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The Thea Renderer is now available in a free beta version, available for Windows, Linux, and Mac OSX.  The beta has watermarks and a resolution limit, but is completely functional otherwise.

Finally, we are here! Thea Render has reached a level that we can safely move forward and publish our work. Our new site has been deployed although there will be improvements and changes in the next weeks for better integration. We want to thank all for your patience and support and we hope that you are going to like Thea and Plugins. We will be waiting for your feedback in the development forums and of course, we are going to answer any question you may have.

They offer plugins for 3ds Max, Blender, Cinema4D, Sketchup, and SoftImage.  Try it out, and if you like it then you can buy the Render for only 161 €.

Thea Render.

Graphics renderer, thea

CGSociety has a great article about the short film “Meet Meline” from Virginie Goyons and Sebastien Laban.  In it they discuss the whole process from concept to completion, and some of the interesting revelations along the way.

When they knew from their storyboard previs that the background would be out of focus they just reduced the polygons number by 10 or even 100 “Since it will be blurred during compositing you don t have to have every detail of the objects and hires textures with features like bump specular etc ” explains Sebastien. “We also separated their render into multipasses.” The foreground was rendered alone first render then the middle ground second render and then the background third render . Instead of having to handle millions of polygons at once this old technique allows to spread the amount of work and helped the computer to complete the render.

via CGSociety – ‘Meet Meline’.

Graphics animation, short, vfx

Jess Bachman is back with the new “Death & Taxes: 2011” poster, and he’s packed even more information into the amazing poster.

There are some cool new features of this years poster too. Last year I had to use dual percentages to represent all the stimulus spending craziness that went on. Well this year that was not needed, but I figured I had already designed it for two percentages, perhaps I can get some extra use in there. So in addition to the 2010-2011 percentage change, I have included the 2001-2011 change.

Buy it now to experience the 6-square feet of soul-crushing debt and financial mayhem of the US government, available in all its glossy glory for $24 USD.

via Death & Taxes: 2011 RELEASED! | WallStats.com The Art of Information.

Graphics death&taxes, infographic, poster

Stock analysts have gotten some information on the inner workings of NVidia, and evidently didn’t like what they saw.  Claiming chip yields of 20-30%  for the Fermi processors, and a backlog inventory of only 10,000, they’ve downgraded from “Strong Buy” to “Hold” and expect them to lose market share in upcoming quarters.

Needham analyst says “We are downgrading NVIDIA to a Hold and removing our 12-month price target was $22 after a series of channel checks indicating that Fermi is not ramping well and there could be further product delays. Based on our findings NVIDIA has very limited supply of Fermi desktop notebook parts and yields remain poor at around 20-30 %”

Of course, this could be a big win for AMD who might find themselves with another 6-12 months of effectively no competition.

via StreetInsider.com – Update – Needham & Company Downgrades NVIDIA (NVDA) to Hold; Concerns of Fermi Ramp and Gross Margin Risk. via XBitLabs and ExPreview

Hardware fermi, nvidia

While no games are out (yet) that support it, Sony is pushing a new firmware update for their PS3 gaming console that brings stereoscopic 3D support to the masses.

In addition, this update preps the PS3 system for some upcoming new features, including 3D stereoscopic gaming, which is coming soon to PS3, in time for the launch of Sony’s 3D BRAVIA TVs.

Of course there are other updates, but who cares about those :)

The 3D They are supporting seems to be active-shutter based, and they claim that eventually it will be retroactively available to all games (presumably via a driver-tweak, similar to how NVidia implements it now via OpenGL & DirectX hooks).

via PS3 3.30 System Software Update – PlayStation Blog.

