Next time you need a giant random scene for a project, check out Arnaud Couturier’s ‘Suicidator City Generator‘ tool for Blender.
“With it, you can automatically create entire, three-dimensional modern cities in a matter of seconds by adjusting various parameters, such as city size and complexity, rather than creating each building, each street, and each texture manually.”
It’s a tiny little python script capable of building entire cities with textures, roads, elevations, and much more with just the click of a button. And what makes it even better: It’s completely free. No charge, public domain, and source available.
As a visualization expert, the first thing you always have to do when dealing with a new person is explaining what you do. Many people have seen so many badly done infographics and excel charts that they think that is the state of the art for data visualization, and convincing them otherwise can be difficult. Juice Analytics has a great new poster available that can turn anyone from ignorant to knowledgeable in 30 days at less than 30 minutes a day.
One of the hurdles we frequently come up against is that people who aren’t actively participating in the visualization discussion don’t know what’s possible. All they’ve ever seen in many cases are the confusing dashboards charts and graphs that are all too prevalent from the vendors in our space. You know the ones a thick layer of technology slathered with some gloss and wiggle between two slices of “do it yourself”.
It won’t make them experts, but at least they won’t be ignorant.
With pretty much all of the Fermi-based hardware out right now being just reprints of NVidia’s reference design, many people have been wondering who would be first to market with their own design. Looks like MSI is the current leader, with pics of their non-reference GTX460 on EXPreview.
This graphics card part number is N460GTX Cyclone 768D5/OC, it based on GF104 which has 336 CUDA Core, core/Shader/memory clocks of 725/1450/3600MHz; Features 768MB of GDDR5 memory as well as 192-bit memory interface, dual-DVI/HDMI output.
Back when Intel’s project Larrabee was going to revolutionize the computer graphics space and crush all of their competition with a single blow, Intel made the not-so-surprising move of acquiring a game development company (Offset Software) to create a secret game to demonstrate the hardware. Called “Project Offset”, a few videos leaked out but nothing more. With the death of the Larrabee hardware it’s not that surprising, but today Intel has just issued a statement saying that the division has been shut down.
Intel purchased Offset Software to improve our game development knowledge-base and to further Intel’s visual computing technology development expertise, helping the company offer robust products, support, and tools to customers. With the recent changes in our product roadmap, some of the resources and technologies from the acquisition are being re-applied to help support new graphics related projects. Additionally, other Offset Software team members have moved onto other external projects outside the company.
The founders have moved on and created ‘Fractiv’, and presumably will finish the project there.
Fitzgerald Steele was fascinated by Paul Adam’s (not the VizWorld Author, rather the Google UX Researcher) presentation on “The Real Life Social Network” where he presents the differences between real-life groups and social groups and how they are typically presented in online social networks. Taking some tips from the presentation and publicly available information on pulling your social graph from FaceBook, he rendered some pretty impressive network graphs of his own FaceBook social network which reinforces Paul’s claims.
Facebook turns out to be a pretty decent proxy for my offline social network. If someone were to ask me, as Google did in their social network user research, to identify my people, place them in groups, and name the groups, this is pretty much the list I would’ve come up with.
I’ve got more than 10 people in most of my groups. However, this graph doesn’t really take into account the strength of the connections. If I were to apply a filter to this graph that only showed people who posted on my wall, or who’s wall I posted on recently, I bet the number would be much closer to 10 per group. And some of those groups would disappear.
If you’ll be in LA for SIGGRAPH2010, you might want to consider attending the Chaos Group’s 8-hour training event on VRay. On the FaceBook page you can see the agenda and some of the great freebies you’ll get for attending:
0930-1000: Registration, Setup, Coffee 1000-1100: The Critical Settings and their Math 1100-1200: Real World Material Creation 1200-1300: Animating with V-Ray 1300-1330: Lunch, Networking 1330-1500: V-Ray Power Tools 1500-1600: Practical Exterior Lighting 1600-1700: Practical Interior Lighting 1700-1800: Q&A, Networking, Refreshments
You’ll need to know 3dsMax and VRay 1.5SP5, register early for $100 discount. Full details on the CGSchool Page.
Today, we begin with a couple not-so-happy infographics. The facts surrounding nuclear weapons, by Elistmania, and another oil spill timeline, this one from Iglucruise. Kiplinger shows us the evolution of Healthcare in the U.S., and two much lighter pieces of information to close today’s selection: ChaCha‘s explanation to why men like beer so much, and 1000 Heads‘s great piece on word of mouth.
Next time you need a giant random scene for a project, check out Arnaud Couturier’s ‘Suicidator City Generator‘ tool for Blender.
Develop Conference 2010 will be underway next week in Brighton, and 3D World has found some great talks to attend if you’ll be there. Specifically:
With pretty much all of the Fermi-based hardware out right now being just reprints of NVidia’s reference design, many people have been wondering who would be first to market with their own design. Looks like MSI is the current leader, with pics of their non-reference GTX460 on EXPreview.
If you’ll be in LA for SIGGRAPH2010, you might want to consider attending the Chaos Group’s 8-hour training event on VRay. On the FaceBook page you can see the agenda and some of the great freebies you’ll get for attending:
VizWorld.com 
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