Abduzeebo brings us a great gallery of 3D Artwork from Olivier Ponsonnet, known as reiv over at CGSociety, who uses 3dsMax to create some simply beautiful character pieces.
Olivier Ponsonnet’s pieces are a mix of realism and imagination, something intriguing and mysterious, full of details and personality. His pieces are really beautiful and eye catching, so take your time to appreciate them.
Hit abduzeebo for their selections, and reiv’s CGPortfolio for more fantastic stuff.
The Motion Graphics Festival (MGFest) is coming to Boston in just a few weeks for a 4-day event of animation, video, and music. In particular is Thursday April 1st, the “Lumen Eclipse” Event which starts at 6:30pm and showcases the work of names like Ken Adams, Carl Burgess, NASA, Larry Carlson, Hikroshi Kondo, and many many more. The website is up with full schedules and registration information, tickets are available now.
Little change beginning today, VizWorld readers. Now, the “Pixels” posts will be organized by ‘type’ (You’ll see below “Review”, “Tutorial”, “Inspiration”) and also include links to good deals. If you find a good deal on a product, definitely send it in to us to be included.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created a project website for OpenPV to track solar energy installations across the US, and visualize the results. You can head over to the OpenPV Page and view maps showing the growth of solar energy sources from 2000 to today (a decade). With granularity of almost day-by-day, you can see every installation as they come online (while bubble) and join the map. No surprise that California has the most, accounting for over 75% of the solar installations in the US, but you can see them scattered across the entire US.
There are seven, in fact, for which the PV Project hasn’t logged a single installation: Alaska, Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Oklahoma, and both of the Dakotas. There probably are a few solar panels in those states, but the point of the map is simply to show the relative amount of solar in different areas. It gets the point across: the above states show up as a huge empty streak splitting the country in half.
“Descendents” is a beautiful 14-minute animated short film telling the story of two flowers, an old and jaded flower voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and a young and hopeful flower voiced by Christy Scott-Cashman. Begun in 2005 as a diploma project by Heiko van der Scherm and Holger Schoenberger at the Institute of Animation, the project resulted in not only the great animated short, but several side-projects like special facial animation rigs and an interesting project management tool called ‘ShotManager’:
As a result of these requirements, the “ShotManager” was born – first planed to be open for any kind of project, but then customized for this project only. Since the whole film takes place at the edge of a clearing of a dark forest, the set had a fixed size. Splitting the set into about 6 multiple reference models has made it possible to set the scene layering inside of the scene manger (enable/disable what’s required)
The Shot manager had also other nice features. If we had to make a change for all scenes (which happened a lot of times), we have just done it on one scene, copied the script log and put it into the Shot Manager. It then generated a script which opened every scene and made our changes. We let it run overnight and all scenes had been updated.
See the video below, then read the MakingOf at CGSociety.
GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market. The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android. I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data. (…)
The IMAX Hubble 3D movie is getting rave reviews, and some of that is due to the contributions of the NCSA Visualization team. The team from the NCSA created some massive 5616×4096 sequences for the movie. (…)
Disney seems to be reinventing the Odd Couple via a new partnership between Disney Research and an Irish scientific organization called Clarity that aims to explore the use of multiple cameras (several dozen) to enhance sporting events. (…)
Samsung made a small splash in the 3D pond at CEBIT recently with the announcement of their “3D Starter Kit”, which contained a pair of wireless (battery-driven) 3D Shutter glasses and a 3D Blu-ray movie, all compatible with their upcoming new line of 3D Televisions. Now, the 3D Starter Kit and the TV are available for pre-order from Amazon. (…)
Another day, another Fermi rumor. This time, Toms Hardware brings us news posted over at VR-Zone of the Fermi-based GeForce GTX480 and GTX470 cards: GeForce GTX 480 : 512 SP, 384-bit, 295W TDP, US$499 GeForce GTX 470 : 448 SP, 320-bit, 225W TDP, US$349 Internal benchmarks reveal that GeForce GTX 470 is some 5-10% faster than Radeon HD 5850 and similiar [sic] for GeForce GTX 480 over the Radeon HD 5870. (…)
