Powers of Eight – G8 vs G20
10:30 am
An Interview with Sergio Santos
10:00 am
Dimension2.5 has a great interview with artist Sergio Santos about his experience entering the modeling field, modeling for video games, and his preferred tools.
What’s new best about our 2011 line of Autodesk in modeling and texturing of characters?. Any more general level?.
It seems that Autodesk is stepping up this year. In 2011 Maya emphasize simplicity to change the interface, something I’ve always missed.
In 2011 Mudbox say I was pleasantly surprised, this version is much closer to ZBrush and even surpassed in some respects, as in the generation of Normal and Displacement Map, poses and paint.
As for 3ds Max 2011 had not taken a big leap from version 4 or 5, is much more robust and stable materials for nodes, the options have painted a giant leap and the new render Quicksilver is faster rendering (at that level of quality) I’ve ever seen.
30-Day Free Trail of MachStudio Pro
9:00 am
If you have a windows PC with a nice video card in it, you can go download a free 30-day trial of MachStudio Pro and try out the new features.
See how MachStudio Pro can help you explore and refine your creative options in real-time in full cinematic quality within a true non-linear 3D environment. This 30 day trial is a full featured version of MachStudio Pro and has absolutely no financial obligation or commitment.
I believe the really impressive features only work if you have one of the high-end ATI Radeon FirePro cards, so this is a great chance to “try before you buy” on your own hardware.
via Try Machstudio Pro: Experience what real-time 3D is all about.
A New Approximation Algorithm for Ambient Occlusion Volumes
8:00 am
Max McGuire, NVidia, and Williams College have just published a new paper that presents a new algorithm for Ambient Occlusion Volumes. From the abstract:
It combines known pieces in a new way to achieve substantially improved quality over fast methods and substantially improved performance compared to accurate methods. Intuitively, it computes the analog of a shadow volume for ambient light around each polygon, and then applies a tunable occlusion function within the region it encloses. The algorithm operates on dynamic triangle meshes and produces output that is comparable to ray traced occlusion for many scenes. The algorithm’s performance on modern GPUs is largely independent of geometric complexity and is dominated by fill rate, as is the case with most deferred shading algorithms.
The algorithms are compared against the Crytek algorithm, although the Crytek algorithm does not support the variable sample counts supported by the other options. The results (compiled into the table on page 8) show significantly reduced render times (some down to 2.9ms from 12ms) with a lower error metric.
Download the paper here (view online).
Whaling Industry: Past & Present
7:30 am
Infographics Summary for 2010-06-21
10:30 pm
The Facts on Heart Disease
Education In The US Vs The World Infographic
The Ins and Outs of the Abandoned Cart
What is Voluntourism?
13 Things Worth Knowing about Mario
14 Things You Didn’t Know about Las Vegas
The cost of going to the movies
Extiction Dangered Primates
15 Things You Didn’t Know About the Tongue
The Vuvuzela By the Numbers
The End of Verifiable.com
1:00 pm
Verifiable.com is closing up shop, handing another bullet to those ammunition-hoarders who think cloud services are a constant trap for taking your data and info with no real requirements. Fighting in a space full of names like Tableau and IBM ManyEyes, visualization as a service is proving to be a difficult market to break. Robert Kosara takes a look at what happened to Verifiable, and provides some tips on how the next startup may fare better.
As much as I hate to admit it, I think all visualization websites fail on point one. People don’t feel a need to visualize data, we have to make them aware that visualization even exists, and that it can do something for them. The vast number of pretty but useless pictures on the web that are all called visualizations doesn’t exactly help.
The few people who do want to visualize their data and are looking for this kind of service are most likely not interested in visualization web sites the way they exist today. Those people are mostly dealing with very valuable proprietary data that they don’t want to (or aren’t allowed to, per corporate policy) upload to a third party’s web service.
Personally. I think the proprietary data issue is the biggest one. People with interesting data worth visualizing typically are very protective and possessive of it. Not to mention, it can be rather large (I wouldn’t want to upload some of my datasets to a cloud server, 10 gigabytes takes a while).
VizWorld.com 
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