VizWorld.com

Ronen Bekerman has a great tutorial on using Instanced geometry and proxies to create “ground covering” in the form of rocks, grass, and leaves.  The results are amazing and go a great ways to add realism to a scene.  He uses several scripts to make it easier, and provides links and details on each.

Advanced Painter script (found here at the script spot) was used to paint / scatter on the ground surface. I loaded the objects I wanted to paint on the ground into the list, selected the ground as the surface to be painted on – and started to paint away!

You can adjust your settings according to your needs as you go along. The Advanced Painter script is really powerful… It has become a regular part of my workflow.

via 3D Ground Cover Modeling in 3D Studio Max – Ronen Bekerman – 3D Architectural Visualization Blog.

Graphics 3dsmax, tutorial, vray

Here’s today’s Pixels:

• NAB: NewTek will be holding daily drawings at NAB totaling $60k!
• Tutorial: Modeling a Photorealistic Actress in 3D
• Inspiration: Best of the PSDVault Flickr Group vol20
• Inspiration: DriftNet Art Installation
• Freebie: Brick Textures

Deals:

• Amazon: $20 Off Adobe Photoshop Elements 8
• Amazon: $20 Off Adobe Photoshop Elements 8 [MAC]
• Amazon: $10 Off Adobe Premiere Elements 8
• Amazon: $30 Off Adobe Photoshop & Premiere Elements 8
• Amazon: Optoma HD700x 720P DLP Projector – $599
• Amazon: Fosmon 10ft HDMI Cable – $6.98
• Best Buy: XBox 360 Elite Console with Forza 3 & HALO3:ODST and a $50 Gift Card – $299

Graphics, Hardware pixels

California has more people than Portugal. California is larger than Italy in land area. California has a larger GDP than Greece and Spain, combined. This message is brought to you by the California Independent Voter Network.

It is a nice little graphic that makes California sound like a great place to work and live. At least California’s budget deficit is not nearly as bad as that of Portugal, Italy, Greece, or Spain.

The following is a visual representation of data about the State of California and how its economic, geographic, and demographic characteristics measure up against other states and countries in the world. California’s sheer size and scope make it quite noteworthy among the fifty American states. Hopefully the information below will help give you a better sense of scale when thinking about the State of California:

via : California vs. The World: An Infographic Look At The Golden State

Read more…

Science infographic

At last week’s MIX10 event, several people talked about NVidia driving IE9 with GPU acceleration, but ATI was there as well.  A new blog post from AMD reaffirms their own commitment to GPGPU, in particular the new IE9 features.  These two bullets in particular:

# GPU acceleration enables improved screen response, higher quality text as well as high-quality screen zooming. These features are enabled by the latest ATI Radeon™ HD graphics cards that support DirectX® 10 and DirectX® 11. This can help the browser experience be more intuitive, fluid and dynamic.

# Introduced with Windows® 7, Direct2D is a hardware-accelerated, immediate-mode 2-D graphics API that provides high performance and high-quality rendering for 2-D geometry, bitmaps and text. With IE9’s support of Direct2D and open HTML5 standards enabling richer multimedia tasks, AMD’s CPU and GPU technology can offer outstanding support for these rich graphical experiences.

Most of this is just PR fluff, as NVidia cards run Direct2D just as well. The one big win is that NVidia still doesn’t have a DX11 card on the market (Fermi will change that next week, if it’s actually available for purchase).  The one haunting bullet is this:

IE9 is expected to offer greatly increased JavaScript performance over prior versions of IE.  A new JIT will generate code based on the system’s processor, which we expect to provide an improved experience on AMD CPUs.

Could AMD have worked with Microsoft to ‘optimize’ the new JIT engine to work better with an AMD CPU + ATI GPU pairing?  I suppose it’s possible.  Most likely it’s still just PR fluff, but it does raise the question.

via Visualizing a More Vivid Internet at MIX10 | The Virtualization Blog.

Science amd, ati, gpgpu, microsoft

cgCoach brings us the announcement of the Computer Graphics Student Awards, giving you a chance to submit your work to be viewed by some of the biggest names in the industry and a chance to win recognition and prizes!

This event aims to provide you with an amazing opportunity to showcase your creative and technical skills to leading production companies, and get a chance to kick start your career. Prizes for this amazing event include over $67,000 worth of Internships, software, and hardware… and all you have to do to enter is upload a single video.

A great list of sponsors are already involved, including Framestore, Double Negative, Luxology (modo), Pixologic (zbrush), and NextLimit (realflow).  Registrations are open now, so enter!

via cgCoach.com – CGSA.

