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If you’re watched a lot of Cartoon Network lately, you might have seen Meindbender’s work.  Using Maxwell render, they previewed a short 30s spot on CGSociety’s forums that eventually turned into a paying gig with Cartoon Network, and they’ve written some tips and tricks on using Maxwell to achieve their clay stop-motion look.

“Maxwell is awesome,” says Michael, “but it’s kind of sad for me as I once was completely obsessed with building complex shader trees. I can now basically throw that hard-earned knowledge out the door, as the setup in Maxwell Render is extremely easy and straight forward.

“Rendering using an unbiased software takes longer to calculate of course, but I could honestly say that we gained back that time in setup. Using the software’s multilight function, it allowed me to render out the lights separately and do all the fine tuning in comp, which was another big time saver.

via CGSociety – MEINDBENDER.

Graphics advertising, maxwell, meindbender, television, vfx

MPC made the VFX of 5 important creatures in the new “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” movie, and VFX Supervisor Guillaume Rocheron discusses the technology and difficulties of the work.

Hades was very challenging as fire was a major component of the character and had to be both extremely detailled and very controllable according to his performance. Our FX team pushed the fire simulations to a much higher resolution than we’ve done previously to ensure details were contributing to the motion and not only added as a post-process. The simulations were computed at a voxel size of under 1mm and then plugged into MPC’s rendering system to generate accurate illumination onto the character. The team used the same methodology to create the Lost Souls, producing super natural fire, shaped and timed specifically for every shot.

In addition to the fire simulations of Hades, they discuss the hair simulation used for the Minotaur and the Hellhounds.

via Percy Jackson and the Olympians; The Lightning Thief.

Graphics movie, mpc, percyjackson, vfx

NASA astronomers have released video taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of our famed ringed planet Saturn. In the video you can see the rings of Saturn nearly edge on. This allowed the telescope to capture magnificent views of the northern and southern aurora. These aurora are comparable to Earth’s own Northern and Southern lights. They are caused by the interaction of a planet’s magnetic field with solar wind particles. From the ESA/NASA site that published the Hubblecast:

In January and March 2009, researchers using Hubble took advantage of a rare opportunity to record Saturn when its rings are edge-on, resulting in a unique movie featuring both of the giant planet’s poles. Saturn is only in this position every 15 years or so and this favourable orientation has allowed a sustained study of the two beautiful and dynamic aurorae, Saturn’s own northern and southern lights.

The James Webb Space Telescope is slated to be the replacement for the aging Hubble Space Telescope. It is slated for launch in 2014, and will be a infrared space observatory.

via : Hubblecast 33: Saturn’s stunning double show

Science astronomy

While watching the Olympics the other night, I noticed a commercial from GE talking about their new pocket sized ultrasound. I can see how such a small device could be very useful in many clinical settings, but especially in third-world settings or by first responders to an emergency. For some reason, this device reminds me of the the Tricorder from the Original Star Trek. I am sure the GE version costs more than the $40 Amazon wants to charge, but it should be more useful as well. From the press release:

GE Healthcare today announced the availability of Vscan, a new, pocket-sized visualization tool developed to provide physicians with imaging capabilities at the point-of-care. Roughly the size of a smart phone, Vscan houses powerful, ultra-smart ultrasound technology that provides clinicians with an immediate, non-invasive method to help secure visual information about what is happening inside the body. Vscan is portable and can easily be taken from room to room to be used in many clinical, hospital or primary care settings.

via : GE Healthcare Introduces Vscan Pocket-Sized Visualization Tool for Point-of-Care Imaging

Hardware, Science biomed, ge

Mint has put up and infographic just in time for Valentine’s Day, which if you think about it for a minute, was yesterday. Unlike the earlier infographic from BillShrink, this one focuses on how the holiday helps to drive up the sales of flowers. Interestingly enough, February is not the top month for flower sales. That gold medal belongs to the month of May, which is when Mother’s day occurs. It looks like we care more for our moms than we do for our sweethearts.

via : MintLife

Graphics infographic

The AMD 5830 GPU was to have launched on January 25, 2010. As we reported earlier, the reason for the delay was that a problem on the circuitboard was triggering an error when it underwent testing. Now more details about the 5830 have been revealed. The 5830 is to have 1280 unified shaders running at 750 MHz, 64 texture mapping units, 32 render output units, and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1 GHz. As a comparison, the more expensive 5850 has 1440 unified shaders running at 725 MHz, and 1 GB of GDDR5 memory running at 1 GHz. The 5850 sells for about $300 on NewEgg. From the article:

… the card should cost around 215€, or about 17% less than the average HD 5850 card on the other side of the Atlantic. This means that, if accurate, and the same price relationship is retained for the U.S. market, the upcoming card could sell for around $250.

via : Unannounced Radeon HD 5830 price and specs revealed

Hardware 5830, amd, ati

Designers, coders, artists, and visualization folks alike can start filling out travel request as a new reason to attend London’s IEEE IV010 conference comes courtesy of Information Aesthetics: the DAVis`10, or International Symposium on Design & Aesthetics in Visualization.

