Autodesk is bringing their premiere CAD design and modeling package back to the Mac after over a decade of being a Windows Exclusive. Many people don’t know that it used to run on Apple hardware, but now they will have the chance to try it again. Images and videos are popping up all around the net showing the new beta version, and the results are promising if not a bit premature.
The provider of the images state that the beta runs quite poorly, but it is the first beta available and there is plenty of time for developers of the application to hone it’s performance. The beta seeding is in 64-bit and present support for Multi-Touch™ gestures.
Are you a Mac Fan that’s had to suffer for AutoCAD? Check out this preliminary video of what you may find yourself doing soon.
For those of you keeping up with the Gulf Oil spill, the New York Times has a great interactive map that chronicles the flow of oil from shortly after the initial blast (4/22) to near-present, adding in details for sightings, predictions, worst case, and various numerical statistics. In addition, they show various undersea current flows and other influential data combined from various sources.
VP8 is an open source video codec owned by Google, which they received when they acquired On2 Technologies. There is a major push behind VP8 to be used as the codec for HTML5, especially on YouTube. However, there are several questions about the quality of VP8, especially in high motion scenes. Author Jan Ozer takes a look at VP8 and compares it to H.264. The video files were encoded by Sorenson Media using their Squish encoding tool. Click on the link below to see the full article, and more comparison shots.
VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn’t substandard, so that’s not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself.
Adobe has just announced that they have outsourced all of their 3D technologies from the Acrobat 9 Pro Extended to ‘Tech Soft 3D’. They’ve finished an in-depth internal evaluation of their products and decided that working with 3D CAD products is hard and best left to experts, so future work in integration with CATIA, Pro/E, Solidworks, and others will be left to TechSoft. But Adobe’s not just walking away:
As I’ve talked with customers throughout this process, the number one question on their minds is, “Will Adobe continue to support 3D in the free Adobe Reader long-term?” The answer is — and I can’t stress this enough — that Adobe is fully committed to supporting 3D viewing and interaction capabilities within Adobe Reader and Acrobat. We recognize our responsibility to customers worldwide who depend on 3D PDF to collaborate, control, and store their product development data for long-term archival and retrieval. That commitment hasn’t diminished, and, I think, has actually strengthened through this partnership.
The 3D PDF support is a nice tool, great for sending low-resolution models to folks without fancy viewer tools. It’s not used very often, however, but it’s nice in a pinch.
Do you think it would be useful to ditch the mouse and interact with your computer by making gestures with your hands? Many researchers have taken on this task, with varying degrees of success and with varying amounts of hardware. Recently researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a gesture based system using just the webcam found on many computers and laptops, and a multicolored Lycra glove.
Wang and Popović’s system, by contrast, can translate gestures made with a gloved hand into the corresponding gestures of a 3-D model of the hand on screen, with almost no lag time. “This actually gets the 3-D configuration of your hand and your fingers,” Wang says. “We get how your fingers are flexing.”
FutureMark has released a demonstration video of the soon-to-be-released 3DMark 11. This video is of the Deep Sea build of 3DMark11 and demonstrates DirectX 11 technologies. Unfortunately, There are no plans to release the Deep Sea tech demo to the public.
Deep Sea is a demonstration of DirectX 11 technologies created using an early development build of the 3DMark 11 engine. 3DMark 11 will be released in the third quarter of 2010. There will be a free edition that allows unlimited runs available at launch.
A new app from Tomas Pettersson called ‘Sculptris’ is now available for download for Windows users, offering a simple and fast tool for sculpting and painting models. Mainly a hobby project, he does plan to continue tweaking it little by little, but keeping it tightly focused.
Sculptris will stay small and focused at its main task, which is sculpting and painting models. There is no point in expanding it to cover all the things advanced users can do in ZBrush, Blender, Maya and all the other big shot apps.
This month’s issue of the IEEE Computer Graphics & Applications journal is dedicated to “Ultrascale Visualization”, all about visualizing massive datasets across some of the largest computers in the world. In particular, this issue contains the article about the massive “Trillion Zone” run of VisIt we discussed a while back.
A series of experiments studied how visualization software scales to massive data sets. Although several paradigms exist for processing large data, the experiments focused on pure parallelism, the dominant approach for production software. The experiments used multiple visualization algorithms and ran on multiple architectures. They focused on massive-scale processing (16,000 or more cores and one trillion or more cells) and weak scaling. These experiments employed the largest data set sizes published to date in the visualization literature. The findings on scaling characteristics and bottlenecks will help researchers understand how pure parallelism performs at high levels of concurrency with very large data sets.
The paper is available from the IEEE Computer Society for $19, but I was lucky enough to get a review copy. Read on to see some details and my thoughts.
NVidia has just announced the first release of the new ‘Verde’ drivers, Release 256, which offers several features. The biggest, however, is the new integration of Notebook & Desktop drivers.
Now, before I dive into the new features, I wanted to let our notebook customers know that this driver is also available for notebook PCs, including those with NVIDIA Optimus technology. Not long ago, I told you about desktop and notebook releases being aligned starting with Release 256. So, all Windows 7 and Windows Vista desktop releases will now be accompanied by a same version Verde Notebook Driver.
But that’s not all. This driver has performance optimizations (that include the GTX400 cards), new multi-GPU options, and BluRay 3D support. They also have CUDA 3.1 and OpenGL4.0 support officially, in contrast to the previous beta releases.
Lots of new stuff to try, let us know how it works for you!
Ronen Bekerman has posted the final entry in his “GH House Challenge” series, this one from the Grand Prize Winner Bertrand Benoit. His article contains several mini-tutorials on tools like the Floor Generator Script and Raindrop creation, as well as others.
I opted to model the hardwood parquet floor (and the deck outside) instead of using textures. For this, I used a great free 3ds Max script called Floor Generator. Coupled with the Multi Texture plugin, it makes creating hyper-realistic floors a breeze. Not only do these show no visible tiling, but they can be seen at very close-range, giving you a lot more options when picking your POV. I use these scripts all the time, not just for parquets but for paving and cladding. This is one of those simple tools that really take your archviz to the next level.
Autodesk is bringing their premiere CAD design and modeling package back to the Mac after over a decade of being a Windows Exclusive. Many people don’t know that it used to run on Apple hardware, but now they will have the chance to try it again. Images and videos are popping up all around the net showing the new beta version, and the results are promising if not a bit premature.
For those of you keeping up with the Gulf Oil spill, the New York Times has a great interactive map that chronicles the flow of oil from shortly after the initial blast (4/22) to near-present, adding in details for sightings, predictions, worst case, and various numerical statistics. In addition, they show various undersea current flows and other influential data combined from various sources.
Adobe has just announced that they have outsourced all of their 3D technologies from the Acrobat 9 Pro Extended to ‘Tech Soft 3D’. They’ve finished an in-depth internal evaluation of their products and decided that working with 3D CAD products is hard and best left to experts, so future work in integration with CATIA, Pro/E, Solidworks, and others will be left to TechSoft. But Adobe’s not just walking away:
A new app from Tomas Pettersson called ‘Sculptris’ is now available for download for Windows users, offering a simple and fast tool for sculpting and painting models. Mainly a hobby project, he does plan to continue tweaking it little by little, but keeping it tightly focused.
Ronen Bekerman has posted the final entry in his “GH House Challenge” series, this one from the Grand Prize Winner Bertrand Benoit. His article contains several mini-tutorials on tools like the Floor Generator Script and Raindrop creation, as well as others.
VizWorld.com 
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