Home » Archives for December 2009
James Cameron’s Avatar just had it’s press screening, and the reviews are coming in. While the hype may be a bit overblown, general consensus that it really is as impressive as James Cameron has claimed.
Basically, effects-driven films deliver three or four showcase set pieces — and sometimes one will blow you away, like the highway-chase scene in The Matrix Reloaded. But Avatar is a nonstop, headlong, 160-minute, jaw-dropping showcase of innovative design (those floating mountains!) and technology (those motion-capture faces!). It's not like Cameron reinvented the medium, but he's turned all the knobs up to eleven.
via Okay, Now You Can Believe the Hype on Avatar’s Special Effects — Vulture.
Graphics avatar, movie
AJA has released a new iPhone application (iTunes Link) that can compute the estimated storage space you’ll need for a wide variety of resolutions, codecs, and framerates. It is missing a few things, like DNxHD:
Don’t expect DNxHD since Avid doesn’t support AJA hardware in the majority of its products. Using the app is easy: just select your codec, frame rate, audio and how you are inputting the time and you get a readout of the total data storage required:
It’s a good replacement for existing websites like Video Space Online or Digital Rebellion’s Footage Calc that works standalone in the field.
via Studio Daily Blog » AJA releases free DataCalc for iPhone.
Graphics aja, iphone, mobile, software
Anyone familar with computer graphics knows of the classic “Teapot”, and a short article on Walyou covers the history of how the classic 3D model came into existence.
The Newell teapot is a mathematical model of an ordinary teapot having a simple shape, which appears cylindrical, solid and partially convex. The creation of this 3D model dates back to 1975 when Newell required a fairly simple mathematical model of a common object for his work. As they were about to sip tea at that time, his wife Sandra Newell suggested using their teapot as a model. Newell liked the idea, and sketched the entire teapot on some graph paper, which he later edited in his lab to come up with the digitized version.
via The Story Behind 3D Computer Model of Newell Teapot | Walyou.
Graphics, Science history
A new poster from Timeplots does an impressive job displaying the history of the US Supreme Court, showing landmark cases, political leanings, and the induction of new judges over the ages.
It combines biographical information on every Supreme Court justice with a visualization of the influence of U.S. presidents and their political parties on the Court over time, and includes vote counts and summaries of landmark cases. We hope that those interested in the Court and judicial history—including lawyers, policymakers, and history buffs—will find this a useful and engaging product.
You can order the poster in regular or framed versions from their website, and browse it in full-resolution.
via ( A Visual History of the Supreme Court of the United States) timeplots.com.
Graphics history, infographic, poster, timeplots
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:
Giri V. V.
(At least, that’s the name they gave, the email address appears valid.) 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 round!
But that’s not all, as we also have the winners of the 4 Dave Matthews Prize Packs. The four lucky winners are:
JeremiahW (Apparently he wasn’t joking when he said he didn’t want to win)
Antitrust
Nick
Ana Cordona
Kayla
Just like above, I’ve contacted all of you via the means you provided.. If I don’t hear anything from you by next week’s drawing (7 days), then I’ll reclaim your prizes for my own nefarious means.. You know, like give `em to my kids or raffle them off again.
There’ll be plenty of more contests in the future I’m sure, so keep coming back to VizWorld.com and comment often! You never know when we might just pick a lucky commenter at random for something neat.
For those of you interested: I used a random number generator to choose between the responses, and the NIST Website to determine the cutoff time.
Graphics, Hardware, Science, Website contest, feature
Been a while since a Pixels post came up, but there’s just so much great stuff to cover today!
And several Global Warming and Climate graphics, coming from the recent release of the global temperature dataset from the UK Meteorological Office.
Graphics, Science pixels
Another week, another high resolution display wall. This time at the University of Texas at San Antonio, using a $482,600 grant from the NSF, they will compile twenty-four 30″ monitors into a 15-foot wide by 4.5 foot tall “VisWall”, and drive it with a cluster of Linux workstations.
“(The Vis-Wall) can greatly enhance our ability to understand physical phenomena by building up digital representations — mathematical and computer models — and displaying complex experimental data in a comprehensible fashion,” Feng says. “In my current area of computational cancer research, this new visualization system will be able to display physical and biological systems, from nano- and micro-scale level objects such as nanoparticles and DNA molecules, up to meso- and macro-scale entities like cells, tissues and tumors, all at the same time.”
The VizWall will be used primarily by the new SiViRT center (Simulation, Visualization, and Real-Time Prediction) and miscellaneous teaching. At least that’s what the announcement says, I don’t think I have to tell you that primarily it will be used as a tour stop.
via UTSA receives grant for high-tech visualization wall – San Antonio Business Journal:.
Hardware, Science displaywall, nsf
WMG has announced a pair of HDR video technologies aimed to redefine modern video: the world’s first true HDR video camera and the world’s largest HDR display. But their advances don’t end there, as the special HDR camera is capable of 20 f-stops, 1080p resolution at 30fps, which generates a whopping 42Gig per minute of footage. That’s far too much for any modern system to manage, so they created a new compression algorithm they call “goHDR”:
goHDR has developed a powerful encoding algorithm. The algorithm provides:
- Substantial compression of more than 100:1
- Preservation of high quality details, allowing high quality compressed digital negatives (important for the cinema industry)
- Very fast decompression method using the power of modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs)
Technical details are light, but they have a bit of information on their site.
via goHDR; High Dynamic Range Video Compression | High Fidelity Virtual Environments | International Digital Laboratory WMG | University of Warwick.
Graphics, Hardware, Science algorithm, camera, hdr, video
One company noticably absent from the recent SuperComputing2009 conference was Verari systems, makers of clusters for several uses. I notice them because I know people with render farms provided by Verari. If any of you own Verari equipment, then you might want to start looking for replacements as news has come out that os of 5pm CST, they’re gone.
InsideHPC has some news, and VerariGuy on twitter seems quite peeved about the whole matter.
Update: A new website VerariAlumni.com aims to bring out news on what’s happening. If anyone has any inside news on the events (Customers, Employees, or anyone else) feel free to drop a line to any of our Tips methods.
insideHPC.com | HPC news for supercomputing professionals.
Hardware deadpool, verari
The new commercial for the Mazda5 was created with help from Rhino with significant help from some previsualization technology. Proving that sometimes CG isn’t the best solution, they struck a good balance between real props and CG to get the perfect combination.
In order to exactly fulfill the director’s and the agency’s vision, Sharabani invested an incredible amount of time in pre-vis to determine which elements should be created with CG and which should be made with more traditional methods. The high tech garage, for example, with its stainless steel cylinders, light fixtures, shelves, and flatscreen monitors, is built of real props, while the ceiling, which retracts to allow a giant claw to descend and remove the car’s entire body, is CG.
via Rhino Supervises Entire Assembly Line for Mazda | CGnews.
Graphics automotive, commercial, vfx
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