A huge update to Chaos Group’s PhoenixFD system adds in liquid simulation, making it a contender to the likes of RealFlow, along with a huge list of other bells and whistles that not only make it more accurate, but prettier and easier too.
New features and improvements in this free upgrade to Chaos Group’s fluid dynamics plugin include: extension for liquid simulations, turbulence helper, forward transfer advection, randomization, analytic scattering mode, added ramps and ranges in the viewport, ability to use the radius of the PF particles in the source helper, color ramp and preview range for each channel, RGB preview of the UVW channel, limits for the adaptive grid, optimized the interaction with the scene, option to displace without surface projection using directly the 3D point coordinates (volumetric displacement), V-Ray 2.0 compatibility and various bug fixes
The latest release of Caedium (v2.4) can now create high-quality movies, where each frame can be rendered by either POV-Ray or a Renderman-compliant renderer, such as Aqsis. Further, multiple frames can be rendered in parallel, either on a standalone multi-core computer or on a cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. The ability to run high-quality renderers in parallel means it’s never been easier or faster to create great looking movies of your Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results with Caedium
I’m somewhat surprised it only runs on WindowsHPCServer, most high-end HPC environments I know are still Linux-based. Nonetheless, support for Renderman-compliant renderers is a big win, and I look forward to seeing who does it next :)
GOOD has announced the winners of their ‘Design an Infographic about Energy’ contest, with the winner being Jamie Granger with his piece above.
The winner of the overall prize is Jamie Granger, whose piece is above (view it larger here). Granger’s tracing of who uses oil and how it gets around the world helped really make clear our global fossil fuel usage. His piece will appear in our energy issue, along with winning a subscription and a T-shirt.
Creating a lush forest wilderness is a challenge in its own right, but creating one to match the vision of James Cameron in Avatar would drive even the most dedicated modeller mad. In trying to find a simpler solution, ILM stumbled across an unannounced product ‘SpeedTree Cinema’, which fit the bill perfectly.
“I knew within 15 minutes that this was what we were looking for,” Bluff said. “In the past, we had never been able to control down to a leaf or a twig, where with SpeedTree we could. We were able to grow and manipulate a tree to the exact specifications of a film where literally every scene had been meticulously pre-visualized by Mr. Cameron’s team.”
Once Bluff’s team knew SpeedTree was the tool they would use, they set to work, quickly churning out the trees they needed by the dozens. “Starting in the morning with five models from your library, one of our artists had 40 trees done by lunchtime,” Bluff said. “Those 40 trees comprised about 80 percent of the trees we needed for the entire film.”
They created a 23-second flyover demonstration which floored James Cameron, and eventually became the first 23 seconds of the film.
A 688 submarine traveling on the surface of the ocean is shown. The simulation was performed on a Cray XE6 supercomputer using 6,144 processors. The simulation ran for 19,000 time steps and completed in 36 hours.
This was run on one of the new HPCMP Cray’s, showing just what you can do with 6,000 cores processors at your disposal.
Disclaimer: I work at the site where this Simulation & Visualization was done, although I was not involved.
Winter-like weather has arrived in the northern hemisphere. But is this winter colder than past ones, or warmer? That is the question NASA seeks to answer with this latest visualization. They have taken temperature measurements using the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Aqua satellite. Then they compared the week of December 3-10, 2010 to the average of the same week from 2002 to 2009. Red indicates areas that are warmer than the average, and blues represent areas that are colder than the average. What caused Greenland and parts of Canada to be warmer than average, while northern Europe was cooler than normal? In short, it was the Arctic Oscillation.
The Arctic Oscillation is a climate pattern that influences winter weather in the northern hemisphere. It describes the relationship between high pressure in the mid-latitudes and low pressure over the Arctic. When the pressure systems are weak, the difference between them is small, and air from the Arctic flows south, while warmer air seeps north. This is referred to as a negative Arctic Oscillation. Like December 2009, the Arctic Oscillation was negative in early December 2010. Cold air from the Arctic channeled south around a blocking system over Greenland, while Greenland and northern Canada heated up.
What if you were able to redraw the map of Great Britain based on how humans interact via phone calls? What would the resulting map look like? One enterprising group tested it out, and has created this video of it.
Do regional boundaries defined by governments respect the more natural ways that people interact across space? This paper proposes a novel, fine-grained approach to regional delineation, based on analyzing networks of billions of individual human transactions. Given a geographical area and some measure of the strength of links between its inhabitants, we show how to partition the area into smaller, non-overlapping regions while minimizing the disruption to each person’s links. We tested our method on the largest non-Internet human network, inferred from a large telecommunications database in Great Britain. Our partitioning algorithm yields geographically cohesive regions that correspond remarkably well with administrative regions, while unveiling unexpected spatial structures that had previously only been hypothesized in the literature. We also quantify the effects of partitioning, showing for instance that the effects of a possible secession of Wales from Great Britain would be twice as disruptive for the human network than that of Scotland.
Carlo Ratti, Stanislav Sobolevsky, Francesco Calabrese, Clio Andris, Jonathan Reades, Mauro Martino, Rob Claxton, Steven H Strogatz – PLoS ONE, 2010
A huge update to Chaos Group’s PhoenixFD system adds in liquid simulation, making it a contender to the likes of RealFlow, along with a huge list of other bells and whistles that not only make it more accurate, but prettier and easier too.
The latest release of Caedium (v2.4) can now create high-quality movies, where each frame can be rendered by either POV-Ray or a Renderman-compliant renderer, such as Aqsis. Further, multiple frames can be rendered in parallel, either on a standalone multi-core computer or on a cluster running Windows HPC Server 2008. The ability to run high-quality renderers in parallel means it’s never been easier or faster to create great looking movies of your Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) results with Caedium
GOOD has announced the winners of their ‘Design an Infographic about Energy’ contest, with the winner being Jamie Granger with his piece above.
Creating a lush forest wilderness is a challenge in its own right, but creating one to match the vision of James Cameron in Avatar would drive even the most dedicated modeller mad. In trying to find a simpler solution, ILM stumbled across an unannounced product ‘SpeedTree Cinema’, which fit the bill perfectly.
Just got an email about this beautiful visualization of water flow around a 
VizWorld.com 
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