The shocking disparities of labor cost
9:30 am
“Beautiful Visualization” from O’Reilly Books
9:00 am
Robert Kosara points us to a new book available at O’Reilly called “Beautiful Visualization“, a collection of essays on several topics of interest.
The chapters cover topics like Wordle, the New York Times News API, the use of color, visualizing Wikipedia, etc. Among the authors are people like Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, Moritz Stefaner, Danyel Fisher, etc. All chapters are in the 10-25 page range, which makes for nice bite-sized chunks that can be read one after the other or as you find the time for them.
Robert’s chapter is on Parallel Sets, but the book covers the gamut. Available at O’Reilly as a restriction-free PDF for $40, or a physical print at $60, the entire book is released under creative commons.
The AlloSphere, a Visualization 3-D Tower
8:00 am
Build a three-story aluminum sphere with a catwalk through the middle, slap on six hi-def 3D-capable projectors, and pipe in live video, renderings, and audio, and what do you get? If you’re at UC Santa Barbara, you’ve just built the AlloSphere.
Project director JoAnn Kuchera-Morin is as happy with the aesthetic results as she is with the science. Trained as a composer, she moved into digital geekery in the 1980s while working with computer-generated music. “We create some of the most exquisite artistic installations that are also some of the most precise scientific simulations in the world,” she says.
via Sensory Overloader: 3-D Tower Lets Researchers Climb Inside Their Data | Magazine.
Infographics Summary for 2010-06-15
10:30 pm
Unity 3′s new Image Effects
4:00 pm
The Unity Blog has been updated with example of some of the new Image Effects you’ll be able to use in the upcoming Unity3. They have examples of lens flares, depth of field, outline shaders, bloom, sun shafts, lens effects, and many more.
Unity Technologies Blog » Blog Archive » Introducing some of the new Image Effects.
Voxelogic’s Acropora now Available
3:00 pm
It’s been a while since we last talked about Acropora, but it’s now publicly available for retail sale for the suprisingly low price of $89. Acropora ™ incorporates some of the latest advances in voxel modeling technology. Features include:
A variety of base shapes and compound shapes as primary surfaces
- User-defined surfaces
- Splines, lofts, grooves, extrusions, chisels
- Voxelisation of user imported models
- Over 50+ volume modifiers
- Automatic generation of up to 15 octaves of three-dimensional noise (volumetric, Perlin and fractal)
- Extensive voxel and noise editing tools
- Extensive post-processing of meshes (tesselation, smoothing, simplification,…)
- Batch processing
- Multiple LOD support
- Export to multiple mesh formats (FBX, OBJ, 3DS, DXF, DAE), DDS volume textures, and raw voxel data
More Realistic Glass with OpenGL & Shaders
2:00 pm
Over at UralDev, they have a great tutorial (in Russian) using OpenGL and some rather complex shaders to create more realistic glass in realtime, complete with reflections, refractions, shadows, and caustic effects.
With the help of modern graphics cards can get more complex dynamic scenes. This means that high-quality (photorealistic) rendering carried out offline in real time. In particular, one of the pressing problems of computer graphics is the calculation and rendering of global illumination and complex materials. In this article I would like to talk about the modeling of glass objects. Glass is quite complicated to model material, when the goal is to get the most realistic image. In this article we shall analyze together with you step through the process of modeling and rendering of glass objects.
FxFactory and PHYX Inc. Release a Cure for Blemished Footage
1:45 pm
Noise Industries and PHYX Inc. have announced the release of a new plugin suite for FxFactory that works directly inside AfterEffects, Final Cut, and Apple Motion to help you clean up and doctor video with ease. The suite, called PHYX cleaner, contains 5 plugins:
- Chroma Reconstructor: Rebuilds pixelated chroma (color) channels. Chroma issues are most obvious when keying green or blue screens, or viewing a colorful object (red coat, etc.). The Reconstructor repairs blocky colors, and removes unwanted sub-sampling artifacts.
- Deband: Restores lost information in gradients, and increases effective color depth up to 32-bits per color. Deband also works wonders for making 3D-generated images look less artificial, and for converting harsh low-bit depth images to high-bit depth smoothness.
- Deinterlace: Converts fields into progressive frames free of comb-like artifacts using field reconstruction and Optical Flow.
- Digital Make Up Kit: Allows users to smooth skin blemishes in post-production. This unique tool detects properly lit skin tones, and smoothes wrinkles, acne, and more.
- Fast Noise Reduction: Spatial noise reduction engine that quickly removes high and low frequency noise (fine and large noise) from images. Fast Noise Reduction also includes a powerful sharpening method similar to that used by NASA, to preserve fine details.
Available for $199.
“As one of our most newest development partners PHYX Inc. has rolled out an impressive number of creative plug-ins for the visual effects community in such a short amount of time ” says Niclas Bahn director of business development Noise Industries. “PHYX Cleaner is an extraordinary tool for patching up gritty footage and gives users a quick way to efficiently transform disappointing tape into flawless film. We look forward to the on-going success of FxFactory and PHYX Inc. visual effects plug-ins and providing creative community with a touch of originality in each new release.”
via FxFactory and PHYX Inc. Release a Cure for Blemished Footage.
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