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Over at BelowTheLine, they have an interview with Joe Letteri, the Visual Effects Supervisor on Avatar.   After experience creating an entirely computer generated, photorealistic character for Lord of the Rings and King Kong, he dove into Avatar and found that the aims were set even higher.

Though Weta craftspeople were familiar with the technology that Cameron required, there were definitely new directions in which the director wished to create his world in Avatar. Rather than create the computer-generated character material largely in postproduction, where, typically, CGI artists are placing digital characters into live-action plates, Cameron wanted to see his camera moves on the day he shot his motion-capture and facial-capture scenes. “So, the virtual stage was a live-action stage.” Letteri expounded. “The biggest difference is that Gollum was being put into a live-action plate whereas Zoe Saldana and Sam Worthington in Avatar were performing in a virtual world, and we were putting everything in digitally around them.”

via Joe Letteri on the Visual Effects of Avatar | Below the Line.

Graphics avatar, interview, vfx

Microsoft has published the hardware requirements for the upcoming Office 2010 suite, and people noticed one surprising addition: A DirectX compatible Video Processor.  Over at the TechNet blog, Microsoft explains why:

If your computer has a GPU, it lets us perform graphics rendering tasks (like drawing charts in Excel, or transitions in PowerPoint) in the GPU instead of in the CPU, which parallelizes work and speeds up performance. This is particularly relevant for users of PowerPoint 2010, which will introduce some awesome new graphics and video integration features (more info at the PowerPoint team blog).

I can’t imagine Word using GPU for faster spell checking, but if it makes Charts & Graphs faster that would be welcome.  I do shudder to think of the many new tortuous animations and slide transitions they will add to PowerPoint now.

At least now all you spreadsheet junkies have an excuse to ask for a Quadro card.

via Microsoft Office 2010 Engineering : Office 2010 System Requirements.

Hardware gpgpu, microsoft

Who hasn’t taken a rock and thrown it in a pond just to see the splash and ensuing ripples? Stephan Gekle and his colleagues have discovered that when you take stone and throw it into a lake, you get the familiar crown splash. Just behind the stone, a large air cavity is formed. This can be seen in the first frame of the image to the right. As the fluid fills in behind the stone, this air cavity collapses (second frame of image to right. In the third frame, the shape of that cavity is in the form of a converging-diverging nozzle, which is the same shape that is found in rocket engines. From the NewScientist article on the paper:

Using high-speed photography, the team spotted a cavity of air forming in an hourglass shape – with the top of the hourglass at the surface of the water and its base at the sinking object. To measure the speed of air rushing out upwards, they marked the air with smoke before the splash. Even though their camera took 15,000 frames per second, they still couldn’t measure the fastest speeds directly, so they simulated the behaviour they had observed.

My question is does this also happen when you perform a cannonball off the diving board into the pool?

via NewScientist : Pebble splashes break the speed of sound

Download of the paper : Supersonic Air Flow due to Solid-Liquid Impact

Science scientific visualization

I almost missed it, but last Friday was the 1-year anniversary of VizWorld’s first post! From our humble beginnings, discussing the VFX of Benjamin Button,we’ve grown to the site you see now.  Also, Saturday’s special feature on Education in Second Life marked our 3000th story here on VizWorld, as well as over 2,800 comments.

Thanks to all of you for helping to make us a success, and we hope to see you more in the following year!

Website Website

The Victoria and Albert Museum in London has a new exhibit titled Decode: Digital Design Sensations. This exhibit is essentially a collection of video art experiments. One of the works in the exhibit uses input streams from visitors to paint colors on a wall through their movements. Another work takes real time data of light, noise, sound, humidity and temperature data and map it onto a globe. Yet another work takes messages from Twitter, either by user name or topic, and then visualizes the data. In this work, popular posts from Twitter spin off horizontally and start a new stream, whereas unpopular posts just link to the next topic. From the Wired article:

The cryptic works on display at London’s Decode: Digital Design Sensations exhibition manipulate raw data as a kind of virtual pigment, finding form and fun amid the sensory overload that threatens to overwhelm the 21st-century hive mind.

via Wired : Decode Exhibition Points Way to Data-Driven Art

Graphics data visualization

In Southern California, the Santa Ana winds arrive every year and are known to fan wildfires in the region. Many of these wildfires are set by humans, both intentionally and unintentionally. To make fighting these fires easier, scientists are mapping sattelite and airborne data onto maps to see where the hottest parts of the fire is located. Miller-McCune has published an article on how the is accomplished at San Diego State University’s Immersive Visualization Center.

