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. The reason why can be summed up in a simple, strangely elegant phrase that translates into English as “the uncanny valley”. Though originally intended to provide an insight into human psychological reaction to robotic design, the concept expressed by this phrase is equally applicable to interactions with nearly any nonhuman entity. Stated simply, the idea is that if one were to plot emotional response against similarity to human appearance and movement, the curve is not a sure, steady upward trend. The same factors that inspired Doctor Mori to research and describe the uncanny valley and the rest of the curve to which it belongs are of immediate concern to any creator of fantasy or science fiction. Full Circle
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. PNG is designed to work well in online viewing applications, such as the World Wide Web, so it is fully streamable with a progressive display option. This specification defines an Internet Media Type image/png. Status of this document This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. This document is the 14 October 2003 W3C Recommendation of the PNG specification, second edition. This International Standard is strongly based on the W3C Recommendation 'PNG Specification Version 1.0' which was reviewed by W3C members, approved as a W3C Recommendation and published in October 1996. Available languages 3.1 Definitions
Welcome — Interactive Ray Tracing 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 (!) We will speak about its unique possibilities and principles of operation, consider aspects of optimization of applications for SIMD extensions, and first of all, for SSE - an additional set of processor instructions first realized in Pentium III and Celeron II. What for? Why we create one more engine if there are a lot of them? It is OK if you are going just to practice shooting for a couple of hours. All such features must be supported by a graphics engine. To be drawn, large levels are calculated beforehand during a long period of time and then the recorded information is used. The problem is not only in visibility. Let's approach the problem from another point of view. What? Shadowcast is a demo program from NVidia. Ray tracing speed VirtualRay engine Performance
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. Tony Clark and the team at RSP
Ray Tracing News, Volume 20, Number 1 Ray Tracing News "Light Makes Right" May 19, 2007 Volume 20, Number 1 Compiled by Eric Haines, Autodesk, 10 Brown Road, Ithaca, NY 14850 erich@acm.org. Opinions expressed are mine, not Autodesk's. All contents are copyright (c) 2006,2007, all rights reserved by the individual authors Subscription: Archive location: (text version at You may also want to check out the Ray Tracing News issue guide, the index to the Ray Tracing News, and the (ancient) ray tracing FAQ. Introduction So I'm back from I3D (papers links at which was a very good time. There was one ray-tracing related paper at I3D: "Interactive k-D Tree GPU Raytracing". Speaking of ray tracing, the second Symposium on Interactive Ray Tracing, aka RT07, will be September 10-12, 2007 at Ulm University, Germany. On to the articles.
ACM Transactions on Graphics 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. Tuning Instant Global Illumination (IGI) IGI is highly sensitive to the input values: gi { type igi samples 128 % number of virtual photons per set sets 1 % number of sets (increase this to translate shadow boundaries into noise) b 0.01 % bias - decrease this values until bright spots disappear bias-samples 0 % set this >0 to make the algorithm unbiased} Here's how to quickly tweak these values: 1. The important thing is to set the bias value properly. 2. Tuning Irradiance Caching 1.
Radium :: View topic - Version 0.10 (test5) Profile Log in to check your private messages Log in 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 Helios User Guide Download Version 0.1.2 – full bundle (source and binary, view change log) for JDK 1.6 for JDK 1.5 Version 0.1.2 – update from previous versions (source also included)for JDK 1.6 If you have a previous version installed and you want to preserve your config files than download the update only and simply write over the previous version with its content. Download older versions Version 0.1.1 Version 0.1 Sunflow Patch This software kit uses a slightly modified version of Sunflow so do not overwrite the sunflow and janino JAR files with newer ones.
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. The second, somewhat related to the other, is that bad models could be too complicated to fit, to find parameters that achieve the desidered look. So what has the good rendering engineer to do in order to avoid those problems? To me the main thing is to always work together with the artists (a good idea is to look at what they're trying to do, ask them to make prototypes with their DCC tools, and then see how we can express in a more procedural way their art), known what they need, know the physics, and base our models both on artists needs and good maths. But what is, that texturemap, encoding?
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. It's now possible to output all the LightMixer layers in a multi-layer EXR file and tune it in your favorite editing software such as Photoshop, After Effect, Nuke... Just like AOVs, LightMixer layers are computed on the fly during the standard calculation of the full unbiased render or AOVs.