VizWorld.com

“Descendents” is a beautiful 14-minute animated short film telling the story of two flowers, an old and jaded flower voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and a young and hopeful flower voiced by Christy Scott-Cashman.  Begun in 2005 as a diploma project by Heiko van der Scherm and Holger Schoenberger at the Institute of Animation, the project resulted in not only the great animated short, but several side-projects like special facial animation rigs and an interesting project management tool called  ‘ShotManager’:

As a result of these requirements, the “ShotManager” was born – first planed to be open for any kind of project, but then customized for this project only. Since the whole film takes place at the edge of a clearing of a dark forest, the set had a fixed size. Splitting the set into about 6 multiple reference models has made it possible to set the scene layering inside of the scene manger (enable/disable what’s required)

The Shot manager had also other nice features. If we had to make a change for all scenes (which happened a lot of times), we have just done it on one scene, copied the script log and put it into the Shot Manager. It then generated a script which opened every scene and made our changes. We let it run overnight and all scenes had been updated.

See the video below, then read the MakingOf at CGSociety.

via CGSociety – The Making of ‘Descendants’.

Descendants from Goro Fujita on Vimeo.

Graphics animation, makingof, short, vfx

The Congressional Budget Office recently said that the health care bill before Congress would cost $940 billion and reduce future federal deficits by $138 billion over 10 years. How will your Representative vote? Who is voting yes? Who is voting no? Who is on the fence. Which way will they lean?

The New York Times has an interactive infographic showing all the Representatives, and where they have lined up already. For those Representatives who have not publicly declared their position, the Times includes some history on how they have voted in the past which gives clues as to how they will vote on the bill.

Below are House Democrats who may decide the fate of the health care overhaul in coming days. Some are members who supported Representative Bart Stupak’s amendment that added abortion restrictions to the House’s bill, which passed in November, and feel the Senate bill, which the House will be voting on, is too weak on abortion. There are also representatives who voted “no” in November, but who party leaders hope to sway. If all of the current 431 House members vote, Democrats will need 216 to pass.

This is an interesting comparison to the Washington Post version.

via Democrats to Watch on the Health Care Vote – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com.

Graphics infographic, interactive, nytimes

The Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center has released its latest visualization of a Lunar South Pole Flyover. The animation starts by using data acquired by Clementine for a global view of the moon. It then transitions into using data acquired by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter when flying over the Lunar South Pole.

The Lunar Reconnaissance Oribiter (LRO) was launched on June 18, 2009. Its mission is to map the moon’s surface, find safe landing sites, locate potential resources, characterize the radiation environment, and demonstrate new technology. One of the instruments on board is the Lunar Orbiter Laser Altimeter (LOLA) which measures landing site slopes, lunar surface roughness, and has begun generation of a high resolution 3D map of the Moon.

via SVS Animation 3686 – LRO/LOLA Lunar South Pole Flyover.

Science astronomy, nasa, scientific visualization

GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market.  The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android.  I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data.

See the fullsize graphic below, or at GigaOM.

iPhone vs Others: The Mobile OS Market – GigaOM.

Read more…

Science infographic, mobile

People have been trying for a long time now to bring 3-D to the world wide web. We have had VRML and Web3D, but nothing really seems to have taken off. CNet has posted an article in Google’s attempt to bring 3-D to the web. As always, there are some problems that need to be overcome.

One hurdle, though, is that WebGL uses the Khronos Group’s OpenGL graphics interface standard, but not all video cards have OpenGL support. Google hopes to sidestep this issue with a new open-source projet that translates the OpenGL commands into the related dialect more common on Windows computers, Microsoft’s Direct3D. The project is called ANGLE, short for Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine,…

You can also find out more about ANGLE on the Chromium blog.

via Google aims for easier 3D Web on Windows | Deep Tech – CNET News.

Graphics google, webgl

The IMAX Hubble 3D movie is getting rave reviews, and some of that is due to the contributions of the NCSA Visualization team.  The team from the NCSA created some massive 5616×4096 sequences for the movie.

“NCSA’s visualization team brought exceptional talent and expertise to this project,” said producer/director Toni Myers. “With software and skill and an artistic eye, they brought the science of the Hubble telescope to life.”

