Most Modified Cars in the USA
8:30 am
NVIDIA Technology Theater on Facebook
8:00 am
If you couldn’t make it to SIGGRAPH in Vancouver (like me), then you can enjoy at least the NVidia presentations via livestream on their Facebook page.
The theater will include demonstrations and real-life case studies that cover the latest in workstation professional graphics technologies. Open to all attendees, the theater is located in the NVIDIA booth and will feature both NVIDIA experts and industry luminaries. See below for the schedule of talks and speakers.
Today (Wednesday), they’ve got talks on CATIA V6, Maya, Enlighten, the new “Quadro Virtual Graphics Platform”, and lots of VFX talks.
Adobe & NVIDIA Team Up for Ray Traced Compositing
7:18 am
Adobe is demonstrating a new research project in the NVidia booth at SIGGRAPH, showing off some realtime raytracing effects for Adobe AfterEffects. Using the power of Fermi GPU’s, they’re able to add effects like reflections and lighting into motion graphics all in real-time. The Fermi GPU is so fast and their algorithm so optimized that they can actually scrub through the timeline in realtime.
What made it practical for Adobe to build this, and reach such high performance levels, was the NVIDIA OptiX ray tracing engine. Adobe worked with NVIDIA to leverage OptiX to build their new renderer in just a few months. The job of OptiX is to let the developer concentrate on rendering while it handles all the intricacies of making it go fast on the GPU – and Adobe’s results are proving it’s good at its job.
Check out the live demo below.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 10/08/2011
7:00 am
Following yesterday’s post, we begin with some tips on how to improve your grammar, provided by Grammar.net, who also help us understand the differences between using agressive and non-aggressive expressions. From Voxy comes the importance of being bilingual, Oxford Dictionaries explains how a new word enters an Oxford Dictionary, and, closing today’s selection, the curious origins of 10 Words & Phrases, from the guys at Today I found out.
Lightworks Artisan comes to ASCON’s KOMPAS-3D
11:42 am
Another big win for Lightworks, their Artisan rendering product will now power the Russian KOMPAS-3D modeling software. Currently in use by over 40,000 customers worldwide, this makes Lightworks’s first big win in Russia once it goes live in September.
Oleg Zykov, Innovation Project Manager at ASCON, added: “More and more our customers are demanding a high-performance solution for rendering, integrated with KOMPAS-3D. The Artisan plug-in from Lightworks is exactly what they need. It allows them to create high quality images, whilst the solution is easy to learn and to work with. I’m sure that our partnership with Lightworks will be long and successful”.
Full announcement after the break.
Walt Disney Pictures and Autodesk Sign XGen Technology License Agreement
11:38 am
Autodesk and Walt Disney Pictures have signed a 5-year exclusivity agreement that brings WDAS’s “XGen Arbitrary Primitive Generator” (known as XGen) to Autodesk’s Digital Entertainment Creation Community. XGen was most recently responsible for the great hair and foliage work in Tangled. It’s based on technology demoed at SIGGRAPH back in 2003, and now 8 years later it’s coming to the public after being featured in Bolt, Up, Toy Story 3, Car 2 and more.
“Twenty years ago, visual effects artists creating computer graphics were mostly mathematicians and scientists using highly technical and complex software tools that required significant amounts of custom programming,” explained Chief Technology Officer Andy Hendrickson, Walt Disney Animation Studios. “Back then, off-the-shelf software could not create the required details of nuance and emotion. Today, we were able to create XGen as an effective artistic tool because Autodesk provides studios like ours with comprehensive tools and a flexible, extensible platform to develop on. The Autodesk customizable toolset helps visual effects artists do their best work.”
No details on what this means immediately, but the technology should show up in upcoming Autodesk products just like WDAS’s PTex system.
Full details after the break.
Daily Viz from Visual Loop – 09/08/2011
7:00 am
Today, we’ll be looking at the use of english words. The folks at Phrase Mix and Grammar.net provided some useful infographics on this, and even if you consider yourself a fairly good writer, you might be surprised with some of the most common mistakes and misunderstandings when it comes to grammar.
Khronos Releases OpenGL 4.2 Specification
2:54 pm
Another stop you may want to make at SIGGRAPH is by the Khronos BOF where they’ll be discussing their newly released OpenGL4.2 specification. Some of the new features include:- enabling shaders with atomic counters and load/store/atomic read-modify-write operations to a single level of a texture. These capabilities can be combined, for example, to maintain a counter at each pixel in a buffer object for single-rendering-pass order-independent transparency;
- capturing GPU-tessellated geometry and drawing multiple instances of the result of a transform feedback to enable complex objects to be efficiently repositioned and replicated;
- modifying an arbitrary subset of a compressed texture, without having to re-download the whole texture to the GPU for significant performance improvements;
- packing multiple 8 and 16 bit values into a single 32-bit value for efficient shader processing with significantly reduced memory storage and bandwidth, especially useful when transferring data between shader stages.
The press release also has comments from both NVidia and AMD discussing their upcoming OpenGL4.2 compatible drivers. NVidia’s drivers are available today, but it seems AMD’s aren’t available quite yet. They mentioned having 4.2 Beta drivers available “with the publication of the OpenGL4.2 specification”, but they dont’ seem to be available yet.
10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos
1:51 pm
The annual SciDAC Visualization Night was last month and another 10 great HPC Scientific Visualizations brought home awards. Wired magazine has the list of winners, complete with their videos.
“The human eye can pick out patterns in simulations that are are otherwise hard to describe, and they can do it better than any computer,” said visualization scientist Joseph Insley of Argonne National Laboratory. “Plus, with the incredible amount of data gathered these days, it’s difficult to analyze it any other way.”
Making a useful scientific simulation isn’t light work. If field researchers want to do it themselves, they must learn to code instructions for computer processing and control advanced 3-D animation software. Because of these hurdles, and the increasing sophistication of modeling methods, most team up with computer and visualization scientists to get the job done.
Disclosure: Me & My Team are included among the winners, the Overhead Threat Protection System video included below.
via 10 Award-Winning Scientific Simulation Videos | Wired Science | Wired.com.
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