Graphics contest

Microsoft has had a few tries at the “Remote Desktop” system over the years, with Terminal Server and Remote Desktop being the two most notable.  They’re coming out with the next iteration in this, in combination with Citrix systems, called RemoteFX.  AMD, in particular, seems excited about this, in particular with this one point:

And the Microsoft RemoteFX feature will accomplish this by harnessing the power of GPU computing to accelerate the rendering of hosted desktop PCs when paired with servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, such as servers based on AMD Opteron™ processors.

GPU acceleration is cropping up everywhere these days, and being able to push “rich 3D, multimedia experiences” remotely would be huge.  AMD has been working with Microsoft on some time by providing server hardware and testing platforms, and combined with this new “HDX” technology it could be a big win for AMD.

via Can You Visualize the Virtual Future? | The Fusion Blog. and Microsoft’s Announcement

Hardware, Science amd, citrix, hdx, microsoft, remotefx

[H]ard|OCP has posted a review of the performance of the Catalyst 10.3a drivers. Basically they show that there was some performance gains in all the games. Personally, I think that the driver release is an attempt to spoil the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480 and 470 launch. The rumor is that these two Nvidia cards perform only 5% to 10% better than similar ATI cards. If that is so, then the following statement from the article is particularly poignant.

We generally saw performance improvements in every game we tested; there is no question about that. AMD should be commended for staying vigilant on improving performance in games. We know these guys work hard at it. However, it does have to be said that most of these improvements don’t add up to changing the gameplay experience. Anything under a 10% performance improvement can pretty much be written off in gamer’s eyes. To gamers, these small increases in performance are meaningless if they don’t let you enable an extra in-game option or raise graphics settings.

via Catalyst Performance – AMD’s ATI Catalyst 10.3a Driver Performance | [H]ard|OCP.

Hardware amd, ati, driver, radeon

If you thought last week was bad for Nvidia rumors, this week could be even worse as we get nearer the March 26th launch date. The rumor of the day is that the GF100 yields are below 50% at TSMC. This is an improvement over the 2% yields reported last year. 50% yields are in line with what was reported for ATI last year.

Since TSMC’s 40nm yield currently is still lower than 50%, Nvidia will block some of the graphics cores with problems on the card. As a result, the GeForce GTX 480 will only have 480 cores and GTX 470 only 448, the sources noted.

And if you want more leaked photos of the Nvidia GeForce GTX 480, you can go here.

via Nvidia initial batch of GeForce GTX 400 series to have fewer cores than expected.

Hardware fermi, gf100, gtx470, gtx480, nvidia, tsmc

… researchers from the University of Missouri have a 3D printer that could one day recreate human organs by using a cocktail made from human cells. If your liver was failing, for instance, cells from your liver could be used to print a healthy one, or cells from your heart could be used to create a new heart, and so on.

Right now, all of that is still a long way off. What has been done, however, is recreate a human vein using “bio-ink,” or the liquid sludge that’s produced using human cells and printed onto “bio-paper.” This paper slowly dissolves as the layers of ink bind and start to take on the shape us humans would recognize.

Inhabitat | Scientists Use 3D Printer To Create First “Printed” Human Vein
DVICE | 3D printer uses bio-ink to create the first ‘printed’ human veins

Hardware 3d, health

WebGL is coming to browsers whether we want it or not, bringing hardware accelerated 3D graphics without the need for Flash or Java.  However, it does rely on functioning OpenGL drivers on the client system.  For most people, this isn’t an issue, but for people running Windows it might.  For those few people who have working DirectX drivers, but no OpenGL drivers, a new project is on the horizon to transparently translate between the two.

The goal of ANGLE is to allow Windows users to seamlessly run WebGL content by translating OpenGL ES 2.0 API calls to DirectX 9 API calls.

Current browser implementations of WebGL depend on having OpenGL 2.0 drivers present to render content, however these drivers are not available on many computers. ANGLE is an early work-in-progress, but when complete, it will enable browsers to run WebGL content without requiring users to find and install new OpenGL drivers.

You may think this is unnecessary, and I’ld agree.  However, people using older windows laptops with Intel integrated graphics chips have no functioning OpenGL driver, but a working DirectX driver.  These systems, while horribly outdated, are very prevalent and widespread.  While ANGLE may serve a niche market, it seems an important (albeit temporary) piece in bringing WebGL to the masses.

via angleproject – Project Hosting on Google Code.

Science angle, webgl