Industrial design students are invited to create home appliances that take into consideration, the shrinking domestic spaces. Your ideas will shape how people prepare and store food, wash clothes, and do dishes in the homes of 2050 when 74%* of the world’s population are predicted to live in an urban environment. Growing populations living in concentrated areas dictate a need for greater space efficiency. This year, special consideration will be given to designers that submit a design within the context of a range or suite of solutions/appliances. The design ideas should address key consumer requirements; being green, adaptive to time and space, and allowing for individualization.
Deadline: 1 May, 2010
Prizes:
1st prize: €5,000 + 6 months’ paid internship at an Electrolux global design center.
2nd prize: €3,000
3rd prize: €2,000
The video below gives more details. So industrial design students, use your FirePro (or other) cards and win the challenge!
FX, lda, a one-man TV production studio in Mozambique, released the second in their series of 3D CG animated TV commercial for “Arroz Leao” brand of rice. What makes these commercials particularly interesting is that they were all produced from start to finish - the audio, modeling, lighting, rendering and client review - in one week.
The tools: ATI FirePro V8750 as the backbone for graphics acceleration; 3ds Max for modeling; MachStudio Pro for lighting and rendering (Pal frames rendered at 1.2 sec/frame!); After Effects for foreground and background compositing; and Premiere Pro for audio and final editing.
Check out this “Natal” holiday commercial and then try to fathom producing this all in a week (music is punkish so take control of your speaker volume before playing).
CG Channel recently reviewed the FirePro V8750 in the leading DCC apps, and directly compares the performance to the Quadro FX4800, the much pricier Quadro FX5800, and the FirePro V8650 (its predecessor). Cut to the chase: the FirePro V8750 is able to match or outpace all of the Nvidia cards across the majority of tests in Max, Maya, Softimage and Mudbox. And if you are a MachStudio Pro user, you will see a doubling of performance with the V8750 vs the V8650.
Quotes from the article:
“AMD has got a winner on it’s hands in the FirePro V8750. It is an excellent piece of hardware with excellent performance numbers. To say it was a pleasant surprise is a bit of an understatement, as I was a bit shocked that it performed so far ahead of it’s competition, and even outpaced it’s competitor’s highest end offering, the mighty 4 GB Quadro FX5800, something that it’s not even targeted at.”
“If you are considering purchasing a Quadro FX4800, or even a 5800, I suggest you seriously consider the FirePro V8750, believe me, you won’t be disappointed.”
AMD’s newly released Maya Tessellator Plug-in allows users of Autodesk’s Maya to take advantage of FirePro Graphics GPU tessellation hardware. The readme.doc file in the package describes how to install and use the plug-in. Binaries are included for Windows XP 32 and Windows XP 64 operating systems Unfortunately you must create a free AMD developer account to download the plug-in.
This demo from IBC 2009, very clearly explains how MachStudio Pro v1.2 uses the hardware tessellation feature on the AT FirePro v8750 to add incredible levels of detail using a displacement map - all without impacting performance. Hardware tessellation in this demo increases the mesh density from a few thousand to several million polygons - without any (as in ZERO) impact on rendering speed. Now more polygons become important when you use the increased number of polygons with a displacement map. MachStudio Pro uses the displacement map to physically displace the model vertices on the model surface to create new geometries. This happens on the fly, on the ATI FirePro card, so that there is no hit to rendering, including AO, lighting, and shadows
Video demo from the AMD booth at IBC 2009 of Autodesk Mudbox, a high-resolution, brush-based digital 3D sculpting and 3D painting solution, running on an ATI FirePro card. Painting and Ambient Occlusion are all real time using the GPU.
This video from the AMD booth at IBC 2009 shows the Viz Video Wall ER (extreme resolution) for interactive content, synchronized over several displays, using the ATI FirePro S400 for Genlock and Framelock. I honestly can’t make out the audio explanation - however I can easily understand the broadcast graphics running across 4 displays.
I’ve been waiting for this video from Siggraph 2009! Rick Bergman (Senior VP and General Manager of AMD), discusses how computer graphics technology can enhance Hollywood productions. The video is naturally about the power of the GPU and in particular how it enables real time creativity. There are some great clips of MachStudio Pro including hardware tesselation for displacement mapping.
Saw on Solidsmack that Autodesk launched Project Twitch, an experiment in delivering the company’s flagship products, AutoCAD, Maya, Inventor 2010 and Revit 2010, over the web as Software as a Service (SaaS). The officially stated goal is to allow people to test and try the latest versions of AutoCAD, Revit, Inventor, and Maya without having to install or download the applications.
The technology preview is not intended for production use - it is just a way to provide AutoDesk with feedback. Also you need to be within 1,000 miles of the San Francisco Bay Area to participate (for latency reasons). But it seems obvious to me and others, that this is a foray into delivering their applications on a monthly fee bases over the web - SaaS / Cloud Computing. Very cool.
Pixelux’s Digital Molecular Matter engine is used to simulate real-world materials in real-time 3D applications. Unlike rigid body physics systems, the DMM engine models the stress within objects, allowing deformation and fracture to occur naturally with all the subtle details the eye expects in physically simulated scenes. For example, tag something as being made out of wood, and it will bend, splinter and snap like real wood. Tag it as glass and it’ll shatter into tiny bits. Tag it as stone..., etc. Importantly, because everything is calculated on the fly, you’ll never see exactly the same action twice.
The DMM engine became well known for its use in the Star Wars: The Force Unleashed game, and is considered a serious game changer in 3D simulation and gaming.
In any case, I am not certain of the origins or validity of this story, but bsn is reporting (and now propagated to Khronos.org) that Pixelux will work closely with AMD in order to push OpenCL CPU+GPU acceleration of its Digital Molecular Matter Engine, and the platform of choice is AMD Opteron with ATI Radeon 5800 series and FirePro graphics cards.
Along with the other AMD DCC related announcements and developments (e.g. MachStudio Pro, Eyefinity), this is a very exciting trend.
FireUser.com is a community resource for visualization, 3D, video and engineering professionals to learn about the latest acceleration and display technologies, discuss support issues, as well as influence the features and direction of the FireGL and FirePro accelerator line.
CG Channel recently 
Saw on 
Pixelux’s 
