VizWorld.com

Animated Gif’s have a bad reputation of being resource hogs that typically do nothing more than suck up bandwidth and create distractions on the web. However, over at “World of Technology” they’ve collected a few great examples of how a simple animated GIF can explain a complicated technical mechanism better than any volume of text.

I’ve embedded one here, but hit their website for more including radial engines, a sewing machine, and a maltese cross mechanism.

World Of Technology: Complicated Mechanisms Explained in simple animations.

Science

At SIGGRAPH2010, Autodesk was advertising a collection of new ROI studies done by Pfeiffer Consulting, showing the vast impact newer versions of 3dsMax and Maya have had on their users.  One frequent argument from managers and people not intimately familiar with the products is what changed between 3dsMax 2009 and 2008 that justifies the expense?  It’s still a modeling, animation, and rendering package, so what justifies the outlay of cash?

The new reports attempt to answer this by analyzing the impressive improved performance offered in the newer versions of the Autodesk products, and benchmarks several frequently used features.  They present the results like so, showing the improvement between 3dsMax 2008 and 3dsMax 2011.

After analyzing several aspects of the software, focusing heavily on Autodesk’s admitted “big improvements” like the new shader manager, the Quadrify functions, and improved rigging tools, they then take the several areas they benchmarked and calculate how many times a day this happens in an animators life, and how much time is saved over the course of a day, week, and year.  Then, for the most substantial impact to the bean counters who are typically reponsible for signing off on the purchases, they look at the amount of money you “save” over the course of a year by upgrading.  The results:

• At $100/hr, an animator could “lose” almost $16,000/year in 3dsMax 2008
• At $100/hr, an animator could “lose” almost $20,000/year in Maya 8.5

The studies are well done, and contain a wealth of information about the improvements Autodesk has made in the last several years, both through routine optimization of the code and the new “Project Excalibur” initiative they’ve been working on.

“Our customers are constantly balancing creativity and innovation with the need to meet tight production deadlines and budgets,” said Stig Gruman, Autodesk vice president, digital entertainment. “As a result, Autodesk has focused on developing both innovative creative tools as well as on under-the-hood architectural changes to improve the performance of Maya and 3ds Max. The cumulative impact of the improvements assessed in the Pfeiffer studies on modern production pipelines is significant. The Pfeiffer studies help illustrate how productivity gains in everyday operations can lead to savings of thousands of dollars per year.”

Personally, I think information like this is invaluable for not just Autodesk products, but all graphic design products.  As these products continue their annual release cycle they risk running into situations similar to Microsoft’s Office suite where users (and professionals) simply stop upgrading since there is no perceivable reason to.  Photoshop CS5 still touches up photos, just like CS2, so why upgrade?  For most consumers, it doesn’t matter, but for professionals these numbers are critical, justifying not only why they should upgrade but quantifying the benefits of such.

However, I do take some issue with why they chose to benchmark their new products (2011) against such old versions.  Why not compare 3dsMax2011 against 2010, instead of the 3-year old 2008?  Why not compare Maya 2011 against 2010, instead of the 2007 version.  Of course this makes for the most impressive results in the ROI study, but is anyone out there in the professional space still using Maya 8.5?

You can read a full press release about the ROI studies here, or read the individual reports:

• Autodesk 3ds Max 2011 Market Perspectives, Productivity and Return on Investment
• Autodesk Maya 2011 Market Perspectives, Productivity and Return on Investment
• Autodesk 3ds Max 2011: Productivity Benchmarks
• Autodesk Maya 2011: Productivity Benchmarks

If you have a question or concern about the study, post in the comments!

Graphics autodesk, feature, siggraph

A History of The Internet: From Concept To Napster and Facebook (Infographic) – HotHardware.

infographics history, timeline

Anything dealing with shots of the White House winds up with lots of heavy compositing and CG modeling, due to the security and secrecy.  The film ‘Salt’ is no exception, and CIS Vancouver worked with several other groups to first previs the shots, and then gather the necessary live video and composite in the CG components.

