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Domain: maasdigital.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to maasdigital.com.

Comments · 7

  1. Very good news! by QuantumFTL · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Debian to Run on AMD64

    This is great news! I do contracting work for Maas Digital, and we have a 30-CPU renderfarm running a weird combination of Debian-32 and Red Hat 64 bit binary overlays. This should simplify things immensely!

    At my other job (lylix.net), we had to move away from Debian to Gentoo for this reason (among others), so it's good to see it finally being

  2. Nice MER Animation by boomgopher · · Score: 5, Interesting · on Opportunity Rover Arrives at Endurance Crater

    Not sure if this has been posted before, but I stumbled on this today, it's quite amazing:

    Mars Exploration Rover
    (requires Quicktime, me thinks)

  3. Re:I'd like to run ray tracing real time on this by QuantumFTL · · Score: 5, Informative · on Rent A Bit Of Weta Digital

    Check out http://www.worley.com/fprime.html

    My part-time employer (when I'm not working for NASA/JPL) Maas Digital just bought a copy of the software... it utilizes stochastic methods to allow flexible real-time raytrace rendering (with good motion blur!)

    It turns out that motion blur in 3D graphics is a very hard problem because it's essentially a high-dimensional integral, and it turns out the best method of doing generalized high-dimensional numerical integration is a stochastic algorithm (monte carlo method) so it's not surprising to me that it's a great way to do motion blurs.

    My favorite aspect of stochastic methods is their ability to be continuously refined (for instance, in a video game, the longer you spent looking at an object, the better it would get etc, and the graphics performance would degrade very smoothly with changes in system load etc). It is also ideal for parallel processing, as it can be dynamically parallelized to completely heterogeneous computing nodes.

    Dan and I agree that there's going to be a lot of stochastic algorithms in the future of computer graphics (though he is hopeful that analytical methods will eventually make a comeback, as they have better asymptotic performance).

    Cheers,
    Justin Wick

  4. Re:if it can dust one thing, why not another by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0 · on Spirit and Opportunity Now Operational

    To clarify on this, it doesn't really dust the rock off. On the rover's robotic arm there is a device, I believe it is referred to as the Rock Abrasion Tool or something like that. It is basically a metallic scraping tool which scratches the rock surface. It would be far too abrasive to use on the solar panels.

    There is a very good animation available here, which shows how this tool is used:

  5. DVD Quality version by Cantus · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Spirit Rover Lands Successfully
    There is a 311 MB DVD-quality MPEG-2 video version of this animation.

    Available only as BitTorrent:

    Download torrent here.

  6. Cool Animation by Unregistered · · Score: 4, Informative · on Spirit Rover Lands Successfully

    here

  7. MER Animation by captaineo · · Score: 3, Interesting · on Beagle II Successfully Separates

    I created all of the animation in these pieces associated with NASA's MER mission.
    The best way to view them is the 9-minute launch-to-landing music video at:

    http://athena.cornell.edu/the_mission/rov_video.ht ml

    And downloads including a DVD-spec MPEG-2 stream at:

    http://www.maasdigital.com/gallery.html

    I also made a bunch of new animation for a NOVA documentary, "Mars, Dead or Alive," which will be shown on PBS January 4-6 (the first MER landing is late night Jan. 3).

    The trailers NASA made look neat. Wish they had used our 24p master rather than interlaced video sources though.