An article on Deathfall discusses the work of Joseph Francis, a great photographer that composes his scenes entirely in software and renders them with Maxwell Renderer.
In 2006 the new Maxwell Renderer caught my eye, and I started testing it. I loved how realistic it looked, and I thought I could use it to create elaborate backgrounds without building elaborate sets. I spent a fair amount of time looking at user-created Maxwell materials, which are available to share on the company’s web site, and imagining possibilities. I really wanted to use CG in an invisible way as much as possible, rather than make obviously CG things like living mermaids or aliens. I feel as if I’m doing it right when someone writes to me assuming the set is real and asking where I shot an image.
RealFlow has a great SIGGRAPH Demo Reel up on YouTube, showing some of the great work they’ve done for TV, Movies, and commercials over the last year or so. You’ll recognize lots of soft drink commercials, body wash commercials, and a few big movie and video game scenes. Check it out above.
Update 9/2: Seems RealFlow pulled the original video, I replaced it with the new version. Only different I see right away is new music. via Siggraph 2011 Showreel – YouTube.
Graphicspeak has a great Success Story from Jeff Patton, freelance CG artist known for his mechanical imagery for some big names. Discussing a recent project for Mercedes Benz, he took his hour per frame renders in 3dsMax and converted them to iRay, and found renders completing in mere minues.
Patton said, “After I finished my first full Mercedes Benz project with the new Nvidia setup, I was stunned. Rendering out the images at 6K in the past took me about an hour per image using the CPU. With Iray and Quadro, I was able to knock that down to eight minutes — EIGHT minutes! It’s a huge benefit to be able to turn things around that much faster.”
The workstation he used had an Nvidia Quadro 6000 and a Tesla C2070 GPU, both fairly high-end cards. Quadro 6000‘s run around $4,000, and a Tesla C2070 runs around $2,500. That same $6,500 could have bought 3 of the BOXX renderPro systems. With a linear improvement in rendertimes, he could have gone from 1 frame an hour to 4 frames an hour, against 7 frames an hour with the iRay solution. Sounds like a win for iRay & CUDA to me.
The University of Zurich partnered up with the University of California at Santa Cruz to run an impressive simulation of the creation of the universe, and visualized the result in this impressive movie now on YouTube.
For almost 20 years astrophysicists have been trying to recreate the formation of spiral galaxies such as our Milky Way realistically. Now astrophysicists from the University of Zurich present the world’s first realistic simulation of the formation of our home galaxy together with astronomers from the University of California at Santa Cruz. The new results were partly calculated on the computer of the Swiss National Supercomputing Center (CSCS) and show, for instance, that there has to be stars on the outer edge of the Milky Way.
Unfortunately, the video is only on YouTube in 360p.
Another entry in the automagic infographic space comes from “vizualize.me”, a new LinkedIn resume visualizer that hopes to cash in on the new craze of flashy colorful resumes. While I think it’s neat to look at, I can’t imagine much real-world use for it, for the reason pointed out by information aesthetics:
While the idea seems certainly useful, one would certainly wish for the availability of more subdued visual styles, in particular for those people who appreciate more classical visual styles when applying for high-end, important jobs. I also foresee some critical comments on the color palette for the ‘language’ world map.
Nate Silver, brain behind the statistical magic of FiveThirtyEight, points his sights at Hurricane Irene and tries to come up with a reasonable analysis of news coverage as compared to economic impact and measurable damage of severe weather.
We’ll accomplish this by creating a statistic which I’ll call the News Unit or NU. This is defined by taking the total number of stories that mentioned the storm by name for instance, “Hurricane Hugo” or “Tropical Storm Hugo”; either one is considered acceptable and dividing by the average number of stories per day that were available in the NewsLibrary.com database during that period. I then multiply the result by 10 just to make things a little bit more legible — so essentially, a News Unit consists of one-tenth of all the stories published on a given day.
He does lots of analysis and finds some interesting things out. It’s a lengthy article to read, but a worthwhile example of data-driven analysis from a wide variety of sources.
FXGuide talks to two of the guys behind some of this year’s SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival entries, including some great details with Damian Nenow on his impressive geometric clouds in 3dsMax.
Most people would do clouds now as volumetric renders, but I didn’t want to use a volumetric solution because it’s hard to control them and know the final shape. So I created them first as low-poly geometry based clouds. Then, using the Vertex Color Tool in Max, which is an almost forgotten tool, I could use the vertex color data to illuminate the clouds in the way I wanted.
