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3dTotal has a nice “Making of” from brandon Martynowicz covering his impressive combination of Google, Maya, V-Ray, and more all into the image above.

I have put together a short “Making Of” of my latest personal piece, called Final Stand. This image was inspired by a quick pencil sketch I did a while back. A big part of creating this image was to keep practicing my skill-set, and to play with composition and lighting. I love doing personal projects because they give me the freedom to create what I envision, rather than being under constant art direction.

via Making Of ‘Final Stand’ by Brandon Martynowicz.

Graphics makingof, maya, vray

If you’ve been holding off on learning much about the new WebGL standards, Opera has a nice piece covering just what WebGL can and can’t do, along with some nice examples and technical details.

This is the first in our series of articles about WebGL. The objective of this series is to provide the information and resources you’ll need to get started learning WebGL. In this piece, we will discuss how WebGL works, what you need to create WebGL applications, and what a simple example looks like.

via An introduction to WebGL – Dev.Opera.

Science tutorial, webgl

The last few weeks, the “Occupy Wall Street” movement has been all over the news. The issues that led to the events ar not new, and we’ll be taking a look at them in this week’s Daily Viz from Visual Loop, starting today, with contributions from Trading Sim, Occupy George, The Grasshopper Group, The Daily Dot and Business Insider, this last one with a great series of charts that explain the whole situation.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

An interesting visualization tool presented this week at IEEE InfoViz adds another datapoint for the “Death to the Rainbow Colormap” club and backs it up with an impressive increase in accuracy from 39% to 91%.

“Our goal was to design a visual representation of the data that was as accurate and efficient for patient diagnosis as possible,” says lead author Michelle Borkin, a doctoral candidate at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS). “What we found is that the prettiest, most popular visualization is not always the most effective.”

via To diagnose heart disease, visualization experts recommend a simpler approach.

Science biomed, conference, ieee

Closing this week’s selection, mainly about tablets, we bring some infographics showing the impact they’re having in news and education, including the substitution of school textbooks by digital ones. Besides the works of Schools.com, Online Education and Pew Research Center, we also included a couple of infographics made by us at Visual Loop, that seem relevant to this topic: the History of Printing and the Publishing in the Digital Era, both featured here earlier this year.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

Combing through the massive amounts of data regarding this year’s massive 9.0 earthquake off the coast of Japan, researchers have found mountains of useful information.  Visualizing it all usefully has proven tricky, but some new techniques coming out of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks show promise.

“When the massive data set from Japan became available through the ARIA project of JPL-Caltech, I had to come up with a better way to look at all this information,” said geophysicist Ronni Grapenthin at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks.

Check out the impressive video of the data below.  Researchers hope that it will pave the way for new real-time GPS monitoring stations that can deliver these same results instantly, making for far more accurate predictions of earthquake strength in the future.

via 3-D Japan Quake Animations May Help Visualize Temblors | Japan Earthquake, Tohoku Earthquake | Tsunami Warnings | LiveScience.

Science earthquake, gis

A new tool from Tecplot today called “Chorus” jumps into the “simulation analytics” space, combining visualization with data maangement, statistics, and data mining techniques to make finding the gems of insight hidden in your massive CFD datasets easier than ever.

“Tecplot Chorus is the new generation of post-processing tools for engineers. The new paradigm of post processing is to simultaneously operate on sets of simulations instead of one at a time, and to take advantage of parallel computers to pre-compute visualizations. The unprecedented level of analysis enabled by Tecplot Chorus allows engineers to make more informed decisions faster, thus enabling companies to develop better products.”

The tool already has some great praise from big names too:

 Swift Engineering CFD Analyst Andy Luo commented, “Our post processing productivity increased by an order of magnitude, thanks to Tecplot Chorus. Now I can do in five minutes what once took me four to six hours.”

Of course, such power isn’t cheap.  Currently it’s $7,500 a year for a floating license, which works on Windows or Linux.

via Tecplot, Inc. Releases Its Latest Innovation in Simulation Analytics: Tecplot(R) Chorus(TM) – MarketWatch.

Science analytics, tecplot

Of course, when we talk about tablets, the first name that pops up is always the iPad. And that’s not only in the US, as we can see in today’s selection. With the help of Colcasac, Gumtree, Techi Wave, Sodahead and Lay, you’ll learn some interesting facts not only about Apple’s tablet, but also the Samsung Galaxy, and even the Kindle Fire.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations

3Dconnexion, manufacturers of the impressive SpacePilot 3D mouse and other interesting multi-DOF input devices, is running a contest right now for a big free trip to the upcoming Autodesk University in Las Vegas next month.

Register now to enter to win:

• One full-conference pass to Autodesk University 2011 in Las Vegas, NV
• Nov 29 through Dec 1, 2011
• Airfare and hotel accommodations for 3 nights
• A SpacePilot PRO – The Ultimate Professional 3D Mouse

Available only in the US, unfortunately.

via 3Dconnexion : Win a Trip to AU.

Graphics 3dconnexion, autodesk, contest

Continuing our weekly topic, today we’ll be focusing the “duel” between Tablets and E-Readers. Maybe “duel” is not the proper word to characterize this comparison, because a lot of experts are saying that the tablets simply killed the e-reader. But is it true? Or is there a market for both gadgets? And what about traditional books? Are they doomed to be a thing of the past? GOOD, iCrossing, Printing Choice, Ria Novosti and Tablets Ratings try to help us finding those answers.

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Graphics, Science design, infographic, infoviz, Visual Loop, visualizations