Hardware 3d, ps3, sony, stereoscopic

In a recent conference call with financial analysts, the Chief Executive Officer of AMD, Dirk Meyer said “We are ramping the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series now and look forward to refreshing the entire lineup in the second half of next year”. By next year, he was referring to the 2010 fiscal year. “The first intersection of our AMD GPUs and Globalfoundries are on the 28nm. We haven’t been public with respect to any timing there.” It looks like that we will see a refresh of the ATI Radeon HD 5000 series in time for the Christmas season, and that it will be manufactured on a 28nm process.

ATI to make 28nm GPUs at GlobalFoundries @ Guru3D

ATI’s New-Generation Graphics Processors on Track for the Second Half of 2010 – AMD’s CEO @ Xbitlabs

Hardware amd, ati

This week’s recommended resource comes from Adobe Press who has just listed all of their CS5 training material online.  In particular, the Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom In a Book.

Creative professionals seeking the fastest, easiest, most comprehensive way to learn Adobe Photoshop CS5 choose Adobe Photoshop CS5 Classroom in a Book from the Adobe Creative Team at Adobe Press. The 14 project-based lessons in this book show readers step-by-step the key techniques for working in Photoshop CS5.

In addition to learning the key elements of the Photoshop interface, this completely revised CS5 edition shows readers how to edit images with precise selection control, correct a wide range of lens-based errors, interactively transform their images with the new Puppet Warp tool, and easily remove or replace image elements with the new Content-Aware Fill mode. The book also covers new powerful painting effects to artistically enhance images and shows how to combine multiple exposures into a single HDR image.

For the first time, the companion DVD will feature, in addition to the lesson files, 2 hours of free video tutorials from Learn Adobe Photoshop CS5 by Video by Adobe Press and video2brain, a great added value!

In addition to this, they also have the Adobe Illustrator CS5 Classroom, and all the rest of the CS5 suite..

This book and many others is available in the VizWorld Store.

Science adobe, cs5, resource of the week

NASA’s newest solar observatory, the Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO), is still only in the commissioning phase, calibrating and testing, but is already creating breathtaking pictures of the sun that have never been seen before.

One particularly interesting observation, Fisher said, shows the evolution of an active region of the sun, also known as a sunspot. The dark spots on the sun's surface are connected to intense magnetic activity. SDO caught this sunspot in decline that didn't look quite how scientists expected it to.

Science is already underway, baffling researchers with the amazing findings that defy expectation and logic.  Surely, more beautiful images will be coming soon.

via SPACE.com — ‘Spectacular’ First Images from New Solar Observatory Released.

Science nasa, SDO, sun

Defense and Academia have historically been the two driving factors of stereoscopic & 3D systems, being that they are the only folks with the needs and deep pockets for VR systems, large-scale projector installations, and CAVE’s.  All that is changing with the new push on consumer 3D and reasonably priced stereoscopic televisions and displays coming to consumer retail channels.  This means that even the Defense industries that didn’t get into 3D before may suddenly find it a reasonably priced and attractive option.

“The defense and government segment will offer 3D technology makers huge opportunities over the next five years,” says Arrington, “Many government agencies and government funded projects will turn to 3D technology for advanced training and analysis. No agency is looking to waste money right now so any technology that can prove it saves a government money will have an advantage. ”

via Computer Graphics World – Defense and Government 3D Visualization, Simulation, and Training Market to Grow Quickly.

Science 3d, defense, stereoscopic

The developers of CULATools, a linear algebra library specifically designed and optimized for CUDA architectures, got their hands on the Fermi-based NVidia Tesla C2050 and put it through the paces.  With almost no changes to the code (only a few compiler flags, no code changes), they got huge performance gains.

As you can see, Fermi is no slouch! We’re reporting performance gains for doubles up to 3x over the previous generation of Tesla GPUs. It’s also very important to note that these gains are achieved with no Fermi-specific optimizations added — these are practically plug-and-play performance enhancements. We have every expectation that with a little time and effort we can improve significantly upon these already impressive numbers.

via CULAtools – Initial Fermi Performance.

Hardware, Science benchmark, culatools, fermi, gpgpu, nvidia