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The 2010 Demo Reel for Houdini is online now, showcasing a great collection of work over the last year from some true masters of the tool

This reel highlights some of the amazing work created by Houdini artists over the last year. From feature films to commercials to student projects and video game cinematics, it is wonderful to see what can be accomplished with Houdini’s visual effects and animation tools.

Houdini Demo Reel 2010 from Go Procedural on Vimeo.

Graphics houdini, reel

Bacon Bits.

infographics

Yesterday, we brought a lot of infographics about Social Media, and, of course, Twitter had to make its appearance, with a new piece by Hubspot about the differences between men and women, when it comes to the use of the popular micro-blog service. Also, a great look at Google PageRank from Zippy Cart and an even deeper overview by Intac, on what will be the Internet in 2020. We then move back to the present, more exactly to the numbers behind the business of Shark Week, made by Meet the Boss, and to the ten biggest black markets in the World, from Credit Score.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, infographic, Visual Loop, visualizations

Another SIGGRAPH2010 Course has published their materials online, this time it’s Magnus Wrenninge’s “Volumetric Methods in Visual Effects”.

The course begins with a quick introduction to generating and rendering volumes. We then present a production usable volumetrics toolkit, focusing on the feature set and why those features are desirable. Finally we present the specific tools developed at Double Negative, DreamWorks, Sony Imageworks, Rhythm & Hues, and Side Effects Software. The production system presentations will delve into development history, how the tools are used by artists, and the strengths and weaknesses of the software.

You can download the course materials as a 65M, 273 Page PDF at his site.

via Volumetric Methods in Visual Effects (SIGGRAPH 2010 course) — Magnus Wrenninge.

Graphics, Science education, siggraph, volume rendering

While at SIGGRAPH, I had the opportunity to sit down and talk to Autodesk about some of their new offerings, the 20th Anniversary of 3dsMax, and the ‘rivalry’ between Maya and Max.  All in all, Autodesk doesn’t look to be shedding the title of ‘Behemoth of the Computer Graphics Industry’ anytime soon, and they’ve got lots on their plate to prove it.

First off, and central to many of their SIGGRAPH events, was the 20th Anniversary of 3dsMax.  Autodesk held a special lunch event with Tim Miller (owner of Blur Studios) and some Autodesk higher-ups to discuss the last 20 years of the product, and where they plan to go from here.  You can hear Tim Miller talk about 3dsMax in a special video at The Area, and his presentation at the event was similar. However, he showed some of the work he’s done over the last 20 years and his personal experiences with the product.  I personally loved hearing him talk about being briefly hired by a “major studio” prior to Blur, and quitting in frustration with how poorly the “Industry” tools on SGI workstations performed in comparison to 3dsMax on a wimpy little PC.  He concluded his talk with the amazing Star Wars: The Old Republic trailer that Blur created.

The other thing Autodesk was eager to talk about at SIGGRAPH was their new “Suites” products.  Similar to Adobe’s Suites, now you can buy collections of Autodesk products in a Suite which cuts the price (obviously) and adds guaranteed 1-click interoperability between applications via the FBX systems.  Their new Entertainment Creation Suites shown here, give you your choice of 3dsMax or Maya, along with SoftImage, Motion Builder, and MudBox.  Whether you choose 3dsMax or Maya, the price does not change and they guarantee the same 1-click interoperability between all of the apps.  That means you’ll be able to click a model inside 3dsMax or Maya and click 1 button to have it immediately transferred over to MudBox for refinement, and then click a button to send the results back to 3dsMax or Maya when you’re done.  It’s a whole new level of interoperability not previously available without extensive plugins and file transfers/import/export mundaneness.

This leads to the last point that you really had to dig to get to at SIGGRAPH:  Neither 3dsMax nor Maya are going away anytime soon.  Several people (myself included) had expected that Autodesk’s acquisition of Maya would mean the end of the product as Maya’s features merged into 3dsMax.  Not the case, as both products have continued on parallel and unique development paths since the acquisition, and Autodesk still has plans for many new features for both products.  The fact that you can get the suites with either case at no cost difference seems to really drive home the point that Autodesk simply sees them as two tools to accomplish the same task : Act as the Central Hub for all of their other products.  Model in MudBox, animate in Motion Builder, Render in Mental Ray, but link it all together in 3dsMax or Maya.  Both products now offer identical capabilities, but expose them in different ways based on their historical audience.

