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Autodesk has put another neat little app on the iTunes App Store, this time taking the fluid simulation capabilities of Maya and putting them into the Autodesk Fluid FX App.

The app is based on the Academy Award-winning Autodesk Maya fluid effects technology. Users can now interact with and manipulate fire and billowing smoke clouds for their own amusement and entertainment. The new app enables users to interact in real time with up to 10 multitouch points to manipulate ultrarealistic smoke and fire or create dry ice effects that fall and flow along the ground. Tilting or changing the orientation of the device influences the imagery which behaves realistically as if affected by gravity.

Kinda a silly little app, but for the low price of $1.99 it’s worth checking out.  Even comes in an extra-large iPad Version.

• Autodesk Fluid FX for iPhone
• Autodesk Fluid FX for iPad

Full release after the break.

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Graphics autodesk, iphone, software

Fans of LightWave rejoice, as NewTek has just announced the release of LightWave 10.  What’s new you ask?

LightWave 10 will also offer extensive, new immersive real-time virtual cinematography and game development tools. These solutions evolved as a result of the virtual cinematic production techniques that were pioneered by leading Hollywood artists and technicians for films like “Avatar,” “Tintin,” and “A Christmas Carol.” For production studios and more advanced individuals, this immersive technology includes integrated support for the InterSense VCam™, virtual camera system. The individual artist gains a similar immersive experience with LightWave 10 and its integrated support for 3Dconnexion’s complete line of 3D mice. This powerful combination provides directors and artists with the ability to interact in real time within a 3D set.

And far far more in the full press release after the break.  NewTek has been hard at work integrating the features developed for these feature customers, and now we all get to share in the results!

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Graphics lightwave, newtek, software

Over at the NVidia forums, one enterprising researcher has optimized the Radix Sort algorithm to run on the NVidia GPU’s (GTX480 with CUDA) and put it up against previously optimized & published results from NVidia.  The results are staggering.

This project implements a very fast, efficient radix sorting method for CUDA-capable devices. For sorting large sequences of fixed-length keys (and values), we believe our GPU sorting primitive to be the fastest available for any fully-programmable microarchitecture: our stock NVIDIA GTX480 sorting results exceed the Giga-keys/sec average sorting rate (i.e., one billion 32-bit keys sorted per second). Our results demonstrate a range of 2x-4x speedup over the current Thrust and CUDPP sorting implementations, and we operate on keys of any C/C++ numeric type. Satellite values are optional, and can be any arbitrary payload structure (within reason).

On a quad core i7 from Intel: 240M 32-bit Keys per second.

On a 32-core Knights Ferry MIC (the successor to Larrabee): 560 32-bit Keys per second.

On the GTX480: 1,005M 32-bit Keys per second.

What makes this particularly impressive is that one of Intel’s arguments has always been that GPU algorithm performance is achievable via CPU optimization if care is taken.  They were proud of those optimized results on the Intel hardware, and the NVidia hardware easily doubled the throughput.

via SRTS Radix Sort: High Performance and Scalable GPU Radix Sorting – NVIDIA Forums.

Science benchmark, cuda, gpgpu, intel

Update 8/3/2010: Read a followup to this post here.

I just got a press release from Khronos about the first OpenGL ES2.0 driver for Desktop systems coming to market from AMD.  Upon further inspection, this looks a bit fishy.

At SIGGRAPH 2010, AMD (NYSE: AMD) today announced availability of the first software driver for desktop computing environments to support the WebGL industry standard, which is designed to bring plugin-free 3D graphics to the Internet. The AMD OpenGL^® ES 2.0 driver is intended to help developers easily create exciting 3D content that can be rendered more quickly for consumers using open-source web browsers, thereby helping create an application-like browser experience.

Ok.  So where do I get it?  Read further down the press release and see:

The OpenGL ES 2.0 driver from AMD will be generally available with the upcoming ATI Catalyst™ 10.7 beta for OpenGL ES 2.0, expected to be available later today.

So it’s not “official”, it’s “Beta”.  But, how did AMD beat NVidia to the punch on this one?  In fact, why is a special OpenGL ES2.0 driver needed anyway?  OpenGL ES is a subset of regular OpenGL targeted at embedded systems, and in fact that’s exactly what NVidia did with it.  NVidia’s OpenGL ES2.0 support is right where it’s designed to be, in the development kit for their embedded system Tegra.

So why do we care about it?  WebGL, the coming common standard for 3D on the Web, is based on OpenGL ES2.0 (presumably to make it an option for smartphones and other portable devices that lack full OpenGL compatibility).  So most companies haven’t focused on putting OpenGL ES on the desktop, because that’s not where it belongs.

Not that it matters too much anymore, thanks to another press release that I got mere minutes after the accolades came rolling in for AMD.  Khronos, the group behind the OpenGL and OpenGL ES standards has just announced the standard for OpenGL 4.1, with one fascinating addition:  Complete compatibility with the OpenGL ES 2.0 APIs.  This means that being OpenGL4.1 compliant means you’re already OpenGL ES2.0 compliant.  So what has NVidia been doing the last few months?

