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CGHeute has an interview with Jeff Campbell, VFX Supervisor on Legion.  Bringing an army of angels to life, hellbent (no pun intended) on bringing about the extinction of the human race is no small task, but Jeff was able to tap into previous experience from the Orphanage’s work on Max Payne to bring these larger-than-life characters to the screen.

There were many complex shots in this film.  But one that stands out is a moment when an army of angels descends from the heavens.  The shot begins in a medium close-up of Michael silhouetted against a sunny sky.  The camera then tilts up to reveal thousands of angels in formation.  The angels break formation and dive in a steep swirling vortex before flying by very close to camera.  The shot combines greenscreen footage with matte painting, crowd simulation, effects animation, and hero keyframe animation by Lead Animator Marc Schreiber.  It was a challenge to render and pull together so many elements but in the end it turned out very nice.

Jeff Campbell – VFX Supervisor “Legion” | cgheute.

Graphics interview, legion, movies, vfx

The GPU Technology Conference 2010 will take place on Monday, Sept. 20 to Thursday, Sept. 23 at the San Jose Convention Center in San Jose, California.

Heres the latest look behind the scenes at NVIDIA. We met with Bill Dally, NVIDIA’s Chief Scientist, who provided details on the upcoming 2010 GPU Tech Conference. Last fall’s GPU Tech Conference was a huge hit and we’re looking forward to the hosting another great show.

via : GPU Tech Conference 2010 Announced

Hardware cuda, fermi, gpgpu, nvidia

Previously [H]ard|OCP posted a video reviewing how easy it is to game with ATI’s eyefinity feature, assuming that you have the right hardware and LCD screens to do it. Now, [H]ard|OCP has posted a video review of the gaming performance of the ATI Radeon 5870 2GB graphics card. This card is running a 3×2 tiled display using Eyefinity. While it is a cool idea, the real question is how does it really play? From the introduction to the video:

Just to be clear, this is not our review of the ATI Radeon 5870 2GB Eyefinity 6 video card that will soon be available. This is however a look at what sort of gaming experience you should expect if you were using one to push six displays.

We take the Eyefinity 6 single-GPU card for a spin in some of the latest video games out, including: Metro 2033, Supreme Commander 2, Aliens vs. Predator, Bad Company 2, Batman, and Borderlands. 5760×2160 resolution is impressive, no matter how you look at it, but does it create a good gaming experience?

The take-away from the video is that in a 3×2 configuration, the bezels get in the way. This is especially true in first person shooter games. Click through the link to see the video.

via ATI Radeon 5870 2GB 3X2 Eyefinity Gaming Experience | [H]ard|OCP.

Hardware amd, ati, eyefinity, radeon

In an effort to shine some light into the United States government, Sunlight Labs is launching, not one, but six contests where you can win $5,000. The contests are:

• Data Visualization of Sunlight Community Data
• Visualization of Data from the Federal Budget and/or USASpending.gov
• Visualization of Recovery.gov Data
• Visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law
• Visualization of Congressional Rules/Floor Procedures
• Redesign of a Government Form
• Redesign of a .Gov website

Sunlight Labs is pleased to announce our latest contest — “Design for America.” This 10 week long design and data visualization extravaganza is focused on connecting the talents of art and design communities throughout the country to the wealth of government data now available through bulk data access and APIs, and to help nurture the field of information visualization. Our goal is simple and straightforward — to make government data more accessible and comprehensible to the American
public.

I already have a winning entry. For the visualization of How a Bill Becomes a Law, I would use the “I’m just a Bill” from School House Rock. Now you are going to have that song stuck in your head all day.

via Design for America.

Graphics data visualization, infographic

The Scientific Visualization Studio at NASA’s Goddard Flight Center has released its latest visualization of the changes in the mass of the ice sheet that covers Greenland. As s the mass of the ice sheet changes, so does its gravity. By using the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellite, researchers were able to compute the changes in the ice sheet. You can click through the link below to download a high-definition movie.

The mass changes of the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) are computed from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) inter-satellite range-rate observations for the period April 5, 2003 – July 25, 2009. The mass of the GIS has been computed at 10-day intervals and 200km spatial resolution from a regional high-resolution mascon solution (Luthcke and others, 2008 and 2006). The animation shows the change in mass referenced from April 5, 2003. The spatial variation in surface mass is shown in centimeters equivalent height of water. The time variation of the GIS mass is shown in the x-y plot insert with units of Gigatons.

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via SVS Animation 3687 – Greenland Ice Sheet Mass Changes from NASA GSFC GRACE Mascon Solutions with Banded Color Scale.

Science nasa, scientific visualization

Pedro M Cruz’s master thesis maps the traffic patterns of over 1500 vehicles over a month in Lisbon, visualizing the results in a variety of informative and aesthetically pleasing ways.

This post presents several experiments (piked between a total of more than 20 generated artifacts) that map 1534 vehicles, during October 2009 in Lisbon, leaving route trails and condensed in one single day. Therefore, the artifacts are animations of the traffic evolution in Lisbon during 24h (from 0:00 to 23:59). In the first artifact, when the traffic is slow, red circles are drawn – traffic clots.