The way it worked was I created these low poly elements, then covered them with thousands of sprites. They had alpha channel textures on them. You can then add photorealistic textures, like photographs of fragments of actual clouds, or you can add hand-drawn ones, which is what I did. So that’s why they look pictorial. I was able to get very fast render times – between 10 to 30 seconds just using a simple scanline renderer.
The Vertex Color tool is far from forgotten in Scientific visualization arenas, we use it regularly here. I can easily see how it’s not particularly useful amongst “normal” animation people tho.
Another week, another surprising Autodesk acquisition. This one comes just under a year from our first announcement, but brings Numenus’s high-end realtime raytracing support to Autodesk’s popular modeling packages.
“High-end, instantaneous visualization capabilities are a necessity in the world of design,” said Andrew Anagnost, vice-president of suites, Web services and subscription at Autodesk. “Combining advanced ray tracing technology with powerful visual communication tools transforms how designers, engineers and marketing teams consume, review and share visual designs.”
NVidia and HP have teamed up to create a new GPU “Starter” kit aimed at bringing GPU computing to a wider audience without getting into all the fine details of system configuration. However, their new “starter” kit is anything but entry-level.
The system contains eight ProLiant SL390 G7 servers, packed full of 24 M2070 GPUs, 16 CPUs, and its preconfigured with CUDA 4.0. The servers, presumably loaded with quad-cores, offer a respectable 32-cores of additional CPU power in addition to the copious amounts of GPU performance. The M2070 GPU that’s included in the package is a Fermi-based part, with 6GB of RAM per GPU.
With a price tag of $99,000, it’s a bit beyond your average hobbyist. It’s a great steal for companies tho as the total system is offered at about a 50% discount of the total package, plus contains their special GPU development tools.
Enrico Bertini has the latest in his “Data Visualization Beginner’s Toolkit”, and I love his new 3 Golden Rules of Viz Tools, particularly #1.
Rule #1: No tool will turn you into a pro. I think I stressed this point already in the past but it’s worth going over it again. Given the rapid development of visualization technology you might be tempted to adopt the latest technology thinking that it will turn you into a pro. This is not the case. There is no tool that can make you a pro, unless you develop your theoretical and design skills accordingly and organically. A visualization designer is a great designer regardless the tool of choice. It’s basically the same as photography. The last digital reflex may take crisper shots but it won’t turn you into the next Ansel Adams.
With so many tools coming out on the market these days trying to cash in on the popularity of infographics and sexy data vis, it’s important to realize that the real successes don’t come from the Software, but from the Designer.
An article on Deathfall discusses the work of Joseph Francis, a great photographer that composes his scenes entirely in software and renders them with Maxwell Renderer.
RealFlow has a great SIGGRAPH Demo Reel up on YouTube, showing some of the great work they’ve done for TV, Movies, and commercials over the last year or so. You’ll recognize lots of soft drink commercials, body wash commercials, and a few big movie and video game scenes. Check it out above.
Graphicspeak has a great Success Story from Jeff Patton, freelance CG artist known for his mechanical imagery for some big names. Discussing a recent project for Mercedes Benz, he took his hour per frame renders in 3dsMax and converted them to iRay, and found renders completing in mere minues.
The University of Zurich partnered up with the University of California at Santa Cruz to run an impressive simulation of the creation of the universe, and visualized the result in this impressive movie now on YouTube.
Another entry in the automagic infographic space comes from “vizualize.me”, a new LinkedIn resume visualizer that hopes to cash in on the new craze of flashy colorful resumes. While I think it’s neat to look at, I can’t imagine much real-world use for it, for the reason pointed out by information aesthetics:
Nate Silver, brain behind the statistical magic of FiveThirtyEight, points his sights at Hurricane Irene and tries to come up with a reasonable analysis of news coverage as compared to economic impact and measurable damage of severe weather.
FXGuide talks to two of the guys behind some of this year’s SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival entries, including some great details with Damian Nenow on his impressive geometric clouds in 3dsMax.
Another week, another surprising Autodesk acquisition. This one comes
NVidia and HP have teamed up to create a new GPU “Starter” kit aimed at bringing GPU computing to a wider audience without getting into all the fine details of system configuration. However, their new “starter” kit is anything but entry-level.
Enrico Bertini has the latest in his “Data Visualization Beginner’s Toolkit”, and I love his new 3 Golden Rules of Viz Tools, particularly #1.
VizWorld.com 
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