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Power up your PhotoShop install with the massive collection of “stuff” from noupe.  From websites to sample PSD’s, brushes to books, they’ve found everything they could and offer it up as their Ultimate Toolbox.

Below is a collection of invaluable Photoshop resources from the online community that runs the proverbial gamut of available PS content. From toolkits full of templates, shapes, gradients, brushes, and so much more, to individual resource downloads of informative PDFs, usable PSDs, and other content galore, this post has everything you will need to amp up your Photoshop toolbox. So if you are a Photoshop devotee, or even just a newb getting started with the program, take a moment to browse down through these useful downloads that we have amassed.

via The Ultimate Photoshop Toolbox – Noupe Design Blog.

Graphics list, photoshop

Around 10am on September 6th, the Fourmile Canyon Fire started out just west of Boulder Colorado, and continues to burn hot.  NASA has released an image of the fire from their Terra satellite.

The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite captured this natural-color image of the fire at 12:15 p.m. local time (18:15 UTC) on September 6, 2010. The red outline corresponds with the unusually high surface temperatures associated with an active fire. A river of thick smoke flows eastward. Over the plains northeast of Denver, the smoke plume casts a shadow to the north.

Boulder County has issued a public health alert, and so far 12 homes and 3000 acres have burnt.

via Fourmile Canyon Fire : Natural Hazards.

Science nasa, satellite, terra

A new extreme gaming PC has just hit the market from Origin PC, the ‘Big O’ that boasts not only a PC, but a fully integrated and watercooled XBox 360 slim inside!  Just look at these specs.

Power Incarnate

Not in flesh, but in all its glorious circuitry with anywhere from a single Intel Core i7 Overclocked to 4.5GHZ to Dual Intel Xeon X5680′s Overclocked to 4.3GHz. Then add up to 12GB’s of Corsair GT 2000Mhz memory and the mother of all graphic setups Quad SLI EVGA GTX 480 FTW video cards. Simply put, you won’t find anything more powerful.

Complete Cold

ORIGIN builds liquid cooling systems that keep your processor, motherboard and video cards running at a temperature optimized for performance.

Look closely at the pic to the right and you’ll see in the upper-left, the DVD Tray.  This thing is huge, so I don’t think they’re exaggerating when they say:

Your one of a kind system is shipped incased in ORIGIN’s Wooden Crate Armor guaranteed to protect your rig during transport. When you see this beast being hauled in on a pallet you will know your Big O has arrived.

Of course, this kind of power isn’t cheap. Starts at $8k, and goes up to $16,999.  Full press release after the break.

via ORIGIN Big O Custom Gaming Desktop Product Details and Features.

Read more…

Hardware extreme, origin

Killzone 3 will be hitting shelves February 22nd, and is expected to usher in stereoscopic gaming in a big way.  The developers have spent countless hours tweaking various game aspects to make the stereoscopic experiences one of the best available, and found themselves answering several odd questions about elements typically forgotten, like crosshairs.

When playing a shooting game, cross hairs often appear on the screen to help the player aim and shoot enemies. But these cross hairs aren’t supposed to be an actual physical object a game character could touch or run into. Ter Heide said the “Killzone 3″ team has had to spend time figuring out at what depth to place those cross hairs within the 3-D world and how to make them move across the varying levels of the world’s ever-changing environment in a way that isn’t jarring to the player.

The same goes for other elements of the “heads up display” – a set of menus and items that gamers often see on the screen that give them important bits of information about things like ammunition levels, directions and the state of the character’s health. Ter Heide said they’ve had to figure out where these various informational devices should “live” in the game.

via Technolog – ‘Killzone 3′ makers run into unexpected challenges going 3-D.

Graphics, Science killzone, stereoscopic, video game

The NVidia GTC is only 2 weeks away (I’m going, are you?) and the details are firming up as to what will be happening when.  Over at the NVidia Ntersect blog, they’ve got a great list of some talks to check out if you’re into video processing, editing, image processing, or other special areas:

If you’re in the business of developing breakthroughs in visualization and imaging, then you won’t want to miss the GPU Technology Conference next month. With over 250 technology sessions presented by industry luminaries, there’s a wealth of information being shared, including tracks devoted to exploring new techniques in the graphics and visualization space involving ray tracing, image processing, video processing and medical imaging.