Hit his website for several videos using different visualization criteria and colormaps.

via Information visualization et al.. via Infosthetics

Traffic in Lisbon – emphasis on sluggish areas from Pedro M Cruz on Vimeo.

Science thesis, traffic

At the IEEE VR2010 Conference in Waltham, MA this week, several companies are hawking their wares for virtual reality products and technology.  One great use of the technology comes from Swedish company Curictus, that combines the SensAble Phantom Omni with some VR glasses to create a small rehabilitation system.

This type of set-up can be used for rehabilitation. Turning exercises into a computerized game encourages patients to complete their exercises and keeps precise records of their performance, says Tommy Forsell at SenseGraphics, a company that provides open-source software for the combined device.

In another game, I used the stylus as a hammer to hit 3-D pop-up images. This game is designed to measure stroke patients' response times and the accuracy of their actions.

It’s not going to teach you to walk again, but in use for small fine motor control and reflex analysis, it should work great.

via Technology Review: Blogs: TR Editors’ blog: VR and Haptics for Rehabilitation.

Hardware, Science biomed, conference, sensable, virtual reality

SlopeViews aims to take the Immersive Media 360-degree Camera to the marketing industry as a clever way to ‘immerse’ potential customers in their ski-trails and slopes with interactive coordinated maps and video.

Your online viewer will feel like a LOCAL after exploring your resort with OnSnow. SlopeViews produces interactive & engaging content with a message on every trail, lift, and mountain feature. By taking them inside lodges, restaurants, trams, conference space, and hotel amenities, SlopeView’s OnSnow Trail Maps convert prospective online users into confident guests.

You can hit their website to see a demonstration of the system in action.

via SlopeViews OnSnow Beta v.02 – Immersive Ski Trail Map.

Hardware immersive media, onsnow

An international team of astronomers studied over 446,000 galaxies from the Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS). The COSMOS survey was conducted over 590 orbits of the Hubble Space Telescope. During those orbits, Hubble used the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) to capture 575 images of the Universe that slightly overlapped. This makes the COSMOS survey the largest survey ever conducted with Hubble.

The researchers then assigned redshift data to 194,000 of the galaxies. Redshift simply means that as an object moves away from the observer, absorption lines in the spectrum shift towards the red end of the spectrum. The more these absorption lines shift, the farther away the observed galaxy likely is. The redshift gives an estimate of distance to the galaxy. The redshift data was collected by ground-based telescopes.

With the COSMOS survey, and the assigned redshift data, the astronomers were able to independently confirm that the expansion of the Universe is accelerating. This acceleration is thought to be caused by a hypothetical form of energy called Dark Energy.

If you click through the link below, the story has four more images, and one high-definition video.

This image shows a smoothed reconstruction of the total (mostly dark) matter distribution in the COSMOS field, created from data taken by the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based telescopes. It was inferred from the weak gravitational lensing distortions that are imprinted onto the shapes of background galaxies. The colour coding indicates the distance of the foreground mass concentrations as gathered from the weak lensing effect. Structures shown in white, cyan, and green are typically closer to us than those indicated in orange and red. To improve the resolution of the map, data from galaxies both with and without redshift information were used.

The new study presents the most comprehensive analysis of data from the COSMOS survey. The researchers have, for the first time ever, used Hubble and the natural “weak lenses” in space to characterise the accelerated expansion of the Universe.

Credit: NASA, ESA, P. Simon (University of Bonn) and T. Schrabback (Leiden Observatory)

via Hubble confirms cosmic acceleration with weak lensing.

Science astronomy, hubble, nasa

NASA has released the land surface temperature for the winter of 2009-2010. The land surface temperature is not the same temperature that is recorded at weather stations. The weather stations measure the air temperature. Instead, the land surface temperature is an estimate of how hot are the desserts, the trees, the roads, the tops of buildings, etc.

The image to the right is for the month of February 2010. Areas in the image that are shaded in blue are up to 12 degrees Centigrade colder than average. Areas in the image that are shaded in red are up to 12 degrees Centigrade warmer than average. The average temperature is calculated over the 2000 to 2008 time period.

You can click through the link at the bottom to see the data for December, January, and February. All the images at the site are much larger and clearer than the one shown here on the right.

This series of maps of land surface temperature anomalies for Northern Hemisphere winter 2009-2010 is a case in point. Based on observations from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, the maps show how temperatures in December 2009 and January and February 2010 compared to the 2000-2008 averages for each month. Places where temperatures were up to 12 degrees Celsius colder than the average are blue, places that were near average are white, and places that were up to 12 degrees warmer than the 2000–2008 average are red.

NASA images created by Jesse Allen, using data obtained from the using data provided by the Land Processes Distributed Active Archive Center (LPDAAC). Caption by Rebecca Lindsey.

via Temperature Anomalies, Winter 2009-2010 : Image of the Day.

Science nasa