The latest video card from AMD, the Radeon 6970, is slated to be released on December 15th at midnight Eastern Standard Time, according to Fudzilla. According to the Overclockers UK forum, which itself links to a German forum, the Radeon 6970 has 1600 unified shaders, 32 Render Output Units (ROP), have 2 GB of GDDR5 memory on a 256-bit memory bus, with a memory bandwidth of 176 GB/sec. The pixel fill rate is 28.2 Gigapixels/sec, and the texture fillrate is 70.4 Gigatexels/sec. The GPU clock is running at 880 MHz, while the memory clock is running at 1.375 GHz. The graphics card comes with two DVI ports, two DisplayPorts, and one HDMI port.
The Radeon 6970 is AMD’s high-end, single-GPU card that is to compete against NVIDIA’s GTX 580. The Radeon 6970 is based on AMD’s “Cayman” graphics chip. Currently the Radeon 6970 scores lower than the NVIDIA GTX 580 in 3D Mark 11. However, that is an artificial benchmark and is not indicative of how it performs in real games. We will have to wait until it is released to see how it really performs.
CreativeFan has a nice list of 20 amazingly detailed 3D CG Characters, ranging from Fantasy to Mundane renderings, great for some inspiration on your design.
3D characters can be created in a variety of 3D software packages, including Pixologic zBrush, Autodesk 3D Studio Max, Mudbox or Maya, Daz Studio, Poser or others. The combination of 3D modeling, texturing and realistic rendering can allow for unrivaled realism and detail in the world of computer graphics.
We gathered up 20 stunning CG character creations from some of the top artists around, with some lifelike and realistic, while others are fantasy-oriented and magical. But, they have one thing in common, they are all incredibly detailed.
The world’s first 3-D lawyer commercial is upon us. I think that this is the beginning of the end of the world. What next? 3-D car salesmen that shout at you? 3-D cash for gold commercials? What do you think would be the worst use of 3-D?
Eric C. Conn has created a first. He has created the first lawyer 3D commercial. It even tells you how to make 3D glasses so you can watch it.
The commercial is commercial in nature. It outlines the reasons that someone should hire them on their Social Security or SSI claim.
In the new movie “Black Swan”, Natalie Portman dons feather-laden wings to performce in the ballet, showing beauty and grace with the unwieldly rig. Or did she? Much to my amazement, it seems the wings are actually digital constructs mapped onto a motion-tracked Portman instead.
New York-based Curious Pictures erected a motion capture set-up on the college location, using 24 Vicon cameras to film a professional dancer carrying out the moves. “It was a little bit of a jerry rig to get a sound stage set up with a motion control rig onto a location,” said Schrecker. “That meant we did have to augment our motion capture data with some hand-tracking, but it was important to start with that basis as far as the actual ballet dance.”
For the wing’s feathers, Look crafted simple models in Maya made up of curved planes for the barbs and cylindrical geometry from extruded curves for the rachises, or shafts. “Each feather has a deformer rig to add bend in two directions and also to allow growth from the rachis outward,” said Look 3D artist Shawn Lipowski. “The body feathers were simplified and usually didn’t contain rigs or separate rachis geometry.”
I have to admit, I am dumbstruck. I never would have guessed those were fake. A few scenes it’s obvious there are CG effects (feathers sprouting out of skin and such), but I really thought that was a physical rig she was wearing. Simply amazing.
Did you know that the chances of finding a pearl in an oyster are 1 in 12.000? Or that becoming a pro athlete only happens once in 22.000 times? A lot more of these curious factoids can be found on Online Blackjack‘s giant infographic. We continue our selection with Girl Talk’s latest mashup masterpiece deconstructed, by designer Tiffany Farrant and Fast Company, then Exit takes a look at this year’s edition of the Festival, and The Black and the Blue explains what is IMax. We close with a deep look at the Silicon Valley’s growing talent war, made by Focus.
Not a whole lot of information here, but according to Senator Chuck Grassley, the NSF has just awarded a $150,000 grant to the Waterloo location of ‘Interactive Flow Studies’.
According to the National Science Foundation, Interactive Flow Studies will use the money to fund the project titled, “Small Business Innovation Research Phase I: Educational Interactive Hemodynamics Flow Visualization and Analysis.” The project involves the development of an affordable educational interactive hemodynamics flow visualization and analysis system which can be used to study blood flow.
