DIY Guide to Successful Infographic Production by Voltier Creative
10:45 am
ShapeShifting with Charlex
2:30 pm
A short film from Alex Weil has some great VFX and CG work done using RealFlow, Houdini, Mental Ray, and several others. They document the process (and show the great film) over at FXGuide.
For one particular shot of a hoof impacting on the ground and causing grass and plant life to start growing, artists looked to the initial design frame by Park. “It was the initial design frame of this shot that inspired the whole story for her,” recalls Weil. “It is a nod to Hayao Miyazaki’s amazing animated film Princess Mononoke, the idea of life and growth spawning and growing from the creatures and the car parts. Based on her design frame, we matched the composition and began creating various plants to grow from the ground. We modeled and rigged all of the plants as opposed to using PaintFX.”
Adobe Pro’s on Setting up a killer video system
2:18 pm
An online seminar from some of Adobe’s biggest names will be held tomorrow (via Adobe Connect of course) giving you all of the details you need to know to setup the biggest and baddest video editing system your wallet will allow.
This session will show you how to configure After Effects, Premiere Pro, your computer, and your projects so that working and rendering take as little time as possible. Topics covered include memory and multiprocessing settings in After Effects, CUDA processing in Adobe Premiere Pro, OpenGL processing in After Effects, background rendering, and dozens of little tips to make things faster.
Presenters:
Al Mooney – product manager for Adobe Premiere Pro
Paul Young – software engineering manager for Adobe Premiere Pro
Chris Prosser – software engineering manager for After Effects
Todd Kopriva – technical support lead for Adobe professional video products
Even if you can’t make it, Adobe promises the video will be available on their Facebook page afterwards.
via John Nack on Adobe : Ask a Pro: Setting up a killer video system.
Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data
11:10 am
Every visualization scientist knows that while we enjoy creating the visualizations, the bulk of our time is spent in finding, processing, and formatting the data into some usable form. Over at ProPublica they have a nice comprehensive series on various tools, applications, and SDK’s for handling data in a wide variety of formats.
These recipes may be most helpful to journalists who are trying to learn programming and already know the basics. If you’re already an experienced programmer, you might learn about a new library or tool you haven’t tried yet.
If you are a complete novice and have no short-term plan to learn how to code, it may still be worth your time to find out about what it takes to gather data by scraping web sites — so you know what you’re asking for if you end up hiring someone to do the technical work for you.
via Scraping for Journalism: A Guide for Collecting Data – ProPublica.
Flame Premium – “Something for Everyone”
2:00 pm
Over at Autodesk’s “The Area” they’ve got an article from Bill Ennis on color grading with Flame, Lustre, and Smoke. The result is almost 90 minutes of background on the entire process of using the tools for a complete product.
I call this series “Something for Everyone” because if you’re thinking about cross-grading to Flame Premium – or just want to know more about how it works, you gotta check these out. I worked with my old friend Marc Hamaker to put the videos together with the goal of introducing the benefits of Flame Premium in familiar terms.
via Area :: Blogs :: Flame Premium – “Something for Everyone”.
Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
10:01 pm
Paul Butler got a lot of popularity from his beautiful Facebook Relationship graph, but surprised many people when he let it slip that he made the whole thing using R. Known as a statistics and analysis package, the thought that it could create graphs like that was unexpected. In a new blog post, he covers how he did it.
The solution was to manipulate the drawing order of the lines. I used a simple loop over my data to draw the lines, so it was easy to control which lines are drawn first using order(). I created an ordering based on the length of the lines, so that longer lines were drawn “behind” the shorter, more local lines. Then I used colorRampPalette() to generate a color palette from black to blue to white, and colored the lines according to order they were drawn.
via Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R | Paul Butler.
Image Processing with OpenGL and Shaders
3:05 pm
A great article in The Linux Journal discusses the creation of an OpenGL-based Image Processing system that can analyze video captured from an attached camera in real-time.
This article discusses using OpenGL shaders to perform image processing. The images are obtained from a device using the Video4Linux 2 (V4L2) interface. Using horsepower from the graphics card to do some of the image processing reduces the load on the CPU and may result in better throughput. The article describes the Glutcam program, which I developed, and the pieces behind it.
In the end, he has it running a single edge-detection kernel, but it could easily be modified to do much much more.
via Image Processing with OpenGL and Shaders | Linux Journal.
Project Overview: Xray Car
11:28 am
Over at CGArena they have a step-by-step overview of creating the ‘Xray Car’, done by Houmam Munir.
Hi, my name is houmam munir and I was born in Baghdad, Iraq. I am 18 years old, I’m still studying and where I had most of my experience with technical drawing. For the experience in the industry I decided to enroll for 3d courses where I can learn the tools of the trade and modeling concepts.
Modeling
To model this car I employed a popular technique used by the modelers to achieve the precision, which is poly-by-poly modeling. This car is created without blueprints and likes to mention without blueprints it is quite hard to model.
Ronen Bekerman on Hair & Fur in 3D Studio Max
9:00 am
Ronen Bekerman has a great short tutorial on using the Hair & Fur modifiers in 3d Studio Max. Based on his use of the modifier on a “furry chair” from a previous image, he writes up how he did with with full screenshots and details.
In my 3d interior visualization scene ‘Bedroom Concept’ I had one chair with fur which many people asked me to write a small tutorial about. Here I will try to explain the process of making it using 3D Studio Max internal Hair & Fur modifier.
I used poly modeling techniques for creating the chair, but I won’t elaborate on that any further since I’m focusing on the use of the Hair & Fur modifier I applied on the chair after I finished it’s modeling.
via Hair & Fur in 3D Studio Max – Ronen Bekerman – 3D Architectural Visualization Blog.
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