I asked some Autodesk engineers about this, and they echoed the sentiment.  If they tried to make 3dsMax more like Maya, users would probably leave for Cinema4d.  If they tried to make Maya more like 3dsmax, Users would probably leave for Houdini.  Leaving the two products along, but unifying them “under the hood” to reduce development time, lets each product play to it’s strengths and lets users remain comfortable in the environment they’ve spent the last 20 years working in.

So what’s in store for the products?  The main thing it seems we’ll be seeing is an extensively redesigned UI.  They admit that the current UI’s have gotten a bit cluttered with way too many rollouts.  They currently have a project underway to redesign the GUI (some of which has already happened in the last 2 versions of 3dsmax) to be more streamlined, and have such lofty goals as a 20s load-time (Wouldn’t that just be AWESOME?). They are also embracing new computer architectures and working to add more features for multicore/multiprocessor systems, taking advantage of those big quad-core/hex-core chips on the way.  But that’s not all, they’ve got a long list of things they’re working on, and I guarantee we will all love every bit of it.

If you were at SIGGRAPH & talked to Autodesk, what all did you see that interested you?

Graphics 3dsmax, autodesk, feature, maya, siggraph

An interesting use of Active Shutter glasses technology (similar to the recent Sony patent) allows multiple users (2 in this case) to interact with a stereoscopic 3D touch-table from opposite sides, while maintaining proper head-tracked 3D stereo perspective for both.

Better still, two users viewing the same model city at the same time from different sides of the table could each see the 3D effect with the correct perspective for their position.

That’s because the glasses are wired to position and orientation sensors that track the wearer’s gaze, and the system uses this information to alter the image accordingly in real time for each user.

NewScientist via InAVate – A 3D touch-screen made for two – Video.

Hardware 3d, siggraph, stereoscopic

A humorous video from AMD that “shows the risks of using anything but an ATI Radeon graphics card for gaming”.  For those of you who can’t watch it, they show a swat team mistakenly infiltrating someone’s house due to unusual heat signatures and power consumption and finding that it’s simply a Fermi graphics card.

It’s a bit backward tho, given that they show “people coming and going at all hours of the day and night”, which would seem to indicate it’s pretty popular.

Still, it’s a funny video.

YouTube – The Misunderstanding – Presented by AMD.

Hardware amd, ati, commercial, humor, nvidia

FXRant has a nice breakdown of one of my favorite VFX scenes, the first “Time Jump” from Back To the Future, where Doc Brown sends his lovable pal Einstein just a few minutes into the future.

FXRant: “Back to the Future,” Einstein Jump.

Graphics movie, vfx

CGHeute (in german) has scoured vimeo and Youtube to create a nice collection of video tutorials for some of your favorite products.

• Blender - including Building a House, Ambient Occlusion, and compositing nodes
• MudBox - modeling heads, using curves, and speed sketching
• Cinema4D - An intro tutorial, using Dynamics, and the Clothilde system

Some great tutorials in there.

Graphics blender, cinema4d, mudbox, tutorial

A master’s thesis by Øystein Krog integrates into the open-source Ogre3d system to provide CUDA-accelerated smoothed particle hydrodynamics.

This work is part of my masters thesis in Computer Science at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology).
I have created a SPH library that uses the power of the GPU (through CUDA) to simulate fluids with extremely high performance (“real-time”).
In addition I have created a small demo application that uses Ogre to render the simulation interactively.
The application (and library) supports simple “wall” boundaries as well as “terrain” boundaries. The terrain is rendered using Ogre’s excellent new terrain component.

The results are impressive, and I almost swear I saw this at the SIGGRAPH Real-Time theater.  If not, then something very similar.  The ability to simulate thousands of particles in real-time is one of those very GPGPU-like problems.

The demo at SIGGRAPH first simulated the particles, then used a multi-pass rendering technique to make the result looks like real semitranslucent water.

gpusphsim – Project Hosting on Google Code. via Ogre3d Forums

Science cfd, gpgpu, simulation