Sculptris, free Zbrush like

Sculptris is a software designed in 6 month by a amateur (Tomas Pettersson). The software is able to perform similar brush work than Zbrush. It's kindly amazing and for Free...

Only two critics : Only for windows... and 32 bits....

Multitouch Keywords

Multitouch set new keywords to know !

Here a complete guide with illustration. (PDF)

Usability of a tablet pc sometimes need to be scratch

Here a video that show that simple ideas could change our habits...

Velcro + tablet pc, make a cool couple to ease the usability of the tablet and multiply the usage.

iPad + Velcro from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

Fast euclidean distance in matlab/octave

On this topic we could see an interesting discussion about how make the fastest euclidean distance.

But I have see that on Octave, it is not true at all...

 a= rand(1000, 800);
b= rand(1000, 800);

%method A:
tic; d = sqrt( sum((a-b) .* (a-b),2)); toc;

%method B
tic; d = sqrt( sum(a.*a + b.*b - 2 *( a .*b),2)); toc;

%method C
tic;
aa=sum(a.*a,1); bb=sum(b.*b,1);
 d = abs(aa( ones(size(bb,2),1), :)' + bb( ones(size(aa,2),1), :) - 2*a'*b); toc

A => Elapsed time is 0.02084 seconds.
B => Elapsed time is 0.0335 seconds.
C => Elapsed time is 1.49 seconds.

So on my machine the naive method is the fastest, certainly due the fact that octave do not use SSE library for my part.

Fusion IO Solid State Flash Memory

Fusion IO, purpose "Persistent ram" that are set on the PCI-Express port. Their solution gives very impressionnant performance. Persitant want to say that data are kept once the PC is shutdown.

Up to 700MB/s Read Speeds
Up to 280MB/s Write Speeds

The performance test : http://hothardware.com/Articles/Fusionio-ioXtreme-PCI-Express-SSD-Review/?page=1

Gesture-based computing on the cheap

A CSAIL graduate student Robert Wang shows off a new system, that can tracked the motion and position of the hand using colored gloves.

The system used things like in NATAL. Namely a database of template image with associated hand skeleton. So a template matching algorithm is used to track and recognize the hand position and movement. The color is only here to decrease ambiguity cases and so give a more accurate result. It seems to work fine, but used a huge database of 40*40 pixels images. So it take a lot of places in the ram memory.

NATAL integrate a compressed version of the database contrary to this method.

 

Source : MIT 

ATI Stream Profiler v1.3 available

ATI Stream Profiler is a Microsoft® Visual Studio® integrated runtime profiler that gathers performance data from the GPU as your OpenCL™ application runs. This information can then be used by developers to discover where the bottlenecks are in their OpenCL™ application and find ways to optimize their application's performance.

What's New in Version 1.3

* Support data transfer for image objects.
* Added five new performance counters: FetchMem, L1CacheHit, LDSFetch, LDSWrite, and LDSBankConflictAccess.
* Added three shader compiler statistics: GPR, scratch register, and flow control stack size used by the kernel.
* Added support to view the CL kernel source in the CodeViewer panel.
* Added support to view the x86 assembly for CPU device in the CodeViewer panel.
* Temporary files are now stored in the ProfilerOutput directory.
* Improved Counter Selection Window.
* Improved results for ATI Radeon™ HD5770 and ATI Radeon™ HD5570 graphics cards.
* Report the API name for the data transfer operations and updated the unit from bytes to kilobytes.
* The kernel name is now appended with the kernel handle to differentiate kernel dispatches for kernel with the same name but different contents.

Augmatic have realeased open source code

Augmatic provides innovative Augmented Reality applications and interactive artwork. They seems to provide service in the following domain :
- Flash Development
- Concept design
- 3D modelling
- Design and Illustration
- Hosting
- Tracking
- Video Production

All the things seems to be powered by an artoolkit flash based code.

For Open Source content : here
You will be able to do your own augmented reality business card :

More information about Unlimited Detail Technology (UD)

Unlimited Detail Technology is a voxel engine that run on CPU.
If you want to know more about it go here

Source : 3d-test

Google SketchUp used in Game Design

In an interview of Robh Ruppel (Art Director at Naughty Dog) we could see that Google SketchUp is used as a game design tool for prototyping scene. The pratical example used is Uncharted2.

The interview show interesting notion, like shape langage that allow to give a style to a lot of scene (It's like a series of asset).

Source : SketchupArtist

How produce stereo 3D (S3D) content ?

Sony have published a series of tutorial that explain how produce 3D stereo content.

http://sonycompetition.3dworldmag.com/video-tutorials/

Video tutorial are produced for :
Autodesk Softimage (S3D camera rigs)

Any software (S3D set-up using a single camera)

Blender, 3ds Max, LightWave 3D, After Effects,Cinema 4D, Modo 401, Maya ...

But do we have yet the hardware to check the output of those methods... Not in all the home...

Source : Sony

GPGPU Architecture Comparison of NVIDIA and ATI Gpus

A good overview of ATI/Nvidia GPGPU recent architecture. Here

 http://www.microway.com/pdfs/GPGPU_Architecture_and_Performance_Comparison.pdf

Here the "Octoputer"  purposed by Microway for  $32000...

Source : Microway