TechEYE.net has an article up claiming to have an inside source on the Intel Larrabee engineering team that claims news of Larrabee’s death has been greatly exaggerated. (…)
Brickyard VFX is working with Toyota and NASCAR for a new ad campaign called ‘Sponsafier’, where you can go to www.sponsafier.com and design your own NASCAR car and select a driver. The three ads features three hilarious designs (a medieval dragon driven by a knight in chainmail armor, a pink kitty-car, and a lonely guy giving a shout out to his girlfriend). Sadly, the cars are not real but were designed by Brickyard VFX and motion-tracked over footage of the track. (…)
Motionographer brings us a pair of new campaign commercials from IBM aimed at making it known how much data exists in the world around us, and how IBM products make it possible. Harness the talents of James Frost of Zoo Films and Motion Theory, they push the increasingly popular “data aesthetic” genre to new heights. (…)
CNNMoney has a short video starring Elaine Politis and Ariel Gonzalez of Second Life’s Beachfront Realty, discussing how they grew the business from a pair of $250 investments to the company it is today. Large enough, in fact that Ariel quit his job as an IT Manager for Merril Lynch to work in Second Life full-time. (…)
Dreamworks Animation hasn’t even released “How To Train Your Dragon“, and is already releasing teaser trailers for the next animated superhero flick “Megamind”. (…)
Muhammad Saleem follows up his great “6 Years of Facebook” infographic with another Mashable Exclusive, this time chronicling the road to the 10-Billionth Tweet. (…)
LabEscape makes a product called “HeatMap Explorer” for converting Excel spreadsheets and SQL databses into interactive HeatMaps for BI uses. The software to create the maps is a Windows-only package, but offers a web-based Java viewer. One of the demonstrations on their website is an impressive visualization of Car Fuel Economy that combines a lot of data into a small easily managed space. (…)
VFXFairness is creating a special free Online Town Hall to talk about the decreasing standards for workers in the VFX industry, lead by Lee Stranahan who recently achieved some mainstream media fame for his ‘Open Letter to James Cameron: Fairness for Visual Effects Artists‘. The description for the event: Effects driven films like Avatar are breaking box office records while visual effects facilities are forced to shut their doors and most VFX workers face long hours, no benefits and little credit. (…)
Alexx Henry has published a pair of videos on Vimeo that show prototypes of a ‘digital magazine’ for women’s magazine VIV, the likes of which you might find on the iPad or any number of upcoming tablets. It’s beautiful, combining text with motion video for a more ‘interactive’ experience. (…)
The House is still debating the new Health Care reform bill, and the Washington Post has created an interactive infographic showing how it’s going. They first show how the individual representatives voted in the earlier November 7th vote, and then show how they are standing for this week’s vote. They combine this with data about their campaign contributions from the healthcare industry and the amount of their constituency that is uninsured. (…)
Abduzeebo brings us a great gallery of 3D Artwork from Olivier Ponsonnet, known as reiv over at CGSociety, who uses 3dsMax to create some simply beautiful character pieces.
The Motion Graphics Festival (MGFest) is coming to Boston in just a few weeks for a 4-day event of animation, video, and music. In particular is Thursday April 1st, the “Lumen Eclipse” Event which starts at 6:30pm and showcases the work of names like Ken Adams, Carl Burgess, NASA, Larry Carlson, Hikroshi Kondo, and many many more. The website is up with full schedules and registration information, tickets are available now.
Little change beginning today, VizWorld readers. Now, the “Pixels” posts will be organized by ‘type’ (You’ll see below “Review”, “Tutorial”, “Inspiration”) and also include links to good deals. If you find a good deal on a product, definitely send it in to us to be included.
The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has created a project website for OpenPV to track solar energy installations across the US, and visualize the results. You can head over to 
“Descendents” is a beautiful 14-minute animated short film telling the story of two flowers, an old and jaded flower voiced by Whoopi Goldberg and a young and hopeful flower voiced by Christy Scott-Cashman. Begun in 2005 as a diploma project by Heiko van der Scherm and Holger Schoenberger at the Institute of Animation, the project resulted in not only the great animated short, but several side-projects like special facial animation rigs and an interesting project management tool called ‘ShotManager’:
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