IFS seems to be in the business of creating physical flow simulation systems, and software to monitor and analyze them.
City University London has just published the results of an extensive survey of 8000 citizens about how they feel the Leicestershire City Council (LCC) is doing in the area. Targeting everything from access to public resources to public perception of the region, the resulting interactive visualization is a wealth of information broken down by responses, demographics, and regions.
An array of information about Leicestershire can be explored – from how satisfied residents are with the quality of refuse and recycling collections to whether they feel well-informed about how their council tax is spent. The degree to which responses vary amongst groups of people with particular characteristics or from particular places can also be considered, for example: comparing the views of 66-75 year olds to those of 18-25 year olds; contrasting the opinions of people who have lived in the same place for more than 20 years with those of recent arrivals; or seeing whether people in one district are more satisfied than those in another.
UC Davis has an effort to better visualize and analyze LiDAR Point Clouds that’s using some rather unorthodox approaches.
The challenge in visualizing and analyzing tripod LiDAR data is that data sets can contain hundreds of millions to billions of unstructured (scattered) 3D points, each with their (x, y, z) position and an associated intensity or color value. Although the sample points sample surfaces in the surveyed area, the data does not contain any relationships between points – the underlying surfaces have to be reconstructed from the point data alone. Our work focuses on developing software to visualize the “raw” LiDAR data as a cloud of 3D points with intensity or color values. We use an out-of-core multiresolution approach to visualize LiDAR data that is too big to fit into the computer’s main memory, at interactive frame rates of around 60 frames per second. Our software also contains tools to analyze LiDAR data, for example, an interactive selection tool to mark subsets of points defining a single feature, and algorithms to derive equations defining the shape of such features.
Previously, lots of research and computing power went into attempting to reconstruct the 3D models from these point clouds. It’s interesting to see a complete about-face in the industry as now they simply visualize the raw point-clouds, which has several advantages:
Level of Detail is a breeze: Simply bin the points.
Various size points can easily be generated via pixel/vertex shaders
It’s a lot easier to add interpolated points if you zoom too close
Add in some interested fake-lighting effects and at a far enough distance (like the image above) you can’t even tell it’s nothing but points. I’ve seen this slowly growing over the last year or two, and at SuperComputing10 this year I even took part in a demonstration at the Idaho National Labs booth of not just LiDAR data but also incredibly high-resolution CT and MRI data.
Daniel Lieske has a great “making of” over at cgheute that demonstrates his prowess in ZBrush and Photoshop.
‘Saving the Alien Girl’ is in two respects, for my circumstances, unusual artwork. First, it is the genre produces one of my very few motifs, in the field of science fiction are found, and secondly, I have used in this artwork, one for me completely new technology – the Digital Sculpting. To the latter will meet again this Making Of Turn, in fact I would like to try, to give an insight into this exciting technology, which at first glance looks like 3D graphics, But clearly in many crucial respects different from the classical work in 3D programs. By Daniel Lieske.
Over at BlenderGuru they have a nice tutorial on how to create a fireball explosion with Blender.
You guys have been asking for this for quite sometime now so I decided to finally deliver on that request. Think of it like an early Christmas present (that explodes in your face).
The particle effects look a bit cheesy, but the fireball is first-rate. Check it out.
CreativeFan has a nice list of 20 amazingly detailed 3D CG Characters, ranging from Fantasy to Mundane renderings, great for some inspiration on your design.
In the new movie “Black Swan”, Natalie Portman dons feather-laden wings to performce in the ballet, showing beauty and grace with the unwieldly rig. Or did she? Much to my amazement, it seems the wings are actually digital constructs mapped onto a motion-tracked Portman instead.
Did you know that the chances of finding a pearl in an oyster are 1 in 12.000? Or that becoming a pro athlete only happens once in 22.000 times? A lot more of these curious factoids can be found on 
City University London has just published the results of an extensive survey of 8000 citizens about how they feel the Leicestershire City Council (LCC) is doing in the area. Targeting everything from access to public resources to public perception of the region, the resulting interactive visualization is a wealth of information broken down by responses, demographics, and regions.
Daniel Lieske has a great “making of” over at cgheute that demonstrates his prowess in ZBrush and Photoshop.
Over at BlenderGuru they have a nice tutorial on how to create a fireball explosion with Blender.
VizWorld.com 
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