“This symposium aims to bring together researchers and practitioners of design, art and related disciplines. The goal is to share their stories and experiences on how the needs and goals of both users and businesses are met through information visualisation.

It supports the publication of research in two general domains: Design and Aesthetics. Design refers to the development of visualisation as a creative design process. Aesthetics refers to the role of user experience in visualisation, as understood in three distinct components: aesthetic experience, experience of meaning, and emotional experience.

Deadlines are tight tho, just 2 weeks (March 1st) but even if you don’t present you definitely want to attend.

via DaVis’10: Design and Aesthetics in Visualization – information aesthetics.

Science conference, davis, visualization

Anandtech has posted a fascinating article on the development of the codenamed Cyprus family of GPUs from AMD. If you are not familiar with what GPU goes with the codename, then the answer is the 5800 series of chips. This includes the 5870 with 1600 shaders, the 5850 with 1440 shaders, and the 5830 with 1280 shaders – even though it has yet to be released. The article talks about all the considerations that went into designing and manufacturing the chip. My favorite part of the article is when they designed Eyefinity, which was internally called SunSpot. They were so paranoid that only a few, select people knew about SunSpot until the last minute. From the article:

When in his own cube Carrell always spoke about SunSpot in code. He called it feature A. Carrell was paranoid, and for good reason. The person who sat on the other side of Carrell’s cube wall left to work for NVIDIA a couple months into the SunSpot project. In all, ATI had three people leave and work for NVIDIA while SunSpot was going on. Carrell was confident that NVIDIA never knew what was coming.

Of course, I am still waiting for the Eyefinity⁶, which is the 6 DisplayPort version. I suspect, though I do not know, that it will be launched around the time of the GF400 series of cards from rival NVidia.

via : The RV870 Story: AMD Showing up to the Fight

Hardware 5870, amd, ati

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, would have us take a look at the job losses as report by the BLS, and correlate them with the President of the United States. From the bar chart to the right, one could mistakenly make the case that President Bush caused all the job losses, and President Obama has stopped the job losses. While some of the policies of the Bush administration may have caused the Great Recession, that same administration also enacted policies to stabilize the economy and to stop job losses before President Obama was ever elected. Likewise, once President Obama was in office, he enacted or continued similar policies. Both policies took time to take effect, and it just so happens that the peak of job losses coincided with President Obama’s inauguration. We have often said here that “Correlation does not imply Causation”. What we mean by that statement is that just because two events occur simultaneously, it does not follow that one event causes the other event.

via : CHART OF THE DAY

Graphics infographic, unemployment

Metaio, creators of the Junaio mobile augmented reality platform we’ve discussed before, is attending the Mobile World Congress this week and announcing their new SDK for Augmented Reality tool development : Unifeye.

The Unifeye® Mobile SDK is the world´s first and only software development kit for creating mobile augmented reality (AR) applications. The professional toolbox is supporting all major mobile platforms and features the latest image recognition technologies, 3D rendering for animations with real time interaction and optimized components for mobile hardware. With the Unifeye® Mobile SDK software it is possible to create fascinating marketing experiences, intuitive information design, mobile augmented reality games or innovative retail solutions. Based on the proven AR platform Unifeye® by metaio it is possible to easily develop and deploy solutions at the interface between the real and virtual world.

Unifeye works in both high-level and low-level languages, and even works in a “programless” mode where you simply import XML descriptors and let their tools do all the work for you.

In addition to the Unifeye announcement, the metaio’s CTO OEter Meier will be giving a speech in the “Mobile Innovation” session to discuss how mobile technology will change our lives, and how augmented reality is a major factor.  Also, Sony Ericsson will be demonstrating a new Android-drive device at an event called ‘Creation Day” on Wednesday (February 17th) that will be the first example of metaio’s new feature tracking technology.

See the product video for Unifeye after the break.

Read more…

Hardware, Science augmented reality, metaio, sdk, unifeye