master plan for 48 hours.

… Build LONDON Live is a collision of master-planning, engineering and political ideas for regeneration. It uses the latest Building Information Modelling (BIM) techniques to create detailed designs and proposals. Teams will submit an unprecedented amount of content including 3D models, imagery, movies, analysis results and show how traditional design methods are enhanced by BIM to everyone’s benefit.

Science "virtual building", AEC, BIM

It’s been a while since we mentioned OpenCTM, but they’ve just released v1.0.2 and added a whole slew of features, most importantly a great file converter so that you can import and export your models into the incredibly compressed OpenCTM format.

OpenCTM v1.0.2 is the third production release of OpenCTM. This time, the 3D viewer has been much improved, but there are also a few other notable changes:

• Added an OpenCTM exporter plugin for Maya.
• Improved the mesh conversion control in the ctmconv tool.
• Added manual pages for ctmconv and ctmviewer.
• Added a “make install” target for Mac OS X and Linux.

via OpenCTM – Compression of 3D Triangle Meshes.

Science compression, geometry, openctm, software

Robert Kosara over at eagereyes throws his hat into the ring with the recently released climate data from the UK’s Met Office and throws his results back to the community.  First off is a much nicer formatted version of the data itself:

I converted and reshaped the data into a CSV file that is much larger (because it contains a lot of redundancies), but that is much easier to work with in Tableau and other programs. This file also contains the continent classification and the first year of data recorded per station. You can also download my packaged Tableau workbook if you have Tableau or want to look at it in Tableau Reader.

After that he shows several visualizations analyzing the data from several different perspectives (regions, timeframes, number of stations, etc).  A great read for anyone looking at this data.

via A Look At Climate Data | EagerEyes.org.

Science climate, tableau, visualization

While Verari is undoubtedly in dire straights at the moment, it seems the rumors of their death might have been slightly exaggerated as evidenced by an interview their CEO held with InsideHPC editor John West.

Also, Wright was at pains to point out that the doors are not closed. Although he did say that most of the staff is gone today, there are people in the office working on a way forward — “some on payroll, and some not.” These folks are working on a support plan for existing customers which Wright hopes to have on the web site “today or tomorrow,” as well as on how to fill existing orders. Verari’s support comes largely from business partners, so they may actually be able to come up with something there.

Sounds like, like some reports said, they’ve lost the ability to make payroll.. So they’re currently in a situation of “work for free and hopefully we can compensate you later”, or stay and home and work on your resume.

via insideHPC exclusive with Verari CEO: “The doors are open.” | insideHPC.com.

Hardware deadpool, interview, verari

Pixar’s most recent short “Partly Cloudy”, revealing the details of where storks really get their delivered babies from, is in the running for the AMPAS Best Animated Short, to be announced February 2nd.  Peter Sohn sits down with StudioDaily to talk about how he got the idea, and some of the hurdles they ran into creating semi-transparent clouds as characters.

“A real cloud is mist and vapor,” he adds. “If you got close to it, it would dissipate. Trying to get something that had a form and was appealing but still retained cloud properties…that was on the technical aspect.” The biggest hurdle, he says, was the rendering. “Gus is made up of over 200,000 particles,” he says. “It took about 60 to 70 hours to render one frame of him, because he was a translucent character. And we didn’t have a lot of time to finish the movie.”

via Studio Daily Blog » Pixar’s “Partly Cloudy” Short Listed.

Graphics animation, pixar, short, vfx

Designorati’s Jeremy Schultz has a nice review up of the new Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2010, which includes Maya 2010, Mudbox 2010, MotionBuilder 2010, and more.

Maya 2010 is also the first Maya release that can serve as a start-to-finish computer graphics workflow. Maya Unlimited tools are included as described above, and so are Maya Composite (for compositing), Autodesk MatchMover (camera tracking) and Autodesk Backburner (a queue manager for multiple computers). Note that Maya Composite is available in a companion application based on Toxik technology, which will be familiar to experienced Maya users.

I have to agree with him in his comparison to Adobe: As Adobe keeps creating more and more “suites” to segment their products to individual markets, Autodesk is going the opposite direction by consolidating everything into a single product line.  I too, think it’s a great move.

via REVIEW: Maya Entertainment Creation Suite 2010 Is A Wonderful Package — Designorati.

Graphics autodesk, maya, motionbuilder, mudbox, review, software

Infosthetics.com just celebrated its fifth birthday, and one enterprising fan constructed a great interactive flash visualization of all 1,950 posts that appeared on the site.

Here is how it works: The little tiles on the left represent the individual posts, with color stripes representing their categories. You can find a color legend in the category filter on the right. In addition, you will find filters for the number of comments, year and author. Clicking one of the filter entries will display only matching posts, and also update the number of items for each filter accordingly. If you click a post, you can see its details on the bottom, and visit it by clicking the preview. In addition, the filter values that belong to this post are marked with a grey background.

via Five Elastic Years of infosthetics.com – information aesthetics.

Science flash, interactive

Now, there’s not really much to confirm this but a slide deck has leaked out showing some (purported) benchmark results for the upcoming GeForce GTX360 and 380, the first Fermi based video cards from NVidia.

Do not ask us how or where these benchmarks source/originate from as we do not know. For all we care they are fake. However, a user in our forums posted screenshots of benchmarks from what seems to be a NVIDIA Slide Deck presentation. I can confirm that the layout and style is exactly what NVIDIA uses for it's presentations.

The slides reveal internal NVIDIA benchmarks of Far Cry 2, Resident Evil 5 and STALKER Clear Sky. Now this remains speculation, but if the numbers are right, then the future is looking bright and sunny for NVIDIA — well if they get their pricing and TDP right that is.

Update 12/15: These are fake.

via GeForce GTX 360 and 380 Benchmarks.

Hardware benchmark, fermi, nvidia, rumor

While I dispute the “world’s first” part of the claim, LG hast just announced a new 3D LCD TV that works with active shutter glasses to create true full-resolution 3D visuals.

Although full HD 3D images have been developed for contents such as video games, movies and animations, 3D display products with full HD resolution were unavailable in the market. The commercial launch of LG Display’s full HD 3D LCD panel is expected to help to boost development of high resolution 3D contents while allowing users to view true-to-life 3D images.

They’re big on the full HD resolution because several of the existing solutions (like the JVC model) are only half-HD in 3D mode because they use interleaved lines.

via Welcome to LG Display.

Hardware 3d, display, lg, tv

Los Angeles is currently debating the location of Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, attempting to strike a balance between access and control, and one requirement up for debate is that they should be 1000 feet away from residential uses.  But what does that look like?  BlogDownTown whipped up a quick map to find out.

The maps above show 1,000, 500 and 200 foot buffers around residential uses Downtown. They are not an exact visualization of where dispensaries could be located — they don’t include buffers around substance abuse center and may not include all residential hotels — but they’re more than the City Council has to work with.

The City’s planning department is working on creating maps of the ordinance’s effects, but they won’t be ready until January.

via Visualizing the Debate Over Marijuana Dispensary Locations :: blogdowntown.

Graphics map, political