Data fusion is the name of the game at the San Diego State University’s Immersive Visualization Center — layering sophisticated weather, atmospheric, smoke and fire data and images onto, say, a topographical Google Earth map (www.earth.google.com). It provides an illuminating picture for emergency operations chiefs who urgently need to pinpoint trouble spots and interpret fast-changing developments.

via : The Fires Down Below: ‘Look-Down’ Technology

Science data visualization

A quick note to all you gamers out there, Amazon.com is offering free trial downloads of all of their downloadable games.   Classics like Jewel Quest III, Tales of Monkey Island 5, and many others are free for you to check out, and then buy if you want.

Check it out, and let us know if you buy anything neat!

Graphics amazon, free, video game

The Strata Workspace

The roots of the developers behind Strata Design go back all the way to the late eighties. When Apple Macintoshes with tiny computer displays, ram measured in single digit megabytes and hard disks packed in whopping double digits ruled the computer graphic design landscape. Desktop publishing had only just started. Two Bringham Young University Students, Ken and Gary Bringhurst, wanted to create a 3D illustration package for the Mac that would offer sophisticated imagery that was, up until that point in time, unseen in consumer grade software, especially on an Apple Mac.

Over the years obviously things have changed and shifted the 3D landscape drastically and where once high-end 3D was only the domain of very expensive workstations like SGI, now there is a wealth of great 3D software packages available for every level of user.

During all this time Strata has seen many developers come and silently go away, or being folded into larger companies. But Strata has remained alert, active and very much in touch with what is still very much the growing market of visualization and 3D illustration.

Now with Design 3D CX 6 they have focused their direction even more to the ever growing need of designers who are fluent with 2D packages but are searching for way to show and communicate their work and their clients’ work in the third dimension. And it looks like Strata Design 3D CX 6 is just the package that will cater to this group of artists.

Read more…

Graphics feature, review, software, strata

Both YouTube and Vimeo announced last week that they would begin to support (on a limited basis) the new HTML5 ‘Video’ tag that allows video playback without relying on Flash.  The technology is impressive, but users quickly noticed that it didn’t work with FireFox.  Odd, since FireFox is 3.5 compliant, but it seemed to only work with Safari and Chrome?  Mozilla has finally come out with a response, and the big problem is that while YouTube and Vimeo are supporting a public standard (the HTML5 Video tag), they’re using it with a non-public proprietary codec, the classic H264.   Mozilla believes that using this proprietary codec is a bad idea for both providers and consumers, and is instead pushing something more open like the OggTheora codecs.

Apart from the issues with H.264 support in clients, there are also huge issues around H.264 for Web authors and content providers. Currently providing H.264 content on the Internet is zero-cost, but after 2010 that will almost certainly change. (…) We won/t know much about the terms until the end of this month. The key issue is not exactly how much it will cost, but that if you want to publish H.264 you will probably have to hire lawyers and negotiate a license with the MPEG-LA. If you just want to put a few videos on your Web site, or add a help video to your Web application, or put a video cut-scene in your Web game, that is probably not something you want to do.

I particularly love this comment from Robert O’Callahan:

But the MPEG-LA won’t bother suing me or my project, we’re not worth bothering with. Perhaps true, but I hope “remain irrelevant” is not the favoured strategy for most free software projects.

via Well, I’m Back: Video, Freedom And Mozilla. and Shaver: HTML5 Video and Codecs

Science browser, codecs, firefox, h264, html5, internet, mozilla, video

OnLive has come out swinging against the bad report written by Ryan Shrout last week, claming that his experience is not representative of the actual product because of his distance to a suitable hosting center.  Also, apparently the current version of the OnLive system hard-codes routes from users to specific hosting centers, so a user’s account is fixed to communicate only to one specific center.

The fact that Ryan Shrout was outside that area means, according to OnLive, there was no possibly way to give him a good experience. “The reason location is so critical is because of the speed of light. If you are more than 1,000 miles from an OnLive data center, then the round trip communications delay (‘ping’ time) between your home and OnLive will be too long for fast-action video games.”

Unfortunately, some other “anonymous” beta testers have come forward claiming that the experience isn’t much better in the “idea scenario”.  Of course, they are unconfirmed and uncorroborated, so take it all with a grain of salt.

via OnLive responds to bad press, more beta testers speak out.

Hardware onlive, videogame