The team at NCSA—including Robert Patterson, Stuart Levy, Alex Betts, Matthew Hall, and AJ Christensen—worked for six months on their contributions to Hubble 3D, using their VirtualDirector software and a state-of-the-art 4k resolution digital 3D display to view the work in progress and interactively choreograph shots with Myers and STScI astrophysicist Frank Summers.

The press release claims they contributed ’600-billion pixels’, a rather pointless metric to go by but one that definitely sounds good for PR.  Some back of the napkin math:

• 5616 * 4096 = 23-Megapixels (Mp) per frame
• 23Mp * 24fps = 552Mp per second
• 600Billion / 552Million/s = 1086s, or 18 Minutes

18 Minutes sounds a bit long to me, but it’s probably spread over several sections of the 48-minute movie, and I’m sure some of it wound up on the cutting room floor.

Nonetheless, Contratulations NCSA!

via NCSA visualizations featured in Hubble 3D.

Update: The NCSA’s Bill Bell informs us that just over 10 minutes made the final cut.

Graphics hubble, imax, ncsa

Imagine putting five 22″ LCD monitors together to run a 5×1 Eyefinity setup. That is a total screen resolution of 8400×1050. That is not too shabby. The setup was a Intel E5200 CPU running at 3.33 GHz, 4GB of memory, and a Radeon HD5850. The game they are playing is DIRT2. Of course, a 5×1 setup is not currently available in the ATI drivers, but as we have reported before, it should be coming soon. Take a look at the embedded video below.

via YouTube – 8400×1050 @ DIRT2 5x 22″ LCD setup.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, radeon

Disney seems to be reinventing the Odd Couple via a new partnership between Disney Research and an Irish scientific organization called Clarity that aims to explore the use of multiple cameras (several dozen) to enhance sporting events.

The researchers said they will initially focus on the sport of field hockey by outfitting University College Dublin’s hockey pitch with up to 21 cameras to capture a wide variety of information for evaluation by researchers on a weekly basis.

This project is part of a larger research agreement focused on advanced application-oriented research in sensor networks, wireless motion sensing/tracking, motion capture, WiFi network modeling, and human-computer interaction.

Unfortunately, there’s no information on exactly what they plan to do.  Stereoscopic 3D?  Realtime 3D Reconstructions?  Automatic Object Tracking?  Who knows..

via Disney starts sports visualization project – UPI.com.

Science disney, research, sports

Financial Infographics has published an infographic that provides a comparison of stock markets and their growth since December 31, 2008. I am not sure why they chose that date. Remember, the United States market did not bottom until March of 2009. Also remember that past performance is not indicative of future results.

via Stock Markets Around The World Make A Comeback.

Graphics infographic

Samsung made a small splash in the 3D pond at CEBIT recently with the announcement of their “3D Starter Kit”, which contained a pair of wireless (battery-driven) 3D Shutter glasses and a 3D Blu-ray movie, all compatible with their upcoming new line of 3D Televisions.  Now, the 3D Starter Kit and the TV are available for pre-order from Amazon.

The 3D Glasses Kit, the Samsung SSG-P2100T, is available for order today (and in-stock) for $349.99.  No word on what “Blu-ray 3D Movie” is included, but other sources state that it is a special previously-unavailable 3D release Monsters vs. Aliens, last year’s Dreamworks Animation release. It comes with no emitter, instead relying on integrated emitters that Samsung will be packaging inside compatible televisions.

Of course, they have a TV for that..

The compatible television is the Samsung PN50C7000, a 50-Inch 1080p 3D Plasma Television.  Unfortunately, it’s not LCD, but the slim-design TV comes fully equipped for 3D at the low-price of $1,799 and is available for pre-order now with a ship date of April 2nd. From their own description:

Get a true cinematic experience without going to the cinema with a Samsung plasma HDTV. This Samsung PN50C7000, with Mega Dynamic Contrast Ratio makes sure every frame is saturated with dense, rich color. Samsung is also ENERGY STAR compliant so you are assured that your 50 -inch plasma HDTV is helping the environment by using less enery while saving you money.

Both items are only eligible for shipping in the US (the TV only in the lower-48), so international customers will have to wait.

Hardware 3d, samsung, stereoscopic, tv