MAXON Cinema4D users have a new toy to check out called ‘m4d’, or MentalRay for Cinem4D. It’s actually both Mental Ray and mental image’s new iray realtime rendering tool, available as a plugin. Currently in Beta, it’s available for € 980.
Two renderers for one price
By purchasing m4d you’ll get two completely different renderers which are fully implemented:
mental ray and iray.
Thus, you are in posession of the most elaborate render engines, for GPU as well as for CPU based renderings.
We begin today with an impressive figure: half the world’s population lives in 6 countries, as we can see on Visualizing Economics infographic. Following that, Time shows why the U.S. is not the land of opportunity it once was, Ria Novosti takes a look at the conditions for doing business in Russia and the rest of the world, and for last, a couple of puzzling questions: eLearners asks if we know how much of your life do we spend in school, and from Mint, a nice infographic on what if we invested in some companies instead of buying their products.
The New York Times has a great article about the growing field of biomedical animation, specifically Molecular animation. They talk to some of the big names in the field like Rober Lue, Janet Iwasa, and Drew Berry to learn how they do it and what the benefits of molecular animation are to researchers.
“All that we had before — microscopy, X-ray crystallography — were all snapshots,” said Tomas Kirchhausen, a professor in cell biology at Harvard Medical School and a frequent collaborator with Dr. Iwasa. “For me, the animations are a way to glue all this information together in some logical way. By doing animation I can see what makes sense, what doesn’t make sense. They force us to confront whether what we are doing is realistic or not.” For example, Dr. Kirchhausen studies the process by which cells engulf proteins and other molecules. He says animations help him picture how a particular three-legged protein called clathrin functions within the cell.
Bunkspeed has just announced availability of their new Bunkspeed SHOT Pro product, the professional version of the Bunkspeed SHOT software they’ve been demonstrating at conferences like SIGGRAPH and GTC for the last year. Based on Mental Ray’s iray, it’s a great interactive high-quality visualization solution for both small and large models. The Pro-version takes it from creating simple still images like a photography suite, into creating high-quality animations perfect for commercials and product demonstrations.
“The addition of turntable and sun study animations brings Bunkspeed SHOT Pro to a whole new level enabling users to create gripping visuals.” says Philip Lunn, Bunkspeed founder and CEO. “We firmly believe that our photo-realistic 3D animations placed on the web will increase product awareness and drive demand. Our animations are simple and quick to create, and are a fraction of the cost of doing a photo shoot of the real product.”
Get the full details in the press-release after the break.
City University London won a Discovery Award at the recent IEEE VisWeek conference for their Hurricane Tracking Visualization tool. A joint effort between climate scientists at NCAR and visualization esperts at giCentre, the work was to find a way to parse the massive database of hurricane tracks for the last several hundred years.
Through the Willis Research Network we worked in close collaboration to develop an exploratory analysis tool for the exploratory analysis of thousands of simulated storm tracks generated through multi-century global climate simulations. We use this tool to help validate the model, generate research questions and disseminate this knowledge to peers and the insurance industry who are interested in the financial impacts of atmospheric risk and impact of climate change on this.
The award shows not only the expertise of giCentre, but the important of creating tools that can make data not only accessible to the scientific community, but the public community at large.
Matthew Foote, WRN Research Director added: “The communication of complex hazard and risk information is an increasingly critical part of insurers’ decision-making process. Tools such as those being developed at City with our research partners are advancing the application of state-of-the-art technologies and the integration of world-leading science and risk management.”
HPC News site HPCWire has released their 2010 Reader’s Choice awards and Kitware brings home 2 of them for their fantastic Paraview product. With both the Reader’s Choice and Editor’s Choice for Best Visualization Product or Technology, they’ve proven just how popular the open-source tool ParaView is.
“HPCwire readers are among the most informed in the HPC community and these awards represent which HPC-related companies are making the biggest impacts in mind-share within this community, said Tom Tabor, publisher of HPCwire. “The HPCwire Readers’ and Editors’ Choice Awards send a strong message to the recipients that those in the global HPC community recognize their work, and consider their efforts meritorious…Kitware is honored to accept these awards on behalf of the global ParaView community that has made ParaView the success it is today.
