Digital "Tissue"

Weta Digital discusses the inner-workings of their Oscar-winning pipeline for digital characters simulation, "Tissue".
From core musculature to fat, fascia and skin, a robust and multi-threaded simulation toolset based on finite-element analysis technology.
Very brainy topic, not a lot of pretty images and sequences, but fascinating material nevertheless!
Via FXGuide.

Wavelet Turbulence Wins Oscar

Theodore Kim's seminal paper has been awarded a Tech Oscar by the AMPAS.

Abstract: We present a novel wavelet method for the simulation of fluids at high spatial resolution. 

The algorithm enables large- and small-scale detail to be edited separately, allowing high-resolution detail to be added as a post-processing step. Instead of solving the Navier-Stokes equations over a highly refined mesh, we use the wavelet decomposition of a low-resolution simulation to determine the location and energy characteristics of missing high-frequency components. 

We then synthesize these missing components using a novel incompressible turbulence function, and provide a method to maintain the temporal coherence of the resulting structures.

There is no linear system to solve, so the method parallelizes trivially and requires only a few auxiliary arrays. 

The method guarantees that the new frequencies will not interfere with existing frequencies, allowing animators to set up a low resolution simulation quickly and later add details without changing the overall fluid motion.

Interview on ZBrush Central

I was interviewed by Pixologic on behalf of Image Engine about the use of ZBrush for the work we did on Tarsem Singh's "Immortals".

You can check it out at:

http://www.pixologic.com/interview/image-engine/immortals/1/

Siggraph '12 - Papers Preview

A bunch of interesting research coming through this year...

Stitch Meshes - CG Woven Fabrics

A tool for modeling knitted clothing with yarn-level detail.

The simulations showcased in the video are mind-blowing, if you consider the complexity of the structures involved.

The work is paired with Steve Marschner's "Specular Reflection from Woven Cloth", also published this year.

To be presented at SIGGRAPH 2012.

The Art of Rendering

Great article from FXGuide.

A good attempt at being thorough about the current state of rendering technologies out on the market at large.

Specially informative sections on RenderMan and Arnold.

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/the-art-of-rendering/

Gotta LOVE raytracing!

Evan Wallace is a WebGL wizard.

Playing with the latest in interactive CGI tech, he gives you a refreshing look at the current state of CG technology, married to Web tech and faster graphics processing.

His work can bee seen on his website, and some great "toys" are available for you to play with directly on your browser - like the interactive path-tracing Cornell box.

Gone are the days when people would look funny at you when you said "let's raytrace EVERYTHING!"  ;D

Brave New World

We hear news of FXI preparing to launch the Cotton Candy, a tiny computer that looks like a USB thumb drive. The device, which can run either Ubuntu or Android 4.0, has a dual-core 1.2GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU, 1GB of RAM, and a Mali 400MP GPU that allows it to decode high-definition video.

And as our classical computer architectures shrink to sizes that were unimaginable 30 years ago, IBM reveals more details of its quest for the "next generation of computing".

According to their news releases, IBM revealed that physicists at its Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York have made significant advances in the creation of “superconducting qubits.” Using a number of techniques, IBM explained that it has set three new records in its bid to reduce errors in elementary computations, while retaining the integrity of quantum mechanical properties in quantum bits.

In quantum computing, conventional binary bits are replaced by qubits, which can be 1, 0 or both. However, until now, qubits have been unstable: the pesky things tend to lose their quantum mechanical properties and go incoherent in a fraction of a second.

"The special properties of qubits will allow quantum computers to work on millions of computations at once, while desktop PCs can typically handle minimal simultaneous computations," the IBM researchers said. "For example, a single 250-qubit state contains more bits of information than there are atoms in the universe.

“In the past, people have said, maybe it’s 50 years away, it’s a dream, maybe it’ll happen sometime,” said Mark B. Ketchen, manager of the physics of information group at IBM.’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. “I used to think it was 50. Now I’m thinking like it’s 15 or a little more. It’s within reach. It’s within our lifetime. It’s going to happen.”

Let's keep watching. If things follow through as they are predicting, and no major catastrophe hits humanity in the next decades, we could witness a leap in computational power within our lifetimes that will be unbelievably revolutionary - to say the least.

Timescapes

Photographer/film maker Tom Lowe's been working on his film TimeScapes since 2009, and has recently released a new trailer that shows off to stunning effect the Red Epic he's been filming on. Between the Epic and Canon DSLRs, all the shots are of incredibly high quality, filmed and edited at 4069x2304 resolution. Filled with stunning time-lapses and slow-motion photography, each frame is the equivalent of a 9-megapixel still image.

The Evolution of Internet Search

Google released a short video today highlighting some of its key milestones in search over the past decade. It’s both a fun blast from the past and a worthwhile reminder of how much things have changed over the years. 

1 TeraFLOPs on a chip

14 years ago, in 1997, Intel demonstrated the first supercomputer capable of achieving 1 TeraFlops by combining 9,680 Intel Pentium Pro CPUs.
Today, Intel unveiled the first chip based on its MIC (Many Integrated Cores) architecture: "Knight's Corner".

