VizWorld.com

It’s been a while since I had a resource to recommend, so I went out and looked and found what looks to be a great reference and educational text on GPU-based Interactive Visualization Techniques from Daniel Weiskopf.

This book presents efficient visualization techniques, a prerequisite for the interactive exploration of complex data sets. High performance is demonstrated as a process of devising algorithms for the fast graphics processing units (GPUs) of modern graphics hardware. Coverage includes parallelization on cluster computers with several GPUs, adaptive rendering methods, and non-photorealistic rendering techniques for visualization.

The book looks to be fairly complex, opening up with scalar field visualization with volume rendering techniques and then transitioning into visualization of vector fields with algorithms like dye advection and level sets.  Definitely not for the novice, but a great book for anyone looking to get some in-depth knowledge.

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From Monty Python to Doctor Who, some of televisions most iconic shows and visual effects came from the BBC VFX department, sadly closed in 2003.  In this book from Mat Irvine and Mike Tucker, we see behind the scenes and the stories of some of these iconic scenes, made before the rise of CGI.

The BBC visual effects department closed its doors in 2003, but for almost 50 years it had been responsible for some of television’s most iconic images. Using interviews with the effects designers throughout the department’s history together with concept drawings, production photographs, and stills from completed programs, this book tells the story of the VFX department and celebrates the work of a group of craftspeople who lived by the mantra “if it can be imagined, it can be made.” Working largely before the age of CGI, the department was responsible for every kind of visual effect, from physical effects such as rain and explosions, to miniatures, models, sculpture, and animatronics, all of which had to be convincing—a challenge in the early days when many programs were shown live. Following a preliminary chapter on effects techniques, the book features in-depth accounts of 50 key shows, representing every genre, from sci-fi and drama to comedies and documentaries. In each we see how the designers worked, from receiving the original script to creating the finished effects. Filled with fascinating insights, wonderful stories, and numerous photographs and artworks that have never been published, this is an essential book for FX fans and anyone who loves television.

This book and many others is available in the VizWorld Store.

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This week’s “Recommended Resource” comes not from Amazon, but from O’Reilly who is hosting a huge sale on the Top 25 of 2010.  For today only, you can get the DRM-Free e-Book version of their Top 25 titles, including the popular “Beautiful Visualization”, at an impressive 60% Off.

For one day only, you can save 60% on our best of “Ebook Deal of the Day” titles – the top 25 of 2010.

Ebooks from oreilly.com are DRM-free. You get free lifetime access, multiple file formats,

and free updates. One day only. Use discount code DDT25 in the shopping cart.

via O’Reilly Media – Best of Ebook Deal/Day – Save 60% on the Top 25.

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It’s been a few weeks since we hand a recommended resource, but today’s offering was too good to pass up.  It’s not actually available yet, but Nathan Yau of FlowingData now has his book ‘Visualize This‘ available for Pre-Order on Amazon.

Visualize This is a guide on how to visualize and tell stories with data, providing practical design tips complemented with step-by-step tutorials. It begins with a description of the huge growth of data and visualization in industry, news, and gov’t and opportunities for those who tell stories with data. Logically it moves on to actual stories in data-statistical ones with trends and human stories. the technical part comes up quickly with how to gather, parse and format data with Python, R, Excel, Google docs, etc and details tools to visualize data-native graphics for the Web like ActionScript, Flash libraries, PHP, JavaScript, CSS, HTML. Every chapter provides an example as well. Patterns over time and kinds of data charts are followed by proportions, chart types and examples. Next, examples and descriptions of outliers and how to show them, different kinds of maps, how to guide your readers and explain the data “in the visualization”. The book ends with a value-add appendix on graphical perception.

I’ve added this book to the VizWorld store, where you can get it and several others!

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If you’re interested in the inner working of some of the biggest in Hollywood’s CG studios, then you should check out the inside story of the creation and faltering of Dreamworks, Nicole Laporte’s “The Men Who Would Be Kings”.