For content production, attendees can learn about how mental images’ iray interactive ray tracing is being leveraged in applications to streamline product development, and how the OptiX application acceleration engine can be integrated into your own application. There are several great sessions on ray tracing and other rendering techniques, including:

via The NVIDIA Blog – GPU Technology Conference Highlights: Visualization and Imaging.

Science conference, gtc, nvidia

Russia and Kazakhstan: main indicators of the countries | INFOgraphics | RIA Novosti.

infographics

Beam Splitters are the current norm for shooting in stereo, but they’re huge and complicated contraptions that are half art and half science.  A new tool from S3D may completely eliminate the need for science, returning the video capture capabilities back into the realm of art, thanks to a new computer controlled beam-splitter with a software calculator to help configure everything.

The Calculator can be used for any rig, but it is integrated in the S3D rig as part of the software. “The rig has a computer that controls it and it’s part of the software inside the computer,” says Portillo. For users of other 3D rigs, the S3D Calculator is available for sale (at 250 Euros) through the company website, and can be downloaded to PC or Mac. S3D Technologies is at work on an iPhone app of the Calculator. The company website also offers a trial version of the calculator for those who’d like to give it a try before buying.

via Studio Daily Blog » S3D Technologies debuts S3D Calculator, new beam splitter.

Hardware s3d, stereoscopic

The Student Loans Scheme: a Gateway Drug to Debt Slavery.

infographics

NVidia has another ally in hitting their aggressive Tegra sales figures, this time in LG who plans to integrate the Tegra 2 chipsets into their upcoming Optimus dual-core CPU phones.

LG selected NVIDIA Tegra because it enables a new mobile experience and content capabilities. Tegra 2 features a number of mobile “firsts”: the first mobile dual-core CPU, the only ultra low-power NVIDIA GeForce？ GPU and the first 1080p HD mobile video processor. Taking full advantage of the two speedy 1 GHz processors sharing the workload in Tegra 2, consumers can experience up to 2x faster web browsing and up to 5x faster gaming performance over single core processors running at 1 GHz. NVIDIA’s leadership in graphics also delivers flawless 1080p HD video playback, console-quality gaming and amazing 3D capabilities.

These new phones are expected to hit the market in the 4th quarter (soon).

via Tegra 2 To Be Used in LG’s Optimus Range of Phones.

Hardware lg, mobile, nvidia, tegra

One enterprising programmer came into possession of some classic windows games, the original 4-part Wing Commander saga, but found himself unable to play them as they were all based on the (now deprecated) DirectDraw API. While many would whine about the dangers of proprietary API’s (I would be one of them), he took it upon himself to resolve the problem.

It all started about a month ago, when one friend of mine had decided to follow his dreams and was moving to the states, and he had to get rid of a lot of stuff. Among his discard pile was a bunch of Wing Commander games, which I bought off him, figuring they might be interesting research material, as I’m planning on a game with similar game play structure (as in story combined with game play, not a 3d space shooter).

So, I found myself in the possession of Wing Commanders 1, 2, 3 and 4, all Windows versions – the Kilrathi Saga and WC4CD to be specific. I installed the first and tried it out. My Win7 switched to 256 colors at a 640×480 resolution, but the game ran.. with completely wrong palette.

His solution was to completely re-implement the DirectDraw DLL (ddraw.dll) with OpenGL calls, turning it into a simple translation layer, with remarkable results.  His source code and binaries are available for download (and extension), along with a list of features to add next:

Next up would have been WC4DVD version, but that adds MCI, DirectShow, mpeg2, DirectDraw7, and all sorts of headaches to the mix, so I figured it’s time for this project to end. I’m releasing the sources, so anyone who wants to pick them up and continue hacking can feel free to do so; with Wing Commanders or other old DirectDraw games.

I love how he’s managed to “fix” some of the ugliness of DirectDraw and adding in improved antialiasing and sync technologies to his implementation.  The fact that on Windows7, OpenGL is actually a translation layer to DirectX, isn’t lost on him either.

Yes, I know, I’m using OpenGL to fix a DirectX problem. Some find this rather ironic. To make things even more fun, vista and Win7 solve OpenGL problems by rendering OpenGL with DirectX. That is, if you’re not using ATI or Nvidia drivers..

via www.iki.fi/sol – Code – DirectDraw Hack.

Science directx, video game, windows