https://kevan.org/extispicious
Glimpses—The Uncanny Valley Why are monster-movie zombies so horrifying and talking animals so fascinating? Written and illustrated by Dave Bryant Japanese roboticist Doctor Masahiro Mori is not exactly a household name—but, for the speculative fiction community at least, he could prove to be an important one. Visualizing Del.icio.us Roundup » Solution Watch I have been coming across many del.icio.us tools to visualize usage during my daily researching hours. So many, that I have decided to start making note of the ones I come across. From the span of about two weeks, I have been collecting as many as I could find. I will list each one along with a description. Enjoy!
Categories, Links, and Tags Ontology is Overrated: Categories, Links, and Tags This piece is based on two talks I gave in the spring of 2005 -- one at the O'Reilly ETech conference in March, entitled "Ontology Is Overrated", and one at the IMCExpo in April entitled "Folksonomies & Tags: The rise of user-developed classification." The written version is a heavily edited concatenation of those two talks. Rising Sun Pictures We are thrilled that Gravity won so many Oscars at the 86th Academy Awards, including the Visual Effects category, to Tim Webber, Chris Lawrence, David Shirk and Neil Corbould. RSP created the climactic re-entry sequence, and are honoured to have the work acknowledged as the year's best. As we enter 2014, we're busy on a number of high profile projects, yet to be announced, along with our ongoing role on X-Men: Days of Future Past. Our venture into long form production continues with "Deadline Gallipoli", produced by Matchbox Pictures and Sam Worthington's Fullclip. The First World War drama commences shooting in the coming months and we are working with the team on the most efficient way to plan and realise the effects for the miniseries. Australia remains a world-class destination for shooting and post, and the continuing fall of the Australian dollar brings greater value to productions who choose to work here.
JTreeMap - JTreeMap Portable Network Graphics (PNG) Specification (Second Edition) Abstract This document describes PNG (Portable Network Graphics), an extensible file format for the lossless, portable, well-compressed storage of raster images. PNG provides a patent-free replacement for GIF and can also replace many common uses of TIFF. Indexed-color, grayscale, and truecolor images are supported, plus an optional alpha channel. Sample depths range from 1 to 16 bits.
Real-Time Ray Tracing Realization. SSE Optimization Introduction Today we will examine an original graphics engine for computer games which is based on the ray tracing technique and which differs completely from others used in modern popular 3D games. The engine doesn't (!) use 3D accelerators. Ray Tracing News, Volume 20, Number 1 Ray Tracing News "Light Makes Right" May 19, 2007 Sunflow Global Illumination Rendering System FAQ This document answers Frequently Asked Questions about the Sunflow Global Illumination Rendering System. It also provides numerous performance tips as well as more detailed explanations of how certain features of the renderer work. Most of this information comes directly from Christopher Kulla, the creator of Sunflow. The faq is comprised of his email and forum-post replies, with some contributions from others as well. Tuning Ambient Occlusion (AO) The options inside the shader block should be self-explanatory.
Helios Helios enables the distributed rendering of 3D models building on open source technologies that are all 100% pure Java. The rendering engine is Sunflow with the distributed computations managed by the JGrid service-oriented Grid system that uses the Jini technology as its base. User Guide Devil is in the details One of the things I'm confident of is that wathever models we provide the artits with, they are capable of tweaking them in unpredictable ways in order to make them fit the idea they want to express. That's great, but has two problems. The first one is that such tweaking could end up with suboptimal use of our precious, scarce, computing resources.
physically-based render engine Key features: Interactive rendering and editing, CUDA empowered, displacement, photo-realistic materials, physically-based, unbiased... Arion raw raytracing speed is vs. quality ratio is unprecedented and can produce the cleanest and the most beautiful artworks. Thanks to its carefully engineered rendering core, it outputs an astonishing amount of work in the same time as traditional renderers. Beside a deep optimization of the core that affects raw speed, Arion 2's new sampling strategy leads to an even faster image convergence. This excellent performance applies to all the different samplers in Arion 2, including Metropolis Light Transport (MLT). LightMixer light layers are back.
New pastures It has been months since my last blog post. My excuse is that I have left my professor job at the University of Utah and joined NVIDIA. I’ll still be based in Utah and will be an Adjunct Prof at the U. Many people have been surprised that I have left a job-for-life that I enjoy, and that I have gone to a GPU company. TomF's Tech Blog - It's only pretending to be a wiki. Email addy is: tomf at eelpi dot gotdns dot org Twitter: @tom_forsyth Although I do have Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, I very rarely log in or check messages.