Want.  Sony showed off a new display device in the Emerging Technologies exhibit with can show 360 images in a cylindrical projection and allows for a “hand waving” interface to virtually spin the cylinder around.  Expected to be on the market in 2 years.

Some great sessions yesterday, including some research in preattentive vision memory and seeing some advances in medical dataset visualization.  Two talks on bat physiology too.  No time to write a full report, but here’s some links…

www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MCG.2006.44

www.neuroconstruct.org/

www.wholebraincatalog.org/

www.gensat.org/retina.jsp

cellimagelibrary.org/

smallworldexplorations.org/

And the quote of the day “The gain in the brain comes mainly from the stain.”

If you close your eyes, it’s lovely here at LAX.  Weather is simply perfect, maybe a slight chill in the shade. Should be a comfortable week, too bad we’ll be inside for much of it.

Here’s a first attempt at delivering an extra shader to the Generic Shader.  In this case it is a “lit sphere” shader.   ZBrush users should be familiar with the idea, a simple shaded sphere image is used to describe non-local shading over all the surfaces visible to the eye.

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Ben an I are heading out to SIGGRAPH later this week.  I’m planning on blogging during the day this year instead of doing a nightly debrief. To add to the challenge, I’ll be doing it all from my Nexus One.  This post was done on the phone, so it seems plausible.  In fact, I may not pack my laptop at all, leaving more room for books in my luggage.

Drop us a line if you’d like to meet up, or if you want to suggest something not to be missed.

Or just keep an eye out for us.  I’ll be the guy in the SIGGRAPH t-shirt with no laptop.

We’re hiring!

We’ve replaced the menu link for Visualization Services with We're Hiring because, well, we’re pretty solidly booked.  Maybe you could help with that?

We’re looking to immediately hire both permanent and contract developers to help us make everything from offline medical image processing and rendering tools to realtime interactive and simulation applications.  We can’t go into all the details here, but if you would like to find out more, drop us a line.

Fusion 6.1 adds a new mode for Displace3D, a worldspace displacement where the input RGB is converted to XYZ positions.

This makes it do to meshes what my previous setups did in particles.

3 maps used to make geometry of a colon

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Today I’ve got a modifier-type Fuse and a an example comp demonstrating some techniques for working with the DoD in Fusion 6+.

We’re working on a project that really needs to leverage the DoD in Fusion for efficiency at certain scales, but we are going to be relying on tools that don’t support DoD yet.  I made several attempts to create some Fuses to affect the DoD in such a way that we could control it more effectively over a comp.  This one takes advantage of the SetDomain tool to do the actual manipulation of the DoD, so it’s just a modifier that sets the appropriate sliders.

Download DoD Union Finder Modifier Fuse 1.0

Download DoD Union Finder and Crop with Metadata example comp 1.0

Here’s one of those posts were we do something clever with only the built in tools in Fusion.  This time it’s getting the worldspace position of any node (or offset point from a node) despite downstream transformations.  Why do I need to make a special setup for this?  Oddly, Fusion doesn’t provide an easy means to convert between local and world coordinates, and someone asked for a way to do this on the Fusion-L listserv.

(Particle Emitter “attached” to a Sphere)

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