The rise and then the crash and burn of DreamWorks, created by three of the biggest egos in Hollywood—Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen—is a gripping saga of changing economic times. Wary of corporate inroads and catalyzed by Katzenberg’s troubled departure from Disney, the three had independently come to a point where they wanted to run their own show. In 1994, without even a name for their venture, they announced the formation of a company that would break the mold on corporate ownership of entertainment-making, respecting creativity above all else. Spielberg was coddled and cosseted as the ultimate artiste. Katzenberg, who headed the animation division at Disney, was motivated as much by vengeance against CEO Michael Eisner when he set about luring away Disney’s animators. Billionaire Geffen was looked on as the businessman who would bring together disparate parts of the company. What followed was a clash of multiple cultures and visions, within and outside of DreamWorks. LaPorte, a former film industry reporter for Variety, offers a deliciously detailed look at the trials, triumphs, and fumbles of DreamWorks—from the complicated story behind Shrek, a CGI pioneer, to the courting of stars Nicole Kidman and George Clooney and soothing of Russell Crowe. This unauthorized chronicle of DreamWorks will no doubt seal LaPorte’s status as persona non grata in Hollywood, but readers will love it. –Vanessa Bush

This book and many others is available in the VizWorld Store.

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This week’s recommended resource is for anyone considering writing their own physically based renderer, or who just wants to know more about how it all works.  The book is Matt Pharr & Greg Humphreys’ “Physically Based Rendering: From Theory to Implementation“.

Physically Based Rendering is a terrific book. It covers all the marvelous math, fascinating physics, practical software engineering, and clever tricks that are necessary to write a state-of-the-art photorealistic renderer. All of these topics are dealt with in a clear and pedagogical manner without omitting the all-important practical details.
-Per Christensen
Senior Software Developer, RenderMan Products Pixar Animation Studios

You can get this book any many others in the VizWorld Store.

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It seems no matter what field you work in these days, if you work with computers you’ve probably heard of the language “Python”.  Currently the core of scripting systems in tools varying from Nuke to Maya to ParaView, the amazing flexibility and simplicity of the language make it an attractive choice for both developers and users.  This week’s recommended resources goes out to Python novices and experts alike, starting with O’Reilly’s “Learning Python“.

The authors of Learning Python show you enough essentials of the Python scripting language to enable you to begin solving problems right away, then reveal more powerful aspects of the language one at a time. This approach is sure to appeal to programmers and system administrators who have urgent problems and a preference for learning by semi-guided experimentation.First off, Learning Python shows the relationships among Python scripts and their interpreter (in a mostly platform-neutral way). Then, the authors address the mechanics of the language itself, providing illustrations of how Python conceives of numbers, strings, and other objects as well as the operators you use to work with them. Dictionaries, lists, tuples, and other data structures specific to Python receive plenty of attention including complete examples.

Authors Mark Lutz and David Ascher build on that fundamental information in their discussions of functions and modules, which evolve into coverage of namespaces, classes, and the object-oriented aspects of Python programming. There’s also information on creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs) for Python applications with Tkinter.

And if just learning the basics isn’t enough, then jump-start your Python skills with a full collection of code snippets with O’Reilly’s Python Cookbook.

Updated for Python 2.4, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition offers a wealth of useful code for all Python programmers, not just advanced practitioners. Like its predecessor, the new edition provides solutions to problems that Python programmers face everyday.

It now includes over 200 recipes that range from simple tasks, such as working with dictionaries and list comprehensions, to complex tasks, such as monitoring a network and building a templating system. This revised version also includes new chapters on topics such as time, money, and metaprogramming.

Here’s a list of additional topics covered:

• Manipulating text
• Searching and sorting
• Working with files and the filesystem
• Object-oriented programming
• Dealing with threads and processes
• System administration
• Interacting with databases
• Creating user interfaces
• Network and web programming
• Processing XML
• Distributed programming
• Debugging and testing

Another advantage of The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is its trio of authors–three well-known Python programming experts, who are highly visible on email lists and in newsgroups, and speak often at Python conferences.With scores of practical examples and pertinent background information, The Python Cookbook, 2nd Edition is the one source you need if you’re looking to build efficient, flexible, scalable, and well-integrated systems.

Find this book and many more in the VizWorld Store.

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This week’s recommended resource is the second edition of Ron Brinkman’s classic “The Art & Science of Digital Compositing” which brings together examples, walkthroughs, and interviews with experts on some of the biggest names in cinema, which is currently on-sale on Amazon for an impressive 45% off!

The classic reference, with over 25,000 copies in print, has been massively expanded and thoroughly updated to include state-of-the-art methods and 400+ all-new full color images!

At ILM, compositing is one of the most important tools we use. If you want to learn more, this excellent 2nd-edition is detailed with hundreds of secrets that will help make your comps seamless. For beginners or experts, Ron walks you through the processes of analysis and workflows – linear thinking which will help you become deft and successfully tackle any shot.
- Dennis Muren ASC, Senior Visual Effects Supervisor, Industrial Light & Magic

Ron Brinkman’s book is the definitive work on digital compositing and we have depended on this book as a critical part of our in-house training program at Imageworks since the 1999 Edition. We use this book as a daily textbook and reference for our lighters, compositors and anyone working with digital imagery. It is wonderful to see a new edition being released and it will certainly be required reading for all our digital artists here at Imageworks.
- Sande Scoredos, Executive Director of Training & Artist Development, Sony Pictures Imageworks

The Art and Science of Digital Compositing is the only complete overview of the technical and artistic nature of digital compositing. It covers a wide range of topics from basic image creation, representation and manipulation, to a look at the visual cues that are necessary to create a believable composite. Designed as an introduction to the field, as well as an authoritative technical reference, this book provides essential information for novices and professionals alike.

• 17 new case-studies provide in-depth looks at the compositing work done on films such as Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, The Incredibles, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Sin City, Spider-Man 2, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith.
• The accompanying DVD-ROM features bonus resources, including example footage from hit films and projects that give readers hands-on experience with real industry materials.
• Includes new sections on 3D compositing, High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, Rotoscoping, and much more!
• 17 new case-studies provide in-depth looks at the compositing work done on films such as Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The Golden Compass, The Incredibles, King Kong, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Sin City, Spider-Man 2, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, and Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith.
• The accompanying DVD-ROM features bonus resources, including example footage from hit films and projects that give readers hands-on experience with real industry materials.
• Includes new sections on 3D compositing, High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging, Rotoscoping, and much more!

This book and many others is now available in the VizWorld Store.

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Whether you’re at GTC this week or not, you’ve no doubt heard the amazing claims of performance boosts possible with using not just CUDA, but any GPU-acceleration system.  However, you can’t just recompile your code and expect massive boosts, you have to dig deep and invest the time and tools to completely rebuild your algorithms for maximum parallelism and concurrency.  This week’s recommended resource is a guide to help you do just that: Clay Breshears’ “The Art of Concurrency“.

If you’re looking to take full advantage of multi-core processors with concurrent programming, this practical book provides the knowledge and hands-on experience you need. The Art of Concurrency is one of the few resources to focus on implementing algorithms in the shared-memory model of multi-core processors, rather than just theoretical models or distributed-memory architectures. The book provides detailed explanations and usable samples to help you transform algorithms from serial to parallel code, along with advice and analysis for avoiding mistakes that programmers typically make when first attempting these computations.

Written by an Intel engineer with over two decades of parallel and concurrent programming experience, this book will help you:

• Understand parallelism and concurrency
• Explore differences between programming for shared-memory and distributed-memory
• Learn guidelines for designing multithreaded applications, including testing and tuning
• Discover how to make best use of different threading libraries, including Windows threads, POSIX threads, OpenMP, and Intel Threading Building Blocks
• Explore how to implement concurrent algorithms that involve sorting, searching, graphs, and other practical computations

The Art of Concurrency shows you how to keep algorithms scalable to take advantage of new processors with even more cores. For developing parallel code algorithms for concurrent programming, this book is a must.

Of course, if you already know everything there is to know about Parallel Algorithms but just need a refresher on CUDA, you can’t go wrong with the last Recommended Resource: CUDA By Example.

This book and many others is available in the Vizworld Store.

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This week’s recommended resource is for anyone gearing up for NVidia’s GPU Technology Conference at the end of this month, and comes straight from two senior developers in the CUDA software platform team, the recently released CUDA By Example.

CUDA by Example, written by two senior members of the CUDA software platform team, shows programmers how to employ this new technology. The authors introduce each area of CUDA development through working examples. After a concise introduction to the CUDA platform and architecture, as well as a quick-start guide to CUDA C, the book details the techniques and trade-offs associated with each key CUDA feature. You’ll discover when to use each CUDA C extension and how to write CUDA software that delivers truly outstanding performance.

Major topics covered include

• Parallel programming
• Thread cooperation
• Constant memory and events
• Texture memory
• Graphics interoperability
• Atomics
• Streams
• CUDA C on multiple GPUs
• Advanced atomics
• Additional CUDA resources

All the CUDA software tools you’ll need are freely available for download from NVIDIA.
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda-by-example.html

This book is actually the foundation (I’m told) of a recent Webinar series on CUDA, sponsored by Nvidia.  This book, and many others, is available in the VizWorld store.

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