VizWorld.com

Tecplot has a great case-study from Continuum Dynamics about their use of Tecplot360 to create a ship air-wake database to be used in helping Helicopters landing on ships.  Using TecPlot not only for its CFD capabilities but it’s visualization support as well, they have a few great paragraphs towards the bottom about their analysis procedures.

Tecplot 360 allowed CDI to graphically render the data for better analysis, as well as to check and double-check data, especially for previously-undetectable data. For example, CDI uses Tecplot 360 to measure tip vortices, rendered visually as an intertwined blue helix.

“I could extract data for each one of those vortices, such as the distance beneath the rotor, so I could compare it to experimental data,” said Whitehouse. “You can also see the vortex pairing, which was not something that had been predicted with CFD for a hovering helicopter before this point. You start to see new physics that have been observed experimentally, but that people maybe have had difficulty predicting.”

via Case Study: Continuum-Dynamics, Inc. Uses Tecplot 360 to Develop First Commercial Ship Air Wake Database for U.S. Navy Helicopter Flight Simulators.

Science case study, cfd, tecplot

A new case study from Nvidia reveals the impact of adding a few NVidia Quadro’s to the rendering pipeline of Tigar Hare, creators of games like “Call of Duty: Black Ops” and “Project Gotham Racing”.  A long-time user of V-Ray, they used the new V-Ray RT technology and Quadro Fermi GPU’s to take their renders from hours to real-time.

To compare GPU-based ray tracing, Hare benchmarked a wide range of hardware configurations, rendering the same scene using V-Ray RT 2.0 on each system.

The scene was set up to use a 3ds Max render time of two minutes. In that timeframe, a 12-core CPU processed just 100 samples — while a combination of three NVIDIA Quadro and Tesla GPUs handled a whopping 1,056 samples – a more that 10X improvement. This same GPU combination in one machine was also 3.8X faster than distributing the job across 80 CPU cores. The NVIDIA Fermi architecture incorporated into the company’s new GPUs also demonstrated a dramatic improvement over earlier GPUs, with the Quadro 5000 yielding 5.5X the speed of the older Quadro FX 5600. It also showed great multi-GPU scaling when combining three new GPU’s: nearly tripling the performance of a single Quadro GPU.

Of course, a Quadro and 2 Tesla’s isn’t cheap, but it’s an impressive statistic when (as stated above) it comes in almost 4x faster than an 80-core system.

Get the full details after the break.

Read more…

Graphics, Hardware case study, nvidia, tiger hare, vray

Manufacturing Business Technology has an article up from the VP of Dassault Systems Patrick Michel, who discusses the advantages of using modern 3D equipment and software in the manufacturing process.  He discusses one particularly interesting situation of a recent aircraft manufacturer that was asked to begin construction of an old 1960′s model aircraft, but found themselves fighting with architectural and engineering plans from the 1960′s.  The few remaining engineers from that period still on the payroll were forced to train new employees on the intricacies of the design, resulting in lengthy training, slow work, and general fatigue of everyone involved.  They found that by switching to newer 3D systems, all of these problems went away.

To address all of these needs, the company found a technology that could scan physical parts into a usable 3D model, coupled with a solution to provide 3D interactive assembly instructions to their production workers.

Using these solutions, the company was able to create a clear and simple document that brought total on-the-job autonomy for junior operators. Additionally, the use of these manufacturing instructions could be expanded to any assembly shop in the world, since the document was mostly powered by the universal language of interactive 3D, which requires no thorough knowledge of any particular language.

It’s a particularly powerful case study, but unfortunately the name of the company and the aircraft are not released.

via Breaking Barriers With 3D Technology | Manufacturing Business Technology.

Science case study

Over at the “More Information per Pixel” blog, they go through a case study where they rebuilt a visualization used by a company for monitoring operational issues and reduced it from a complex 34-page pile of charts and graphs, into a single slick page of data.

We receive many questions about “what is the best chart for this situation” or “what colour should I use for emphasis”. These questions are usually attacking the problem from the wrong angle. The one question you need to ask before anything else is “who is this visualization going to be seen by and how?” Is it in a boardroom on a printed sheet or across a trading floor on a plasma screen. Are the consumers domain experts?

via Data Visualization – a real world example | More Information per Pixel.

Science case study, visualization

Mr. X did many of the VFX shots in upcoming “Amelia”, a movie about famour female avaiator Amelia Earhart, and has published a new Case Study on their website about how they created the clouds used in many of the flying shots.

The first step in the cloud shot pipeline was blocking. The previz team created cloud layouts in Maya using placeholder spheres that would represent the cloudbanks from the sequence style frames.  Cameras were also animated during this stage and any gaps in the cloudbanks were filled with additional placeholders.

Once blocking was complete, the spheres were replaced with polygonal models matching the desired profiles of the clouds. When these were approved, the surface shapes were passed on to the VFX team to be converted into true volumetrics.

“The VFX team’s first step was to bring the polygon clouds into Houdini and voxelize them,” said Price. “Then procedural volume shaders were used to provide finer detail by modifying the density within each cloud.”

Mr. X Inc. > News & Press.

Graphics amelia, case study, makingof, movie, mr x, vfx