Besides Twitter and Facebook, the biggest name in the Social Media realm this year has been LinkedIn. Not even the Google+ launch could minimize the importance of 2011 for this Social network, and we close this week with infographics found on TechCrunch, Lab 42, Mashable, Eyedea Lab, and also by LinkedIn itself, showing some interesting and curious aspects behind the users of the top professional Social Network.
3dsMax and VRay both have a tendency to crash when you exceed your system memory, that’s a long establish fact that frankly isn’t unique to rendering packages. But there are things you can do to reduce your memory usage, options buried deep within with cryptic names like “BSP Trees” and “Face/Level Coefficient”. If you want to know how to tweak these options to best effect on your rig, check out this great article from RenderStuff.
As we know, V-Ray uses the organization of the scene geometry in a form of a BSP tree to accelerate the raycasting process. It is logical to assume that the deeper our tree structure, the smaller its leaves, and the smaller the units of the geometry each leaf contains, then the more space in memory we need to hold tree’s branches and the greater is the potential raycasting speed it can provide.
However, there is a limit in such acceleration. After a certain threshold, further division is not reasonable, since the excessively branched structure of a BSP tree makes the work with itself too difficult. The raycasting algorithm may spend the computational resources for walking through the huge BSP tree, ruining all the gain in speed.
A battle for the future of 3D cinema is brewing between Sony and Theaters over the cost of 3D Glasses. Previously provided by Sony, now they want individual theater guests to buy their own sets of glasses, which NATO (National Association of Theater Owners) says really translates to increases deployment costs fot theaters.
In its statement, NATO said press reports indicate that Sony wants audience members to buy their own glasses, but in reality, the studio wants to move the expense of providing glasses off their own balance sheets and doesnt particularly care if the cost is borne by theater owners or ticket buyers.
via NATO Slams Sony for 3D-Glasses Charges Updated | Reuters.
After yesterday’s post about Twitter, today we’ll be talking about Facebook. After all, there are over 800 million users all over the planet, and since the launch of Google+, a lot of changes have been happening in the world’s largest social network. Simply Measured, Soda Head, Online Dating, Pagemodo and Social Media Explorer break down the impact of some of those changes, and show a lot of new facts behind Facebook users.
The Lion King in 3D made a huge splash in theaters the last 2 weeks, showing that the Disney classics still hold our attention and that classic Cell animation still holds a special place in our hearts. Of course, the original Lion King wasn’t in 3D so converting it was a large affair taking the talent of hundreds of animators, and FXGuide has the details of how.
One of the other things we developed was an intelligent depth painting tool that would allow the artist to give little gray scale hints at different points of the character. They could put a little dab of gray of varying values at different points on the character and they would begin to blend to form a depth map that strikingly begins to look like the character as you add more locations.
Computational fluid dynamics is one of the oldest areas of computer simulation, and probably one of the most commonly requested features of most VFX projects. Not only for fluids, but now also for fire, smoke, and more, it’s an area with lots of well-developed software products but frequently with little understanding of what actually is going on under the hood. FXGuide has a nice starter article on the field of CFD, and some of the big names in VFX fluid simulation.
One of the most significant and commonly requested areas of real world simulation is fluid simulation. From pouring shots to ocean vistas, directors and artists have come to rely on computer simulated water and similar fluids. Fluid dynamics is a complex area and fluid simulations are notoriously computationally expensive, yet when they work they can provide magnificent production value and breathtaking visual effects.
One of US President Obama’s platforms during the election battle was to add several degrees of transparency to government, embracing open standards and visualization. Last week at the Tech@State event there was lots of discussion on the topic, and an article on NextGov recaps their progress and some of the attempts underway.
Several projects have recently been launched, including a map of sexual orientation and gender identity issues in South and Central Asia and another map charting specific incidents of anti-Semitism in Europe by country. Since the site is part of the Open Government Initiative, all data is in the public domain and made embeddable for easier sharing.
via State and USAID embrace data visualization to promote missions – Nextgov.
Today we’ll be showing off some of the most recent infographics made about Twitter. The micro-blogging platform continues to grow, and from Viral Media Solutions, Inbox Q, Lemon.ly and Veracode come several stats and facts that illustrate the amount of messages being sent, among other facts and stats. The last pick of the day goes to GE‘s interactive visualization of the Twitter conversation about breast cancer.
I still remember my old Geocities account.. My first experiments with HTML, full of frames, tables, and blink tags. And I wasn’t alone, millions of people cut their teeth on the web via Geocities pages that broke every design rule and tricked browsers into going far beyond their design intent. Sadly (thankfully?) Geocities is gone, replaced by MySpace, FaceBook, and Twitter, but before it disappeared one group decided to mine it. This video is the result of their massive 650Gig dataset, visualized as a City.
In an heroic effort to preserve 10 years of collaborative work by 35 million people, the Archive Team made a backup of the site just before it shut down. The resulting 650 Gigabyte bittorrent file is the digital Pompeii that is the subject of an interactive excavation that allows you to wander through an episode of recent online history.
The Deleted City from deletedcity on Vimeo.
AMD has just announced a new embedded GPU targeted at signage and industrial spaces, but comes with the impressive capability of driving 4-displays and supporting EyeFinity.
Targeted at casino gaming, digital signage, instrumentation and industrial control systems, the AMD Radeon E6460 GPU sets a new bar for features and performance in an entry-level embedded GPU with broadly scalable graphics and multimedia performance, and a planned 5 years of supply availablitly (hence the longevity in the press release title).
It also includes HDMI 1.4, Stereoscopic video, and DisplayPort 1.2. Not bad for an embedded chip.
VizWorld.com Got an idea for a story? Drop us a line at [email protected] or other means.
Comments