VizWorld.com

The success of James Cameron’s Avatar has kicked off an avalanche of 3-D movies. Some of the those movies have been good, some of them have been pretty rotten. Personally, a 3-D movie is not any good unless there is a good storyline behind it.

The NYTimes talks with James Camerson on the future of 3-D. However he also brings up and interesting point about the 3-D post-production process. If you have a $150 million movie, and you take three to four months to do a 3-D conversion process at the end of the movie, you are still paying interest on the $150 million bank loan that is costing the studios money.

Q. Do you think the success of “Avatar” set off an arms race among the Hollywood studios to release as many 3-D movies as possible?

A. I think it accelerated a move toward 3-D that was already in progress. There were a number of 3-D films that were being very successful over a period of three years or so, but “Avatar” was the moment that the wave crested, if you will. After that it was undeniable that 3-D was going to be lucrative and it was here to stay, and it wasn’t a gimmick and all those things. And I think there was a rush, a gold rush, and some mistakes were made and some bad 3-D reached the marketplace. And then there was a little pushback from the audience, that we don’t want to pay extra for something that’s not a great experience. And I think that the studios have been somewhat chastened by that, and they’re now attempting to do 3-D at a higher quality.

via James Cameron on ‘Avatar,’ ‘Titanic,’ and the Future of 3-D @ NYTimes.com

Graphics 3d

German site Hardwareluxx (Read an English Translation here) has some details on the new AMD Technology Demo that will be accompanying the release of the new Radeon 6800 card.  It’s a game demo (of course) using Trinigy’s Vision-8 engine and the Bullet physics engine with several other fancy effects, as evidenced in the slide below.

No actual benchmarks or video out yet, but it sure does look impressive.

Hardwareluxx – Pre-Release: Mecha Rampage Tech-Demo zur Radeon-HD-6800-Serie (Video).

Graphics, Science amd, software

If you don’t actually work in the VFX Industry, you may be completely oblivious to the incredible power that ‘color grading’ can wield over a scene.  Be it recorded video or CG footage, the power that a color artist wields in post-production has the capability of changing the entire feel of the footage.

The process of colour grading is something that is used in almost every piece of professional video. Colour grading can take the form of simple colour correction such as correcting white balance, or can be used to give a particular look, e.g., making a scene look warm or cold.

Whilst it is mostly associated with recorded video, it is also something that’s important in motion graphics too. First we’ll take a look at exactly what colour grading is then we’ll look at some of tools you can use to grade your videos.

via An Introduction to Colour Grading | Fuel Your Motionography.

Graphics color, vfx

The Sculptor Galaxy, or NGC 253, is an spiral galaxy located in the constellation Sculptor. The Sculptor Galaxy is a currently undergoing a period of intense star formation. It is located between 10.9 million light years away and 12.8 million light years away. It depends on which method of measurement that is used.

The red image at bottom right shows the galaxy’s active side. Infant stars are heating up their dusty cocoons, particularly in the galaxy’s core, making the Sculptor galaxy burst with infrared light. This light — color-coded red in this view — was captured using WISE’s longest-wavelength, 22-micron detector. The dusty burst of stars is so intense in the core that it generates diffraction spikes. Diffraction spikes are telescope artifacts normally seen only around very bright stars.

The green image at center right reveals the galaxy’s emerging young stars, concentrated in the core and spiral arms. Ultraviolet light from these hot stars is being absorbed by tiny dust or soot particles left over from their formation, making the particles glow with infrared light that has been color-coded green in this view. WISE can see this light with a detector designed to capture wavelengths of 12 microns.

The blue image at top right was taken with the two shortest-wavelength detectors on WISE (3.4 and 4.6 microns). It shows stars of all ages, which can be found not just in the core and spiral arms but throughout the galaxy.

via WISE – Multimedia Gallery: Sculptor Galaxy.

Science astronomy, nasa, wise

Today we start with a couple of infographics about the economic situation in the UK, both by The Guardian: the breakdown of the Government spending by department, and the Interactive comprehensive UK’s spending review. After, we take a look at the top ten most expensive cities to live in 2010, brought by Home Loan Finder, the Vault Index Summer 2010, made by JESS3 to Perfect Market, and finally we learn from Games 2U how Video Games are made.

Read more…

Graphics, Science design, economy, environment, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

If you’re tired of waiting for ambient occlusion passes to render, then maybe you should look at a tool from ‘Rusted Dreams’ called ‘Faogen’. It’s a hardware accelerated rendering system designed solely for ambient occlusion map generation.

Faogen itself uses hardware shadow mapping, floating-point render targets and OpenGL Shading Language to compute ambient occlusion data. This process is much faster than any CPU-based approach.

C++ library for integrating AO generation into your applications also available:

In the current version you have to be able to convert your scene/model into OBJ or LWO (Lightwave) files, but they hope to expand this to other formats in future versions.  They have a free demo available for download, after which it’s only $70 per license, and $400 for a site-license.

via rusted dreams: faogen.

Graphics faogen, software

As I have said before, I think that a lot of the 3-D TV hype is overblown. The largest problem that 3-D TV faces is a lack of content. The second largest problem is that many people have already upgraded to high definition televisions, and do not want to upgrade yet again just for 3-D content (which is lacking). Over time these two problems will be mitigated. More 3-D content is coming out weekly, and eventually people will upgrade their televisions.

However, even while people are focused on 3-D televisions, the industry is already looking towards the next big thing: connected TVs. According to DisplaySearch, connected TVs are forecast to grow to over 118 million units in 2014.

While much of the news coverage surrounding TV features concentrates on 3D, the quiet revolution of connected TV is reaching new heights with over 40 million units expected to ship in 2010. According to the DisplaySearch Q3’10 Quarterly TV Design and Features Report, the category is forecast to grow to over 118 million in 2014. TV set makers continue to develop new service platforms to offer a variety of new formats for TV viewing, while broadcasters are also launching their own standards and portals this quarter, such as Hbb.TV and YouView.

via While 3D TV Captures Consumer Attention, the Industry Tunes Into Connected TV – DisplaySearch

Hardware 3d, hdtv

In 2006, AMD acquired the graphics company ATI for $5.4 billion. Shortly thereafter, AMD announced an initiative codenamed Fusion. The goal of this initiative is to a CPU and GPU into what is called the Accelerated Processing Unit (APU). Products from this initiative are due in 2011. The Bobcat core will focus on 1 watt to 10 watt products. A netbook is an example of a product that might use the Bobcat core. The Bulldozer core focused on 10 watt to 100 watt products, which could show up in laptop computers and personal desktop computers.

The Llano APU is not going to be built on either the Bobcat or Bulldozer platforms. Instead it will be built from up to four 32nm Phenom II-like cores. Llano will use a new socket (AM3r2) and will use DDR3 for memory. None of this is really new, as we have covered the LLano platform before. However, today Guru3D has some more information regarding LLano, along with some platform pictures.

The Llano APU demo showed three compute-intensive workloads simultaneously on Microsoft Windows® 7, including calculating the value of Pi to 32 million decimal places, and decoding HD video from a Blu-ray™ disc. Running concurrent to the CPU and HD video playback applications, Microsoft’s nBody DirectCompute application is shown achieving around 30 GFLOPS (as reported in the application) a relative measure of the available capacity to post-process video during playback, play a DirectX11 game, or assist the CPU cores to accelerate a non-graphics application. The demonstration represents a preview of Llano’s raw compute power enabling new levels of experience computing that AMD aims to bring to mainstream PC users in 2011.

via AMD Fusion APU Codenamed “Llano” Photo’s

Hardware amd, fusion, lano

One of my great disappointments with NVIDIA’s Fermi is that we know it has 512 streaming processors. Unfortunately, none of the graphics cards, whether for professional or gaming purposes, that have been released by NVIDIA enable all of these streaming processors. The GeForce GTX 480 has only 480 streaming processors. In the professional realm it is even worse. The Quadro 6000 has only 448 streaming processors.

A user over in the [H]ardOCP forums has collected some nice NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 rumors. Among those rumors are that the GeForce GTX 580 will have all 512 streaming processors enabled.

Hardware fermi, geforce, nvidia

Martin Krzywinski has a fascinating article up about an alternative to what he calls “hairballs” in network visualizations that creates not only visually appealing graphs, but graphs with significantly improved analytical features.

In this layout, nodes are constrained to linear axes and edges are drawn as curves between nodes. Node position is determined solely by network structure, node, edge annotation, or any other meaningful properties of the network. In other words, layout rules are defined by you based on what properties that are meaningful to you. These rules form a mapping between structure and layout can be as simple or complex as you wish.

I’m still having some difficulty understanding how he maps certain information onto this new visualization, but I have to admit it seems to be much ‘cleaner’ than traditional network graphs.  He shows it in use for parallel axes, stacked bar graphs, and a few other visualization strategies. I plan to read it further, and recommend you do too!

via Linear Layout for Network Visualization – Visually Interpreting Network Structure and Content Made Possible.

Science algorithm, visualization