The Kursk submarine disaster Timeline
11:30 am
176 Mograph & VFX Tutorials
11:00 am
VisualFXTuts turned their head away for a minute to work on their site redesign, and when they turned back they found the community had overflowed with new tutorials. They’ve made a pass over the new offerings, and compiled them into an impressive list of 176 Motion Graphics and VFX tutorials covering pretty much every aspect of software on the market.
SLI vs. CrossFireX: The DX11 generation
10:05 am
Tech Report has a great roundup of multi-GPU solutions from NVidia (SLI) and ATI (CrossFire) across multiple pieces of software and multiple graphics cards, pushing the peaks of performance to their limits across a variety of uses. To anyone who’s followed graphics cards, the results shouldn’t be a surprise:
One impression hasn’t changed since our value roundup: the latest GeForces tend to be better values at present than AMD’s 5000-series Radeons. That’s a clear reversal of fortunes since the GeForce GTX 400 series’ somewhat underwhelming debut, when the GTX 480 was really no faster than the Radeon HD 5870. The Fermi architecture still quite new, and Nvidia has extracted enough additional performance through driver tuning to put the GTX 470 on equal footing with the 5870—and the GTX 480 well ahead. That’s true across a range of games, not just those where the GeForces have an apparent advantage, like Metro 2033 and Borderlands. The addition of the cheaper and more architecturally efficient GeForce GTX 460 has further solidified Nvidia’s value leadership.
The ATI cards do seem to beat out the NVidia cards when you start looking at 3-card solutions, but that’s still rather rare. To those who said MultiGPU’s were unlikely, here’s another step towards their inevitability.
SLI vs. CrossFireX: The DX11 generation – The Tech Report – Page 1.
Job hunting: 5 tips for CG graduates
9:00 am
Over at Escape Studios, they’ve published a helpful list of tips and advice for recent CG graduates looking to get their first big gig in the industry.
We all know that finding your first job in the CG industry can be tough, but we have good reasons to feel pretty confident about future job prospects. That’s because the industry has seen growth for the ninth year in a row. There are jobs out there and I am particularly well placed to comment as I sit opposite our Recruitment Team and so I get to hear everything about the jobs they have available. Over the last few months, they have all been incredibly busy, and that’s good news for all aspiring artists.
Intentionally Avoiding Details in Toy Story 3
8:50 am
The Toy Story franchise has been around for several years, and since the original film the tools have improved significantly. Visuals and realism have improved by startling amounts, but to remain true to the look and feel of the original they had to avoid using these new tools.
According to director Lee Unkrich, “the technology and the tools and such were such that we couldn’t achieve what we wanted to.” Surprisingly, those limits came back to challenge the artists on Toy Story 3. While the models and rigging had to be upgraded to be compatible with current software, many of the usual constraints had to be limited or removed to keep the animators from adding too much detail to the characters expressions. “That was a challenge for our animators. They would be animating Buzz or Woody and putting all this detail into the animation,” said Supervising Animator Mike Venturini.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 12/08/2010
7:00 am
The end of the week is near, and you probably had a couple of meetings during this period. If so, the numbers brought by Socialcast may come to a shock. Also shocking – or maybe not – is the approach made by Credit Loan, giving a National Credit Score to compare the reality of several countries. Definitely NOT surprising, is the retail phenomenon called Apple, as showed by GigaOm, and even less the status of Facebook, on another graphic about the biggest Social Network in the World, this time by The Blog Herald.
Finally, a very interesting set of data about Web Designers, from Intac.
Infographics Summary for 2010-08-12
10:30 pm
Chaos Group’s Phoenix Fluid Dynamics Solver
4:30 pm
Next time you need fluids simulated in 3dsMax, you have a choice other than RealFlow thanks to Chaos Group’s newest product: Phoenix.
Phoenix Fluid Dynamics is the latest product released by Chaos Software. The software perfectly combines a grid based simulator with outstanding rendering capabilities. In addition to the usual uniform fluid behavior, Phoenix FD is capable of simulating a whole array of additional processes like pressure decay, thermal radiation cooling and mass-temperature dependence.
Currently available at a promotional price of $445, it will rise to $895 on September 10th.
“World’s Fastest 3D Film Segment” clocked by Mercedes SLS AMG
4:00 pm
Mercedes took a team of experts and partnered them up with the MErcedes SLS AMG, and set out to record the “world’s fastest 3D film segment” as they aimed to hit 162 mph on the Isle of Man.
Procedure:
- Assemble Britain’s brightest talents in 3D technology.
- Ask David Coulthard to drive the SLS AMG as fast as he possibly could (and mind you – he is fast).
- Track the paces with “another” Mercedes SLS AMG with a boot 3D camera (driven by none other than rally ace – Robbie Head), a modified 4×4 with a V10 engine, special boom cars and several helicopters.
The video will be shown on the Sky 3D pub channel this sunday, and there are reports that the producers will be showing it in stores belonging to a “major electronics brand”.
via “World’s Fastest 3D Film Segment” clocked by Mercedes SLS AMG.
VizWorld.com 
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