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Rising Sun Pictures has updated their Australian website to include VFX Breakdowns for their work on The Spirit.

Rising Sun Pictures.

Graphics rising sun pictures, spirit

The BenjaminButtonFX website is back up, and this time without a username/password wall.  Go check it out for some great behind-the-scenes footage of how some of the best shots were made.

The Science Behind The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

Graphics

Another win for GPU’s as Computers, OpenMM is giving researchers 100x faster results on Molecular simulations:

The key to the accelerated simulations OpenMM makes possible is the advantage it takes of current graphics processors (GPUs), which cost just a few hundred dollars. At its core, OpenMM makes use of GPU acceleration, a set of advanced hardware and software technologies that enable GPUs, working in concert with the system’s central processor (CPU), to accelerate applications beyond just creating or manipulating graphics.

Platform agnostic, it works on both NVidia & ATI cards, and work with GROMACS.

via New open-source software permits faster desktop computer simulations of molecular motion.

Hardware gpgpu

With the help of the WPTouch plugin, VizWorld now offers an iphone friendly version that’s better suited to the small-screen. Simply load the site as usual and enjoy the Mobile Goodness.

If you experience any problems, please let us know.

Science

Sad news for the FX Industry today, it seems The Orphanage will be closing up indefinately.

Today I had the heart-wrenching task of joining my co-founders Scott Stewart and Jonathan Rothbart in announcing that The Orphanage will be suspending operations indefinitely. We started the company ten years ago, tripled in size each year for our first three years, and worked on some of the biggest and best effects movies made. We produced shorts and even features, we spawned a commercial division and an animation company, and we hung out in the halls with Frank Miller, Ethan Hawke, and M.C. Hammer. We did DI before it was called DI, we gave birth to Magic Bullet, and we did really, really good work.

The Orphanage has worked on a long series of movies, including (but not limited to) Iron Man, The Spirit, Superman Returns, Sin City, and more.

via ProLost.

Graphics theorphanage

NewTek today revealed their new product “Core”, a node-based multi-processing unified application.

• Press Release
• Core Technology FAQ

It will be available Q1 to any HardCore members.  We look forward to hearing your reports on it!

NewTek LightWave CORE™.

Science lightwave, newtek

Digital Televisions outperform most virtual environments in displaying high-resolution video.  The high framerates and frame-sizes prove difficult to manage in a VE.  But a grad student at University of California at San Diego, Han Suk Kim, has developed a mipmap based algorithm to make it possible.

“Visualizing cellular datasets and maximizing high-resolution video playback share similar problems ” Kim said. “If you have 10 gigs of data but only 2 gigs of memory how do you achieve that NCMIR has a lot of datasets that are usually made up of very high-resolution microscope images and all the optimization solutions that we used in video playback can also be applied to the rendering system of light microscope and electron microscope data. The next step would be something called ‘transfer function design ’ which adds color to the 3D datasets so scientists can compare them.””

He plans to present his work as a poster at the IEEE Virtual Reality conference in Lafayette, LA March 14-18.

via Engineering Graduate Student Narrows Gap Between High-resolution Video And Virtual Reality.

Science

From the Examiner, it seems that Congress has decided to extend the Analog TV cutoff into June.  Stations will have the option of cutting off Analog before then, but it will become mandatory on June 12th.

WASHINGTON Map, News – Congress has now decided to give people four more months to prepare for the upcoming transition from analog to digital TV broadcasting.

The House voted Wednesday to postpone the end of analog TV signals until June 12. The move is meant to address concerns that more than 6.5 million Americans with older TVs would not be ready by Feb. 17, the originally mandated deadline.

The House took up the question last week but under a special procedure that required more than a simple majority. This time it went through a normal vote.

The Senate passed the measure unanimously last week and the bill now heads to President Barack Obama for his signature. Obama’s spokesman has said the president will sign it.

via Congress postpones digital TV transition to June – Examiner.com.

Science dtv

FurMark 1.6.5 has just been released and now supports the ATI Catalyst 9.1 drivers.

FurMark 1.6.5 ChangeLog:

• Change: workaround for Catalyst 9.1 when Catalyst A.I is enabled: all textures used by FurMark are now in 4-channel RGBA format (in the previous versions, some textures were in 3-channel RGB format…).
• Change: the OpenGL version used by the renderer is now displayed in stability test mode (near renderer’s description) – thanks to David Legrand ;)
• Change: by default the creation of an OpenGL 3.0 rendering context is disabled. If you want to enable it, just start FurMark in command line with the /gl3 parameter or use the batch file called Start-FurMark-OGL3.bat.
• Change: small modifications in OpenGL 3.0 context creation.
• Change: workaround for Catalyst 9.1 bug in glGetString(GL_VERSION) when an OpenGL 3.0 context is used.
• Removed: timer check in contest mode.

And in case you don’t know what FurMark is, then from their site:

FurMark is a very intensive OpenGL benchmark that uses fur rendering algorithms to measure the performance of the graphics card. Fur rendering is especially adapted to overheat the GPU and that’s why FurMark is also a perfect stability and stress test tool (also called GPU burner) for the graphics card.

The benchmark offers several options allowing the user to tweak the rendering: fullscreen / windowed mode, MSAA selection, window size, duration.

via FurMark 1.6.5 Won the OpenGL Fight Against Catalyst 9.1! | The Geeks Of 3D.

Science

VRay is looking for artists to contribute to their VRay Gallery.

Call for entries. We are looking for VRay artists around the world that would like to send us their VRay image renderings for possible inclusion in our galleries and Artist Spotlight. When you are added to our Artist Spotlight, you gain the following benefits:

• Your own spotlight page with up to 8 featured images
• Your own spotlight page with up to 8 featured images
• You are featured on our main page
• You are featured on our main page
• You are featured in our VRay newsletter
• You are featured in our VRay newsletter

Participation is free and only requires the following

• Images must be rendered with VRay (Any flavor).
• Do not add water marks all over your images.
• Include a brief overview of yourself for your spotlight page.
• You must own the images and not send us copyrighted materials.

Let us know which flavor of VRay that you use. i.e. VRay for 3ds Max, VRay for SketchUp, VRay for Cinema 4D etc.

via VRay Artist Spotlight – Requirements – VRay.com.

Graphics