VizWorld.com

This afternoon at 1:00 at the NewTek Book (#337) on the SIGGRAPH2010 Exhibition floor, William Shatner and Dick van Dyke will meet up for an interview on the past, present, and future of Visual Effects.  Shatner will be doing the interviewing, while they both discuss their own longtime use of LightWave3D in their own projects (I honestly had no idea William Shatner was a VFX guy, did you?) and how they’ve changed the industry.

So, depending on your personal inclinations, either get there early or be nowhere near the Exhibition Floor at 1:00 .  Full release after the break.

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Graphics interview, lightwave, newtek, siggraph

HPC vendor Penguin Computing has just announced that they now will be supported mental image’s RealityServer product in their ‘HPC On Demand’ product, making configuration and deployment of a RealityServer-based product easier than ever.

“RealityServer is a powerful web platform that enables the development of interactive, incredibly photorealistic 3D web applications, which can be compute-intensive,” said Tom Coull, general manager of Software and Services at Penguin Computing. “With POD – which is now optimized specifically for GPU compute workloads – mental images’s RealityServer users have access to a cost-effective, extremely powerful resource on demand, to help them innovate faster and without concern for compute infrastructure limitations.”

Their offering is based on clusters of nodes with NVidia Tesla cards to accelerate the workload, and is exposed via the RealityServer Web Interface.

via Penguin Computing’s “POD” HPC On-Demand Platform Hosts mental images’s RealityServer Platform | www.penguincomputing.com.

Science mental images, penguin

NewTek, creators of popular 3D animation and video products, has partnered up with InterSense Inc, creators of the fascinating VCam product we discussed at SIGGRAPH last year, to create the industry’s first off-the-shelf 3D Virtual production system: LightWave 10 with VCam.

“With LightWave and VCam, we can put more control and creative freedom back in the hands of directors, producers and VFX supervisors while ensuring that more of the production budget stays on the screen,” said Dean Wormell, director of applications marketing, InterSense. “Together, we hope to open up a new world of immersive virtual production for independent filmmakers and game developers worldwide.”

Full details in the release after the break.

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Graphics intersense, lightwave, newtek, vcam

In response to demand for a lower-price point for The Pixel Farm’s amazing 2d/3d tracking and matchmoving technology, they’ve just released a new product called ‘PFMatchIt’.  PFMatchIt is the first product to utilize the company’s new 64-bit architectures and the new node-based flowgraph, both of which dramatically improve the speed of the software and the ease of use.

“The Pixel Farm has created easily the most sophisticated 3D tracking software we have ever used,” said Timor Kardum, CEO of OMStudios in Berlin. “The combined power of features in PFMatchit, like optical flow for 3D tracking, Python scripting, RED RAW support and the ingenious Edit Camera node will revolutionise matchmoving.”

In addition to the above improvements, this version also offers GPU Acceleration in several key areas, making the entire package significantly faster than previous versions.

Update: (I meant to add this and forgot).  I had a chance to see the product in action and it really is amazing the speed at which it works.  In mere seconds, they imported the footage shown in the thumbnail above, and used a mere 5 markers to accurately track the camera motion and the object in-frame.  In a later demo, they loaded a completely markerless scene that many would consider untrackable, and used their new node-based workflow and some of the camera edit functionality to first create an estimated path by hand (keyframed approximately 5 locations along the path), and then let PFMatchIt analyze it to refine the path.  It still wasn’t perfect afterward, but that alone would accomplish in 10 minutes what traditionally would have taken a full day or more.

It will be available in late August, at a price point near $700.  Full release and more screenshots after the break.
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Graphics pixelfarm, software

We start today again with Social Media infographics. First,  an interesting comparison between Digg and Reddit by Rate Rush, the overview on the privacy issues in Google and Facebook from Word Stream, and Focus‘s Evolution of Email. Health is also a frequent topic, these days, specially the ones related do the heat waves that are affecting so many countries. Ria Novosti‘s shows how to cope in an extreme heat wave, and, finally, Term Life Insurance teaches why we should stop drinking bottled water.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations

3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator owners can now use their precious little magic knobs with 3dsMax, thanks to a new driver update that brings intelligent 3D navigation to the Autodesk Classic.

“Our innovative intelligent 3D navigation feature provides a new level of control over the point of interest in 3D designs” said Dieter Neujahr, president of 3Dconnexion.  “By automatically establishing and displaying the optimal center of rotation, designers are free to focus more on the creative elements of their designs without having to think about navigating or positioning their model.”

It actually supports 2 different modes of navigation, one that simply navigates about the center of the screen (useful for wide zooms) and another that allows you to assign an arbitrary rotation point.

Full release after the break.

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Hardware 3dconnexion, 3dsmax

Today at SIGGRAPH, Sony Pictures Imageworks and ILM announced that they have collaborated on a new open-source project named ‘Alembic’, a new interchange format designed to efficiently store animation in a format that can be ready by multiple software applications.

“Who better to understand the demands of high-end production better than those who are in the thick of it,” explains Lucasfilm CTO, Richard Kerris, “working with the team at Imageworks, I think we have created a file format that will have a significant impact on the industry as global production and shared workflows continue to be a driving force.”