Matchmove lead, Peter Hart worked with match mover, Kate Lee in tracking the plates. They created a simplified model from the point cloud and lined it up with the plates using Boujou. Earl and his team would keep adjusting the textures and lighting on the White House, rendering it out for the compositors to test in the plates. We had recently switched from Shake to Nuke, so everyone was a little new at the start of the project. It was amazing just how quickly they picked it up.

CGSociety – SALT.

Graphics cis, movie, vfx

Raffael Marty of SecViz.org is hosting a talk tomorrow (Aug 19th) at 5pm on uses of Data Visualization in solving security and IT problems.

Over the past years, organizations have collected more and more data and log files within their networks, systems, and cloud environments. Oftentimes, the data ends up being stored and archived without ever being used. This can be attributed to a lack of tools that help process and analyze all the data, but also to the lack of knowledge around data analysis. In this presentation we will explore how we can leverage visualization to uncover hidden problems. We will discuss some common visualization libraries and have a look at how they can be deployed to solve security and IT problems. We will look at a number of visualization examples that show how security data benefits from visual representations. For example, how can network traffic, firewall data, or IDS data be visualized effectively?

You’ll have to register for a BrightTalk account, but looks like a good 45-minute talk to attend.

via Log Visualization in the Cloud | brighttalk.com.

Science security, secvis

It came as a bit of a shock to a lot of people: Demand Media, the biggest pure-play SEO company in existence, is going public – and the amazing numbers behind the company are illustrated by Authority Labs. Less impressive is the analysis brought by Credit Score, comparing United States’ credit rating to the rest of the World – there’s a long road ahead for the American credit recovery. Changing the topic, have you ever wondered how  stressful is your job for real? That’s the question posted by Credit Loan on their infographic, worth having a look, specially because Robots are taking over the workplace, according to Focus – talk about stress!! To end today’s round-up, Mashable‘s graphic about the rise of Text Messaging.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations

Tamar Infographic series: captivate, communicate, convert

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Graphics, Science digest, infographics, list

CBSHealthWatch goes inside Weill Cornell Medical College’s new CAVE to see how it works and what it can do for the future of medicine.

Chris Wragge visits New York’s Weill Cornell Medical College to have a look at a new 3D technology that allows doctors to see inside the human body like never before. It’s called CAVE and stands for Cave Automatic Virtual Environment.

They do actually answer a few of the things I mentioned in my original cover, getting real doctors to show uses of the technology and talk about how it can impact their effectiveness.

via CAVE: A 3D Virtual View Inside the Body – CBS News Video.

Science biomed, cave

Lightworks has announced the winner of their latest photorealistic image competition, Hans Zijffers.  He’s a long-time user of caligari Truespace, which made use of the Lightworks rendering technology, and submitted the image above.

After my experiments with Lightworks renderings, I introduced the use of 3D because it has so much more to offer then just making design drawings by hand alone. And being a fast render engine it turned out to be a great tool for producing images, for example, while a customer is sitting next to me he can watch the wireframe model unfolding into a full colour image. When we upgraded to the next version of trueSpace, the built in Lightworks render engine had also been updated and the new version had a major update on shader and lighting technology which made it possible to boost the render quality further. Image Based Lighting (IBL), Area Lights, Goniometric Lights and HDRI were also added to the Lightworks toolbox, enough to produce great looking images to convince your customers. Rendering with Lightworks is as easy as using a point and shoot camera, but with the quality of an expensive DSLR camera.”

For his effort, he gets a sniffy 16GB iPad.  See the other entries on the competition results page.

via Lightworks photorealistic image competition winner receives iPad.

Graphics

It’s a Wide-Format image.

Part 1 of 4 – Tamar Infographic series: captivate, communicate, convert | Tamar.

infographics