When The Lost World (the first sequel to Jurassic Park) came out, audiences weren’t really interested in another sermon on the risks of cloning. All we wanted was more dinosaurs, ideally fighting, which is what this CG simulation mostly delivers. After all, chickens are just tiny dinosaurs, right?
The music video for Ghost, the latest track from an Australian indie folk band named Husky, looks like it was brought to life by hundreds of senior citizens cross-stitching around the clock for months on end.
Jurassic Park had just six minutes of computer-generated dinosaurs in it, compared to modern blockbusters which can have thousands of shots requiring complex visual effects. It’s no surprise that animators are eager to embrace any shortcut they can—which is why realistic-looking CG mud could be a game changer.
So far 2016 has been a wild ride, but there’s one less thing to keep you awake at night, terrified about the future, now that Disney Research has finally found a way to render convincing computer-generated sugar that looks and moves just like the real thing. Phew!
Nvidia and Adobe teamed up to develop a 3D-painting app that is sure to become an essential tool for modern day art forgers. The software accurately simulates the 3D texture of oil paints, and how the bristles of a brush work to smear it across a canvas.
Better graphics requires a better graphics card. This much is intuitive to most people. But asking what makes a GPU different from a standard CPU is almost a trick question, because at their most fundamental level they’re the same damn thing.
Step right up, ladies and gentlemen, for the fantastic feats of Chill Pope! Today, he’s showing off a classic: The old ‘yank a tablecloth, leaving everything else on the table undisturbed’ trick. It’s a miracle! Except that it’s totally fake.
You might not understand all of the technical details behind the computer graphics research being revealed at Siggraph 2015 this week, but come next year when the CG characters in movies and video games start to look indistinguishable from real humans, you’ll know who to thank.
The rooms in Ikea's catalogs may look like wonderlands of inexpensive furniture, but they're mostly computer generated. Like, 75 percent computer generated. The Swedish juggernaut has experimented with CG product shots for almost a decade now, and it's getting incredibly good at it. But it's far from the only company…
After modeling the exceptionally well-preserved remains of a 410 million-year-old arachnid, researchers from the University of Manchester in the UK used an open-source computer graphics program to bring the extinct predator back to virtual life.
It's considered a Japanese national treasure, but the colors on an 8th century statue of the Buddhist deity Shukongojin have all but faded. Now, using computer graphics technology, a joint team from Tokyo has brought its vivid colors back to life.
The incredibly lifelike computer simulations of snow and water seen in effects-heavy Hollywood blockbusters—and even video games—require a significant amount of computing power. It's not uncommon for a single frame of a movie to require days to render, and these days visual effect studios have more computing power…
Simulating the complex ebbs and flows of liquid in real-time is not easy, but this jaw-dropping new demonstration from PhysX shows we'll eventually get there.
Now here's something impressive. PhysXInfo seems to have solved one of the tougher problems in computer graphics: realistic fluid dynamics. In other words, making water look like actual water, and not a tub full of triangles.
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbrücken have developed a new type of motion capture system that doesn't require the live action performers to wear those skintight body suits covered in cumbersome tracking markers. And the typical 360 degree array of infrared sensors capturing their…
As hard as this is to believe, very little of The Avengers was shot in New York City, including the epic finale. To pull off the trick, the Industrial Light and Magic crew created an intricately detailed 20-block "digital playground" that was mapped against the real thing. Check out this video to see how they pulled…
Computer graphics have come a long way since a T-Rex ate that lawyer in Jurassic Park. But if these glimpses of what the next generation of CG has in store, we ain't seen nothing yet. Cloth simulations with hyper-realistic wrinkling, modelling complex human hair using thermal imaging, and new approaches to smoke…
Every last detail can help make a computer-generated character seem more realistic. So a team of researchers at Cornell University have developed a simulator that can accurately recreate the sound of cloth so that the CG characters you see on screen also sound as authentic as possible.
Before the internet as we know it came to be, there were other services that delivered news and information to homes via computers and TVs. Like AT&T's failed Viewtron system, which required content creators to shell out $34,000 for this Frame Creation Terminal that produced crude computer graphics even by Mario…
If you reached the limits of your artistic capabilities with crude flipbooks in your high school textbooks, but dream of being an animator, the Qumarion will make up for at least a little lack of talent.