“The release of OpenGL 4.1 just five months after OpenGL 4.0 shows that collaborative innovation to build market opportunities for high-performance GPU acceleration is not slowing down.  The ARB is also working hard to ensure backwards compatibility with each release so developers can absorb new functionality at their own pace,” said Barthold Lichtenbelt, OpenGL ARB working group chair and senior manager Core OpenGL at NVIDIA.  “I am also pleased to announce that NVIDIA will release OpenGL 4.1 production drivers on our developer site for all Fermi-based graphics accelerators, including the GeForce GTX 400 series, during SIGGRAPH.  OpenGL 4.1 is not just a specification – it’s here and now.”

Myth Busted.

See both press releases after the break.

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Science amd, khronos, opengl, opengles

Daihai Shibata’s amazingly beautiful short film ‘The Light of Life’ is showing this week at SIGGRAPH’s Electronic Theater.  Created with heavy use of CINEMA4D and Body Paint3D, Maxon wants to make sure you get the chance to witness what their products can do in the hands of an expert.

The Light of Life has widely posted and been discussed online for being an inspirational work, with viewers claiming that the film’s mesmerizing ethereal beauty almost defies being categorized as CG. In a recent interview Shibata described the process of creating the film as crafting, “super normal beauty through soft and shining images that don’t seem to be CG.”

It will be airing in all 3 evening Electronic Theater presentations, and is available online at Vimeo if you miss it. Full press release after the break.

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Graphics maxon, short film, siggraph

A pair of press releases from StudioGPU, creators of MachStudio Pro, this morning announce two big deals.  The first is that they’ve now added support for using Pixar’s Renderman for high-end ray-tracing visuals, if you aren’t amazing enough by the built-in GPU visuals.  It’s a seamless workflow moving directly from authoring and modeling into the final rendering.

“We are pleased that StudioGPU has closely integrated RenderMan inside of MachStudio Pro,” said Chris Ford, RenderMan business director at Pixar Animation Studios. “The ability to preview renderings before the export of final shots to RenderMan helps streamline the creative process in a way that benefits everyone.”

In addition to this, they’ve announced new options for Student Pricing that make it more attractive for educational uses.  Now a student can get MachStudio Pro and a working ATI FirePro V7800 for $999, or just the software for $499, a substantial savings from the full prices of both.

“Students should be encouraged to explore creativity however possible,” says Rob O’Neill, director of the Digital Arts Research Lab at Pratt Institute and partner at Kickstand in New York City. “By offering MachStudio Pro at educational pricing for students, StudioGPU is helping to remove the production barriers that can easily stifle a student’s access to cutting-edge tools. Now with MachStudio Pro, students can focus on the art of animation instead of the workflow limitations of long renders.”

Good news for students and experts alike.  Full press releases after the break.

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Graphics machstudio, software, studiogpu

Time Out New York (TONY) is a Kid’s magazine targeting the New York Area, and the August Issue features an augmented reality trick linking it to a Webby Award winning video of the fifth grade chorus from Staten Island, care of Junaio.  All it takes is an issue of the mag, and your handy smartphone.

Elizabeth Barr, editorial director of Time Out North America, has this to say: “Time Out is always looking for ways in which our readers can engage creatively with our product, so creating a cover that plays with augmented reality was a no-brainer. It reflects the spirit of fun that TONY Kids seeks to create on a monthly basis. The cover literally sings to our readers, allowing them to experience firsthand why our editorial team chose to feature the talented students of the P.S. 22 Chorus in the first place.

Full press release and a demo video after the break.

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Graphics augmented reality, junaio, magazine

News has leaked out of the buggy Panasonic website about their upcoming HDC-SDt750, a ‘prosumer’ grade stereoscopic 3D camera.  Rather than a completely new camera, it looks like they’ve simply fitted a large 3d lens on the end of an existing 3MOS camera like the HDC-HS700.

Details are scarce, aside from 1080p AVCHD at 60fps and Hybrid O.I.S. Image Stabilitization technology. The rest should come out at the big event July 28th.

Panasonic’s consumer-grade 3D camcorder leaks out, the HDC-SDT750 — Engadget.

Hardware

Water regulates climate, storing heat during the day and releasing it at night. Water in the ocean and atmosphere carry heat from the tropics to the poles. The process by which water moves around the earth, from the ocean, to the atmosphere, to the land and back to the ocean is called the water cycle.

This animation of sea surface temperature shows the transport of heat along the ocean’s surface.

credits: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio; this is a contribution of the Consortium for Estimating the Circulation and Climate of the Ocean (ECCO) funded by the National Oceanographic Partnership Program; the Blue Marble data is courtesy of Reto Stockli (NASA/GSFC)

Science nasa, scientific visualization

Tableau Public has only been out for 5 months, and today has released some of the initial figures on usage.  So far, over 4.5 Million Tableau visualizations have been viewed, gracing the websites of such major companies as USA Today and CBSSports.  To celebrate, they analyzed their logs to collect the Top 100 Visualizations for our viewing pleasure.

Among the Top 100, the most commonly viewed category is sports and the most interactive category is travel and lifestyle. Interactivity lets viewers explore the data within the visualization. People have created vizes on a wide range of topics, including worldwide alien abductions, the hottest U.S. cities for muscle cars and the all-time best basketball players.

Congratulations to Tableau for making the big time only 5 months in!  Full press release after the break.

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Science tableau