It is a single CPU with 50 computing cores, reaching over 1 TeraFlops in one chip. According to Intel,  "the result is a fundamentally new architecture that uses the same tools, compilers, and libraries as the Intel® Xeon processors. 

Intel already foresees a combination of many Intel® MIC processors surpassing the next big milestone: the exaflop barrier."

As a frame of reference, a six-core Intel i7 CPU peaks at 109 GigaFlops.

1 GFlop = 10⁹

1 TeraFlop = 10¹² 

1 ExaFlop =  10¹⁸ (that number would be read as "10 followed by 18 zeros", or "one quintillion" calculations per second) 

More at INTEL.

Earth is AWESOME!

How can one not stare in absolute awe at the beauty of this little blue marble we live on?

Watch this in HD with full-screen ON!

Katana is out.

The Foundry has finally released the first version on their website and announced ILM has already purchased a site license.

Katana was developed at Sony Imageworks and has been their core lighting and look development platform for a fair number of big productions.

 Paired with either Arnold or PRman, Katana is reportedly a tremendous performance boost for artists lighting and shading 3D assets and environments.

Katana is Linux-only at this point, and price is undisclosed at The Foundry's website. Trust me, this in not software for the "shallow-pocketed" and "faint-of-pipeline".  This is a tool for studios with solid Linux pipelines and cash-fluent production revenues...

For more details, check out Katana's website.

Better White LEDs

Researchers are reporting the first use of a fundamentally new approach in the quest to snare the Holy Grail of the lighting industry: An LED (light-emitting diode) — those ultra-efficient, long-lived light sources — that emits pure white light. The new approach yielded what the scientists describe as the most efficient and stable source of pure white light ever achieved. The advance could speed the development of this next-generation technology for improved lighting of homes, offices, displays, and other applications, they say. 

Touchscreen Distinguishes Different Parts of Finger

By attaching a microphone to a touchscreen, the CMU scientists showed they can tell the difference between the tap of a fingertip, the pad of the finger, a fingernail and a knuckle. This technology, called TapSense, enables richer touchscreen interactions.

More at CARNEGIE MELLON NEWS

Say hello to Lytro...

Lytro has unveiled a little something it calls the Lytro camera - the world's first consumer light field camera.
Within the anodized aluminum frame, the friendly camera totes an f/2, 8x zoom lens which utilizes an 11-mega-ray light-field to power all that infinite focus magic.
www.lytro.com

Google Ngram Viewer

Google has been digitizing books. MILLIONS of books...  Well, the goal is pretty much to digitize ALL books printed by humankind since the invention of the printing press. (not very ambitious. heh?)
Realizing that they had a MASSIVE database of words, they put forth a search engine (because, after all, they are Google) that allows you to search the occurrence of a particular word or words through their ENTIRE books database.
You may ask "why the heck do I want to do that?!"... Elementary my dear: besides satisfying whatever geek drive you may have in you, the tool allows you to spot and compare cultural trends through time.
Google's database holds printed matter from the 1700's or earlier, so you can actually see how popular has the term "fame" (for instance) has been through centuries. By entering multiple terms separated by commas, you can compare them all in the same graph and infer some interesting cultural repercussions around that. 
Click HERE to go play with Google's Ngram Viewer.
Well, if you still think it's dumb, I apologize. You can go back to watching "Jersey Shore" now...

Best 2011 Electron Pics

FEI, a company from Oregon that makes electron microscopes, sponsors a contest every year to find the best electron microscope images.
There's a whole world out there that we're incapable of seeing without the aid of very complicated an expensive electronics. On the large scale, we're talking about looking at the universe through telescopes, but it works the other way, too, using things like electron microscopes to explore the inherent beauty of the very, very small.
The images can be seen on FEI's website or available in desktop wallpaper-sized versions on Flickr here.
Also, do not miss their Nanoscale Bug Image Gallery showing some extreme close-ups of common bugs - GREAT reference material!

Fly away with GoogleMaps

Google Maps has long been my favorite way to get driving directions, but now they've added a cool new 3D preview feature that lets you take a virtual flight along the route before you hit the road.
To make it work, you simply enter your start and end points as usual, choose whether you're walking, biking or driving, and click the "3D" button at the start of the written directions list. The program will zoom into your start point, then take you along the route using an angled view from above as if you were in a helicopter. What's really cool, is that unlike a regular overhead map or satellite image, you can really see the terrain and what types of difficulties you might encounter when you actually travel along the route. That's cool if your driving, but it's especially useful if you're going to be biking or walking and want to know where the hills are.

Digital Scrolls

The Israel Museum welcomes you to the Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Project, allowing users to examine and explore these most ancient manuscripts from Second Temple times at a level of detail never before possible. Developed in partnership with Google, the new website gives users access to searchable, fast-loading, high-resolution images of the scrolls, as well as short explanatory videos and background information on the texts and their history.

The Dead Sea Scrolls, which include the oldest known biblical manuscripts in existence, offer critical insight into Jewish society in the Land of Israel during the Second Temple Period, the time of the birth of Christianity and Rabbinic Judaism.

Five complete scrolls from the Israel Museum have been digitized for the project at this stage and are now accessible online.