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.

StudioDaily on "Immortals"

More on Image Engine's work on "Immortals".

This time, an article from StudioDaily.

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. 

Image Engine Immortals

FX Guide talks to Image Engine about the work on Immortals. Mike chats to vfx supervisor Simon Hughes and Executive Producer Shawn Walsh about the film, which was shot in Montreal.

Direct link HERE.

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.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

NVIDIA Maximus-powered workstations combine the industry-leading professional 3D graphics capability of NVIDIA Quadro® GPUs and the high-performance computing power of NVIDIA® Tesla™ GPUs. Tesla co-processors automatically perform the heavy lifting of rendering or CAE computations, freeing the Quadro GPUs to do what they do best—enabling rich interactive graphics.

Nvidia MAXIMUS

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.

Colour Bleed

Fantastic short by Peter Szewczyk.
Watch from the BBC's FilmNetwork.

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. 

Image Engine talks "The Thing"

Watch FX Guide's podcast as they talk to Image Engine about the creature and environment visual effects work in director Matthijs van Heijningen Jr.’s The Thing.

Jesper Kjolsrud, our VFX Supervisor for the show and Steve Garrad, VFX Executive Producer, talk about the challenges and accomplishments of working on this project.

Check it out at FX Guide's website HERE.

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

Immortals Trailer

A new trailer is available for "Immortals", Tarsem Singh's vision of the Greek myth of Theseus and the Titans.
I was senior digital artist on this project for a good chunk of 2010 and early 2011.
"Immortals" will be in theaters November 11, 2011.
Link HERE.

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...

VFX Bill of Rights

In response to the current production environment, the VES offers this visual effects Bill of Rights, and a dedication to work with the entertainment industry at large to transform the visual effects industry into a model that is mutually sustainable for artists and practitioners, facilities and studios.

Head over to the VES website for the complete text.

"District 9" - Lighting Reel

In lieu of a full demo reel with shots from most of my work for the past 3 to 4 years, I have included a lighting reel with the shots I worked on for "District 9".

Sorry, it's the only edited reel I have at this point. But I am working hard to finalize a proper demo within the next couple of months!

You can hop straight to the D9 Reel page HERE.

Image Engine Designs

I have been flexing my rusty graphic design muscles at Image Engine, creating pieces for our marketing department over the last months.
Worked on some banners, promo posters and crew t-shirts for "Disctrict 9", "The Thing", "The Twilight Saga" among others.
You can see a few that are available at the Personal Works area of the website. Direct link HERE.

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.