It’s amazing to see Physics Simulations moving out of the arena of SuperComputers into the realm of mere mortals with tools like GPU accelerators and fast physics engines like PhysX and Havok going mainstream. ForCG.com has a great compilation of 20 impressive physics simulation videos, including the amazing one shown above.
Physics simulations are becoming more and more advanced and more spectacular each year. With processors that are becoming faster and faster computers are able to calculate complicated simulations ending up with really stunning effects. This collection consist of some beautiful physics simulations made using RayFire plug-in for 3D application or NVIDIA PhysX. Both of them enable designers to create very realistic 3D simulations.
(Chicago, IL) – SIGGRAPH announces the Computer Animation Festival’s Best in Show, Jury Award, and Best Student Project recipients for SIGGRAPH 2010 to be held in Los Angeles this July. Nominees were chosen from 750 submissions from around the globe, presented by both professional studios and students alike.
“It was difficult to narrow the pool of submissions because of the high level of quality and technical expertise,” said Isaac Kerlow, Computer Animation Festival Director from The Earth Observatory of Singapore/NTU ADM. “Attendees will experience an endorphin rush as they watch the screenings of independent and commercial films, and will get a behind-the-scenes perspective from the planned Production Sessions featuring the visionaries behind some of this year’s most successful Hollywood films. Whether you are an industry veteran or someone who just enjoys quality visual effects and animation, there is something for everyone this year.”
Shrek and Fiona may have finally ridden off into the sunset for the last and final time, but some of the tricks that Dreamworks integrated into the movie will be talked about for some time. Over at CGSociety, they talk to VFX Supervisor Doug Cooper about some of the tricks you have to feel to believe.
“For example, there’s a moment when Shrek does his roar at the birthday party and he’s screaming this terror out at the audience. We are playing Shrek’s face large in a close-up, hanging in front of the screen in front of the audience while he’s roaring. When he settles down for a second we let him drift back behind the screen, so subconsciously we are giving the audience some distance from Shrek.” When you watch it you don’t see it, but you feel it. It’s as if the space opens up and there is an uncomfortable silence between you and Shrek.
The VFX of Marmaduke consisted largely of CG head replacement, done by Rhythm & Hues, CIS, and Cinesite. Over at FXGuide, they have interviews with all three studios on their contributions and how they built the amazing talking dog.
For the surfing sequence, one of the biggest challenges was achieving the right scale. “That’s always a game between how fast things should move,” said O’Neal. “Everybody usually wants a fast-paced sequence, but almost all of the surfing reference we had was shot in slow motion. It’s a cascading effect because once you start the speed of one thing, that drives the speed of everything else. We ended up having all kinds of challenges – how fast could it go to the camera and still have it feel realistic, how much camera shake can you give it without making it feel like a miniature? How explosive can the white water be to make it look really powerful but doesn’t make it look small because it's going too fast? A lot of it was timing and re-running simulations and checking things.”
Monster Cable Products, Inc. is the maker of high performance audiophile cables to connect your audio/visual equipment to each other. They have also gained a reputation for being very expensive. Personally, I use the Amazon branded basic cables, and they work just fine for me. Plus they are inexpensive.
Monster has recently announced the Monster Vision Max 3D glasses. These are meant to be universal 3-D glasses that will work with any TV set. Monster accomplishes this by not using infra-red emitters to sync the glasses with the frames shown on the TV. Instead Monster is using the radio frequency for the sync signal. HDGuru takes a look at the new glasses in their latest article.
The Monster Vision Max 3D (MVM3D) glasses employ Bit Cauldron’s “Heartbeat” technology. The system’s transmitter converts the TVs infra-red 3D sync pulses into a radio signal. The Monster transmitter uses the 2.4 GHz radio frequency equipped with a ZigBee chip. Placing it directly in front of a 3D TV will block the sets built-in infra-red emitter. Moving it away from the 3D TV allows the use of the set maker’s 3D eyewear in addition to the MVM3D glasses.
Nvidia has added new sessions to the agenda of the GPU Technology Conference. If you attend this conference, and I am seriously thinking about doing so, then you will be able to interface with scientists, researchers and visualization experts who use GPGPU in their work and research.
One of the people I would like to meet is Mark Cheung. He is using GPUs to analyze the large amount of data coming off the Solar Dynamics Observatory, which we have covered here at VizWorld. The following is the abstract from his talk that he will be giving at the GPU Technology Conference.
Learn how GPU computing is enabling astrophysicists in the study of our closest star. NASA’s recently launched Solar Dynamics Observatory is continuously streaming full-disk images of the Sun at visible, UV and EUV wavelengths. The data rate from the telescopes onboard the Atmospheric Imaging Assembly (AIA) and the Helioseismic and Magnetic Imager (HMI) instruments, each delivering a 16-megapixel image every few seconds, amounts to 1.5 TB per day. This presentation will discuss ways that GPU computing is helping scientists cope with the analysis of such immense data volumes as well as in numerical modeling of the Sun.
Another talk that I am very interested in will be given by Dale Southard. He will be talking about the second fastest High Performance Computer on the planet. The Chinese supercomputer, called Nebulae, is built with Intel X5650 processors and NVidia Tesla C2050 GPUs. When you look at the peak performance of Nebulae, it is the fastest system in the world. Its theoretical peak performance is 2.98 PFlop/s. However, when you use Linpack, the performance comes in at 1.271 PFlop/s which gives it the number 2 position.
Learn what to expect when deploying PetaFLOP or larger systems. The June 2010 list of the Top 500 computer systems featured the first GPU based cluster to exceed 1 PetaFLOP of foating point power — a system that was built in a fraction of the time and cost a CPU-only system of that performance would have required. An overview of how system builders and administrators should prepare for large-scale HPC deployments.
The NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) has released an image showing the global temperature anomalies for May 2010. The northern polar regions showed a dramatic increase in warmth, while cooler-than-normal conditions occurred in parts of western United States, and southern South America.
This color-coded map shows global surface temperature anomalies for May 2010 compared to average temperatures for the same time of year from 1951 to 1980. Above-normal temperatures appear in shades of red, and below-normal temperatures appear in shades of blue. Gray areas indicate areas of insufficient data.
Recently we told you about the new GPU acceleration that is available in the latest release of VLC version 1.1.0. Anandtech has taken this latest version of VLC for a spin to see how well it really performs. What is their take on the new upgrades? Well, you can read the article for yourself – it really does have some good information in it – or you can just read the summary below.
VLC has taken the important first step towards enabling GPU acceleration for various codecs commonly used in high definition videos. However, they have been crippled by their application structure, resulting in the fact that they are unable to provide the same amount of acceleration as other methods like DXVA using MPC-HC / Windows Media Player. While the untested Arrandale provided around 5% CPU usage improvement for VC-1 decode, PureVideo VP2 had speed-ups of around 60% for H264 and 20% for VC1. PureVideo VP4 turned out to be the best of the lot when GPU acceleration is enabled. CPU usage was lesser by a factor more than 65% for H264 and 36% for VC1.
Shrek and Fiona may have finally ridden off into the sunset for the last and final time, but some of the tricks that Dreamworks integrated into the movie will be talked about for some time. Over at CGSociety, they talk to VFX Supervisor Doug Cooper about some of the tricks you have to feel to believe.
VizWorld.com 
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