“Even though we recently started using our new format on multiple productions, as soon as we learned about ILM’s concurrent development it was immediately clear that one open source format utilizing the very best technology from both companies would offer the best solution for the industry,” notes Rob Bredow, CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks.

It sounds very similar to the work done by Autodesk over the last several years with FBX, but the entire format is open-source.  Hopefully other applications will begin to support it, and maybe we will finally one the “One Format to Rule Them all”.

Full announcement and details after the break.

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Graphics ilm, imageworks, opensource, sony

Huge day for NVidia.  First the amazing Quadro Fermi series (Read our review of the Quadro 5000), and now new 3D Vision Pro and new AXE systems.  First, let’s discuss the impressive new 3D Vision Pro.

NVidia brings their 3D Vision Pro to a new class of applications with one simple change:  Switching from IR transmitters to RF transmitters.  This effectively eliminates line of sight problems, opening the 3D Vision use for crowds of people, multi-screen displays, and VR environments like the CAVE.  Also, this allows them to synchronize glasses to specific displays, as they’ve done in their impressive SIGGRAPH Booth.  3D is a big driver today, and they’ve got around a dozen different 3D displays running different demos all around the booth.  Each display has about 4 3d glasses synced to it, and they don’t interfere with other displays, nor do the glasses work with other displays.  The display can effectively turn the glasses on and off, without messing with other displays.  This kind of managed interface is critical for large-scale professional applications.

“By providing large scale visualization capabilities and remote management capabilities, NVIDIA is pioneering 3D technology for the enterprise, opening the door for professional users and large scale visualization system integrators to utilize 3D in ways not thought of before.”  Dr. Jon Peddie, president of Jon Peddie Research.

The other big announcement coming out right now is the slew of updates in the AXE suite, the Application Acceleration Engines.  These are the various support technologies based around the NVidia brand like OptiX (ray tracer), SceneX (scene graph) and others.  Today they’are announcing major revisions to several of them.

NVIDIA SceniX 6

• New Bezier Patch geometry class, using Cg tessellation programs for the smoothest of surfaces on NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs;
• OptiX 2 support for faster, interactive ray tracing;
• Continued improvements in overall performance and fidelity, and;
• Future support for iray by mental images.

NVIDIA Cg Toolkit 3

• New tessellation programs, allowing displacement and procedural surfaces to dynamically adapt their tessellation in real-time on the latest NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, and;
• OpenGL 4 and DirectX 11 level of programmability for the latest in portable, cross platform effects.

NVIDIA OptiX 2

• Optimizations for new NVIDIA Fermi architecture class GPUs, delivering up to 4X performance over previous generation (GT200) GPUs and >10X over G92;
• Support for all NVIDIA CUDA™ architecture-capable NVIDIA GPUs (G92 or later) on Windows, Linux and Mac OSX, and;
• Direct3D and fast interoperability in Direct3D and OpenGL; for flexible compositing and hybrid rendering opportunities.

Again, Amazing stuff from the NVidia folks.  I look forward to spending some time in their booth later today, and sharing the experience with you all later tonight!

Full press releases on both topics after the break.

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Graphics, Science nvidia, optix, quadro, scenix, siggraph

Since the Fermi chipset came to reality in the GTX480 card, high end graphics professionals have had a difficult choice.  They can take the latest and greatest technology, the GeForce GTX480, or go back a generation for a QuadroFX 4800 (or similar).   Several of the newer CUDA applications for professionals, like the Adobe CS5 applications, only works on Quadro cards.  The added performance of the Fermi chipset, tho, makes it worth it in certain applications.  It’s been a difficult decision time for Quadro fans.

Today, NVidia has announced that this is a difficult decision no more.  They’ve just announced the newest generation of their popular Quadro cards using the newly designed ‘Fermi’ technology and combines it with the rest of the Quadro ecosystem to bring to bear a card that truly is top of its class.  The core of the new offering is three new Quadro Cards:

• Quadro 4000 – 2GB, 256 cores
• Quadro 5000 – 2.5GB, 352 cores
• Quadro 6000 – 6GB, 448 Cores

Yep that’s right.  The Quadro 6000 sets a new record for video memory with 6GB available on a single card.  In addition to these three, there will be a new Quadro 5000m design, which packs the regular Quadro 5000 into a mobile form factor suitable for high-end laptops without compromising functionality.  Also, if you really need power, you can get the new QuadroPlex system which contains 2 Quadro6000′s for truly amazing power.

NVidia gave me one of the Quadro5000′s to review, and you can read my results below.
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Hardware feature, fermi, nvidia

One cannot speak about internet marketing without having, at least, some basic notions of Search Engine Optimization – SEO. A couple of graphics to go deep on this: the history and evolution of SEO, from Greenlight Search, and a visual guide to SEO by BloggingPro. Then, Visual Economics helps us understand the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, followed by Credit Loan’s lessons on the easiest ways to save extra money. Finally, a great Interactive design by News Illustrated on preventable deaths.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations