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Slashdot | NSF Gives Supercomputer Time For 3D Model of Spill

Computerworld | Researchers race to produce 3D models of BP oil spill

Acting within 24 hours of receiving a request from researchers, the National Science Foundation late last week made an emergency allocation of 1 million compute hours on a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center at the University of Texas to study how the oil spreading from BP’s gusher will affect coastlines.

The goal is to produce models that can forecast how the oil may spread in environmentally sensitive areas by showing in detail what happens when oil interacts with marshes, vegetation and currents.

What may be just as important are models that simulate what could happen if a hurricane carried the oil miles inland, said researchers in interviews.

This is the best use of the government’s scientific funds on this horrible disaster yet. Looking forward to images from and analyses of the model runs.

Science 3d, disaster, modeling, oil&gas, oilspill

Similar to Strata’s Foto3D CX tool, ProFORMA can reconstruct a virtual model of a physical object from live video and then augment the live video with the wireframe version.  Created by Qi Pan, Gerhard Reitmayr and Tom Drummond of the Cambridge University Engineering Department, the project is the winner of the ISMAR 2009 Best Demo Prize.

The generation of 3D models is very useful for many computer vision applications. This paper introduces ProFORMA, a system designed to enable on-line reconstruction of textured 3D objects rotated by a user's hand. Partial models are created very rapidly and displayed to the user to aid view planning, as well as used by the system to robustly track the object pose. The system works by calculating the Delaunay tetrahedralisation of a point cloud obtained from on-line structure from motion estimation which is then carved using a recursive and probabilistic algorithm to rapidly obtain the surface mesh.

See a demonstration video after the break.

via Cambridge University Engineering Department – Qi Pan.

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Science 3d, algorithm, cambridge, modeling

So you’ve just spent 100 hours making a fantastic model, complete with bumpmaps, lighting, environmental effects and high-resolution textures.  The next step is to present it in a fashion that accurately represents the work you put into it, and makes the best presentation possible.  A new tutorial on CGArena by Ashraf Aiad does just that.

In this series of tutorials I’ll be showcasing different ways to present your models. I start by showing an interesting way of making an object appear as if it’s being constructed from the ground up.

And in the second tutorial we will explore how to present your model on the web as a 2D image. We start by exporting our Model from Mudbox into Maya along with its associated channels such as color, displacement, AO, and normal map. In Maya we use these channels to match the original Mudbox file, and render it with mental ray. Finally we export the image components out of Maya into Photoshop for color correction and adding Depth of filed.

via CGArena : Video Tutorial: Showcasing the Model.

Graphics maya, modeling, photoshop, tutorial

CGTantra has announced their November Challenge, and the results are guaranteed to be easy on the eyes.

A femme fatale (pronounced /ˌfɛm fəˈtæl/ or /ˌfɛm fəˈtɑːl/; French: [fam faˈtal], with all [a]‘s) is an alluring and seductive woman whose charms ensnare her lovers in bonds of irresistible desire, often leading them into compromising, dangerous, and deadly situations. She is an archetypal character of literature and art.

Lets show some emotion and balance in our character.Throw in a pedestal under your character for her to stand, lie or crawl on.

Full submission guidelines are available on their site.

November “Femme Fatale” Modeling/Sculpting Challenge Guidelines.. – cgTantra Forums.

Graphics character, contest, modeling

A new tool from Strata, called Strata Foto 3D CX, uses technology developed by Canon and Creative Dimension Software to turn any digital camera into a 3D Model scanner.

Strata Foto 3D CX lets you use a standard digital camera to capture real-world objects as fully textured 3D models. Its ideal for difficult to model objects like organic shapes, soft forms and hand made items.

Looks like you simply take several pictures of the image from multiple angles and it reconstructs a basic 3D model and textures it automatically. It comes with an optional (printable) mat to aid in image registration, and plugins to allow you to manipulate the models in Photoshop.

Buy it now for only $695.

strata3d.com.

Graphics, Science image processing, modeling, software, strata

Hiroshi Yoshii has been drawing fun little characters for the last several years, currently amassing a collection of 1671 different creatures.  Originally working in 2D, he’s made the transition to 3D through several software packages and discusses all of it in a great interview at the Luxology forums.

In the year 2000, I met ZBrush and it gave me a good feeling to model like handling clay without being conscious of most polygons. I then switched the ZBrush instead of using Painter when I created some illustration as well. However, I figured out that while ZBrush is a nice tool for creating complex objects very quickly, I felt that I should use a polygon modeler for creating simple objects. So that I started using Cinema4D in 2002. And then, I start using modo for all of my work except animation works when modo came out in 2004.

via Luxology > Community > Member Profile > Hiroshi Yoshii.

Graphics cinema4d, interview, modeling, modo, zbrush

Jordu Schell, Lead Character Designer of the Na’Vi for James Cameron’s Avatar film, discusses some of the iterations he went through for the design and how he found CG modeling lacking and reverted to physical sculpted maquettes.

How many characters did you design overall?

Oh gosh. I did a design of the lead female. I did — I don’t know, I would say I did probably about 15 total maquettes of the characters, and I did a bunch of maquettes also of the creatures that are in the film. Most of those maquettes — all of those maquettes — were based on designs that come from other artists that I kind of massaged into a more realistic realm taken from the drawing.

PS: We’ve been trying to setup a similiar interview with Jordu ourselves here at VizWorld, but he hasn’t responded to the first round of questions we submitted via email.  Hopefully we’ll pull something together with more in-depth details on the design.

via Avatar Concept Designer Reveals the Secrets of the Na’Vi – Avatar – io9.

Graphics avatar, maquettes, modeling, movie, sculpting

Tools like ZBrush make fantastic models quickly and have become a popular choice amongst graphics designers, but the models they generate are often too detailed and need to be reduced.  A new software product, TopoGun, aims to make generating texture maps and resurfaced models much simpler.

TopoGun is a stand-alone resurfacing, and maps baking application. The resurfacing functions in TopoGun will help you modify and/or recreate the edgeflow of your digital 3D models. The maps baking functions, will help you bake various types of texture maps from your high resolution 3D models and then allow you to apply them to your newly created optimized meshes. These texture maps contain information that will help you recover the appearance and features of the original high resolution mesh.

There’s a free demo if you want to try it out, (feature restricted, cannot save scenes or maps), and it’s available in both node-locked and floating versions for $100/$250 respectively.

TopoGun | Home.

Graphics modeling, software, topogun, topology

Researchers at the University of Washington’s Graphics and Imaging Laboratory have designed a system capable of reconstructed 3D models of cities from images available on Flickr.  By aligning all of the images & performing some 3D registrations, they can extract 3D points.

In their project ‘Building Rome in a Day’ the group considered the problem of reconstructing entire cities from images harvested from the web. The aim is to build a parallel distributed system that downloads all the images associated with a city from Flickr.com. After downloading, it matches these images to find common points and uses this information to compute the three dimensional structure of the city and the pose of the cameras that captured these images. All this to be done in a day.

Look after the break to see a 3D Flythrough of Dubrovnik (Shown above) built using their software.  Full details of the system are available on their site.

via Digital Urban: Building Rome in a Day: A 3D City via Flickr.

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Science algorithms, flickr, geospatial, imageprocessing, modeling

With the iPhone picking up steam as an “Artist’s” tool, such as with the recent Brushes success on the New Yorker cover, new apps are constantly innovating on the capabilities.  Volutopia has a new app out called “SculptMaster3D” that brings volumetric sculpting capabilities, similar to ZBrush, to your iPhone.

Create amazing digital sculptures by painting and carving clay-like material with fingers! SculptMaster 3D works like any other familiar doodling application with the exception that you have now one more dimension to operate with. With the intuitive user interface, you can produce masterpieces in no time. Making three-dimensional art has never been so fun!

See a video of it in use, after the break.

via Volutopia.

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Graphics, Hardware art, iphone, modeling, sculptmaster3d, volutopia