Possibly to compete against NVidia & PGI’s ‘CUDA x86‘ offering, Intel has announced at SC10 that they have a new OpenCL SDK enabling executing of OpenCL code on Intel x86 Processors, currently only on Windows Vista & Windows 7.
OpenCL* is an emerging standard from the Khronos Group industry consortium. As a Khronos founder and promoter, Intel has made significant contributions to OpenCL* feature set. With the Alpha release of Intel® OpenCL SDK, Intel continues to demonstrate its commitment to parallel computing tools and standards support.
OpenCL still hasn’t achieved the penetration of CUDA, primarily because it’s a bit more difficult to work with and it simply hasn’t had the time that CUDA has had, but this is a huge step toward creating a single truly universal language that runs on AMD GPU’s, NVidia GPU’s, and now Intel CPU’s.
Apple leaked it a few weeks ago, but now it’s official: NVidia has just announced the Quadro4000 for the Mac. With the same acceleration benefits of the Quadro on the PC, it will greatly improve performance of any graphics or CUDA-related application, like the popular Adobe CS5 suite.
“Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the Adobe Mercury Playback Engine, accelerated by NVIDIA Quadro GPUs, have redefined the non-linear editing workflow, delivering huge productivity gains,” said Ginna Baldassarre, senior product manager at Adobe. “Adobe looks forward to working with NVIDIA to help more Mac users reap the benefits of real-time performance and the ability to create compelling, multi-layer projects with multiple HD or higher resolution video clips, all while instantly viewing results.”
Google has released a new open-source tool called ‘Google Refine’ that aims to make cleaning up messy datasets a breeze. Their description is a bit sparse:
Google Refine is a power tool for working with messy data, cleaning it up, transforming it from one format into another, extending it with web services, and linking it to databases like Freebase.
Essentially it’s a desktop software accessible via a web-browser, which means you don’t have to upload your data to google to benefit from this, that uses lots of ‘intelligent’ algorithms to fix common problems with data like bad field alignment, format inconsistencies, and mangled input. It’s really meant for more database-style inputs (row/column style), but could be great for cleaning up user-survey inputs or large downloaded datasets. The main focus of the software is to first execute a filter to get just the part of the data you want, then apply a single operation to the group. That operation can be anything from ‘delete’ (to remove offending rows from a cut-n-paste’d Wiki entry) to reformat (to convert lines into tables). Watch the videos after the break for more details.
MAXON Cinema4D users have a new toy to check out called ‘m4d’, or MentalRay for Cinem4D. It’s actually both Mental Ray and mental image’s new iray realtime rendering tool, available as a plugin. Currently in Beta, it’s available for € 980.
We begin today with an impressive figure: half the world’s population lives in 6 countries, as we can see on 
The New York Times has a great article about the growing field of biomedical animation, specifically Molecular animation. They talk to some of the big names in the field like Rober Lue, Janet Iwasa, and 
Bunkspeed has just announced availability of their new Bunkspeed SHOT Pro product, the professional version of the Bunkspeed SHOT software they’ve been demonstrating at conferences like SIGGRAPH and GTC for the last year. Based on Mental Ray’s iray, it’s a great interactive high-quality visualization solution for both small and large models. The Pro-version takes it from creating simple still images like a photography suite, into creating high-quality animations perfect for commercials and product demonstrations.
City University London won a Discovery Award at the recent IEEE VisWeek conference for their Hurricane Tracking Visualization tool. A joint effort between climate scientists at NCAR and visualization esperts at giCentre, the work was to find a way to parse the massive database of hurricane tracks for the last several hundred years.
HPC News site HPCWire has released their 2010 Reader’s Choice awards and Kitware brings home 2 of them for their fantastic Paraview product. With both the Reader’s Choice and Editor’s Choice for Best Visualization Product or Technology, they’ve proven just how popular the open-source tool ParaView is.
Possibly to compete against NVidia & PGI’s ‘
Apple 
Google has released a new open-source tool called ‘Google Refine’ that aims to make cleaning up messy datasets a breeze. Their description is a bit sparse:
VizWorld.com 
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