Mihai Panai, a graphic’s designer for ORAD, has published a series of videos covering various parts of working with Thinking Particles. So far the five videos cover:
A great resource to check out for sure, but he’s disabled embed. View them on his videos page.
The invaZion 2010 challenge is revving up, and focusing on 3D Stereo Short films this time. They’ve named their star-studded judge panel, including guys from Pixar, Dreamworks, and Disney, and their prizes are worth 20,o00 € .
Entries must be in by March 30th, and much be in either 720p or 1080p format. If you want to enter, the full submission guidelines are available online.
Disney has just release previously discussed PTex under an open-source (BSD) license and made it publicly available to all.
The new open source library supports Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces (including quad and non-quad faces), Loop subdivision surfaces and polymeshes (either all-quad or all-triangle). Also, several data types are supported including 8 or 16-bit integer, float, and half-precision float. An arbitrary number of channels can be stored in a Ptex file. Arbitrary meta data can be stored in the Ptex file and accessed through the memory-managed cache.
The source code is available in a github repository, and you can watch a demonstration of PTex in use after the break.
Ptex Overview. via CGSociety
Another public “Call to Action” for the reading public. VizWorld has been approached by a few software developers for reviews, mostly software in the animation and modeling space. While I respect their work, and I’m fascinated by the potential, it’s simply not my field of expertise.
That’s where you come in! If you have some time and the inclination to write up a good review of a software product, then we need to talk! If you have expertise in animation, modeling, or computer graphics, then drop us a line in the comments or via our email address ([email protected]) and we can talk. Be sure to include:
We will provide the software for you to review, so there’s no need for you to worry about that. Look forward to hearing from you soon!
All that said, if you simply are looking for a place to publish a review of some graphics or visualization based product, feel free to contact us as well and maybe we can work something out.
Those great little plastic blocks that kept us all busy with ideas are under fire from the “Maelstrom” in a new Massive Multiplayer Online game from NetDevil.
With a creative and building focus, LEGO Universe invites players to explore, battle, make friends, and flex their imaginations with the brick in a vibrant online world. Developed by The LEGO Group and NetDevil, LEGO Universe is a family-friendly online game, appropriate for players aged eight and above. The LEGO brick lies at the center of the experience, and several levels of building are available, from simple gameplay-oriented challenges all the way up to sophisticated brick-by-brick building.
The game itself looks like pretty standard MMO fare: Help NPC, earn “Plastic”, use “Plastic” to buy blocks and weapons, repeat. Unlike other MMO’s, however, it uses the entire Lego brand so that you can fight in medieval castles, space stations, formula 1 race cars, and more. Watch the trailer above first, then go check out their website.
PHYX Inc, creator of several plugins for the popular Apple Shake compositing system, have partnered with Noise Industries to bring their plugins to several new platforms including Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Motion, and Final Cut Express.
“Our Apple Shake customers were interested in utilizing our tools in After Effects and Final Cut, which lead us to Noise Industries and FxFactory,” says Justin Bendo, President and CEO, PHYX Inc. “PHYX Keyer is designed to empower users with a toolset to achieve fast, outstanding keying results and FxFactory lets us effectively deliver our powerful visual effects tools to existing and new customers. We thank Noise Industries for their support and look forward to being a part of the innovative FxFactory family.”
Given the recent demise of Shake, this isn’t much of a surprise. It’s great to see new tools, new common tools, coming to such a diverse collection of systems tho. Check out the plugin, including a 15-day free trial, at the FxFactory website.
Activision’s latest entry in the Call of Duty franchise, Modern Warfare 2, has sold over $1 Billion worldwide, quickly making it one of the most successful video game launches of all time, and putting it in the ranks of most successful entertainment products of all time.
“In its first five days alone, the game sold an estimated $550 million worldwide, outpacing five-day worldwide theatrical box office gross figures for such films as Avatar, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and The Dark Night,” Activision crows.
ArsTechnica taks a look at the release process to see what we can learn from it. Covering the usually high price, $60 rather than $50, the exclusion of PC gaming support and dedicated servers, and the unusual review policies Activision implemented.
There was only one way to review Modern Warfare 2: on the Xbox 360, in Santa Barbara, under the watchful eye of Activision. Accepting the paid trip, along with room and board, was the only way you were going to get a review before launch. Joystiq noted that this broke their ethics policy, but they went anyway. Who can say no to a review destined to bring in traffic?
In short it seems that to a point, the gaming industry is changing. No longer do successful games need to enable modding and user content, putting the experience squarely back in the hands of the designers. Will this be the norm for games in the future, or will more open-ended platforms reign?
AMD’s Develop Central has a new collection of videos dedicating to spreading the word of their Stream OpenCL library, five videos in all from Justin Hensley PhD, Senior Member of the Technical Staff, Office of the CTO. The videos are:
nCL™? (7:44)Hit their website for all the details.
via ATI Stream OpenCL™ Technical Overview Video Series | AMD Developer Central.
Anandtech has posted an article today on the GF100, which is the graphics card based on Fermi. The GF100 is specifically designed for gaming, and the article focuses on those aspects that make it great in that arena. Unfortunately, there are no real benchmarks where they have the hardware in hand and can test it to its fullest. Instead they just have a couple of teaser benchmarks based on demos that they saw Nvidia run.
At this point the final products and pricing are going to heavily depend on what the final GF100 chips are like. The clockspeeds NVIDIA can get away with will determine power usage and performance, and by extension of that, pricing. Make no mistake though, NVIDIA is clearly aiming to be faster than AMD’s Radeon HD 5870, so form your expectations accordingly.
via Anandtech: NVIDIA’s GF100: Architected for Gaming
A new biomedical visualization company has emerged at the recent TEDMED conference with a product called ‘The VisualMD”, which combines traditional 3D biomedical scans (CT, MRI, etc) with high-end animation rendering tools to turn classic scans into ‘stories’, presenting information to patients with new background and understanding.
Our visuals are produced using real human data from a variety of medical scans – magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), computer tomography (CT) ultrasound, and confocal laser scans. The data is collected, digitized, and recompiled using volume-visualization software. These volumes and virtual models are dissected, repositioned, colorized, and texturized as necessary to bring them to life.
Currently sponsored by Philips, the video contains examples of the product and interviews with the creators who advocate using these story-based presentations as a new means to inspire patients to make the necessary life changes to correct such problems as heart disease and high blood pressure. Be sure to watch the video (the visualizations open the clip, showing some of the impressive results), and then check out their website.
VizWorld.com Got an idea for a story? Drop us a line at [email protected] or other means.
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