Hamlet Diagram Poster
5:48 pm
Snowblind : Free, HD, and in 3D
5:46 pm
Snowblind is a new ‘spaghetti western’ film available for free on YouTube and RapidShare in HD and 3D, and available for purchase on BluRay.
SNOWBLIND is true film making 2.0: Community-powered, fan-based, graphic-novel grindhousy goodness… Shot on our own money and post-produced in endless hours of unpaid work. What else to do but share it with the world for free now – because in our present, yesterday meets tomorrow and spaghetti western goes digital!
Indie online film is getting big, with Snowblind, Sintel, and more coming out in rapid succession.
Geforce GTX580 to launch on Nov 9th
3:00 pm
The rumor is that the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 will be coming out on November 9th to compete with AMD’s Cayman series of GPUs, which will be the 6900 series. Interestingly enough, this means that the GTX 580 will launch before the 6900 series. However, there is no telling if this is a soft launch or a hard launch with the product being in stores. The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 580 will have all 512 streaming processors enabled, have a 128 texture mapping units (TMUs), have 2 GB of GDDR5 memory, is using the GF110 chip, and will have a thermal design power (TDP) of 244 Watts.
You can look at this card as Fermi done right and we can also confirm that the card is scheduled to launch before AMD’s Cayman-based Radeon HD 6950 and HD 6970 parts.
The fun in the graphics world is just about to start, as there are still a few more interesting cards to launch until the end of 2010.
Past century of government and economy
2:00 pm
FlowingData points us to a chart from John Palmer that visualizes the last 100 years of government and economic indicators, containing the national debt, US GDP, house and senate majority parties, voter turnouts, tax collections, and inflation.
We learn from our mistakes. Hindsight is a prompt path to clarity. This historical perspective visualizes economic trends and spending patterns, during good times and bad. Present-day assumptions regarding core party values have had major shifts over time, and the ridiculous extremes in voter alignment, lobbying, and legislative action are due for
revision. As a basis for future shift, this data can educate a presumptive public, empowering citizens to make an informed decision on each and every election day.
Today is Voting Day here in the US, but I don’t know if this chart will impact your decisions at all. It may debunk the theories that any particular party is more responsible for the current state of things, but the most important thing to take away from it is that voting is important. Be it in the US or overseas, get out and vote!
Election Forecasts from Nate Silver
1:30 pm
Nate Silver earned some internet celebrity during the Obama Presidential election for his daily election predictions on FiveThirtyEight.com . During this election cycle, he’s publishing his efforts at the New York Times complete with commentary and his usual collection of statistics for the Senate, House, and Governor’s races.
Hit his NYTimes page for all the election numbers you can shake a stick at.
Impure Demonstration on Delicious Tags
1:00 pm
If last week’s discussion of the new visualization programming language ‘Impure’ caught your eye, then check out the live demonstration they’ve posted where they visualize the most popular tags of a few loved website (hint hint).
In Impure there is an API module called DeliciousTagFromUrl that downloads a list of tags that people have being associating to an url on their Delicious account, and how many times each tag have been used. So, we used this module three times in order to get Table for each blog. Then we assemble in a new table containing all the tags and all its weights.
Finally we read the three NumberList (the lists with weights) and we plug them to the ComparativeProportionsTriple visualizator, which is perfect for this purposes. This one is a home made interactive visualization method .
A still of the resulting image is above. I’m happy to see VizWorld scoring in 3D and News, but it’s neat to see how public perception (at least the delicious-tagging public) sees the three sites (VizWorld, FlowingData, and Infosthetics).
via Impure Blog.
Solid State Flash Memory For Compositing
12:00 pm
Over at the RenderStream Blog they have a discussion with Vincent Brisebois of FusionIO on the use of SSD’s in Compositing work. They cover the benefits of using SSD as disk-cache, to improve performance on cached renders, but then get into a less-frequently discussed aspect of SSD’s.
RS: In a recent interview you gave on CG channel, you mention that before you started using your solid state memory cards, you were never able to fully utilize your Quadro FX card. Can you elaborate on that? How do the GPU’s and the Fusion-io cards relate to each other and when does it make sense to buy another GPU or assemble an SLI?
VB: This is an interesting case. Before the Fusion-io cards, I never had enough data throughput to saturate my CPU and GPU. Even with a 4 drive Sata RAID, you only have four reading heads (one per disk), so if you have a 20 layer comp, you aren’t able to feed 20 frames simultaneously to the CPU. With SSD technology you can feed hundreds of images simultaneously, allowing you to easily “feed” the CPU. With the CPU now at 100% utilization, you can quickly process the images and render a result which then goes to the GPU to display. With a four drive raid, I could realistically work on 1080p footage pretty well, but stereoscopic 2K was impossible and 4K was just a pipe dream.
In the interest of fairness I feel the need to point out that Vincent Brisebois works for FusionIO, a well-known SSD manufacturer, and RenderStream builds high-end workstations, so they both have something to gain by pushing more SSD’s in the industry. However, they both make very good points.
As prices continue to plummet on SSD technology, I think we are really heading for a world where Hard Drives are the equivalent of modern Tape Drives: Slow but Huge and Reliable storage.
via Solid State Flash Memory For Compositing « RenderStream.com.
HeadsUp Displays on Iron Man 2
11:00 am
Iron Man is a great resource for anyone interested in Heads-Up displays, the entire movie is full of the Iron Man Suit HUD’s and various floating displays all around Tony Stark’s house. Bringing these fictional displays to life was the job of several VFX experts, and an article on CGsociety gets into the details of how some of this works.
To get the 3D graphics in the interior of the helmets right, PLF tried several test approaches using combinations of C4D and After Effects. Ultimately, the HUD animations were made in After Effects and the HUD data was projected onto a sphere in CINEMA 4D to get the curvature. That animation was then overlayed onto the actor’s face in After Effects so the face and the display could be visible at the same time. Artists who worked on the HUDs often used models gathered from Industrial Light and Magic that were rendered out in CINEMA 4D using shaders and Sketch and Tune.
GE & TEDMED visualizes health
10:34 am
On GE’s website they’ve got a pretty interactive visualization, created with help from TEDMED, that charts various aspects of people’s health for individual states against the national averages.
The visualization above, created as part of GE’s sponsorship of TEDMED, allows you to take an in depth look at the relationship between risk factors and common conditions by state. You might be surprised by what you discover. Please take a look and share your insights.
Click on any of the circles for more detailed numbers and a reference of where that number came from.
VizWorld.com 
Comments