Thursday, November 21st, 2024Posted by Jim ThackerCheck out Blender crowd animation add-on Population 2html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd"Blender tools developer Bproduction has released Population 2, the latest version of its promising lightweight Blender crowd animation system.The add-on makes it possible to quickly add background crowds to Blender scenes for animation or visualization work, and comes with sets of stock 3D characters and animations.New features in Population 2 include the option to paint crowd characters into the scene, and new Group and On Vertices modes for distributing characters across surfaces.A promising lightweight tool for adding animated crowds to Blender scenesFirst released last year, Population is a lightweight crowd animation add-on for Blender.It makes it possible to add animated crowds to Blender scenes simply by drawing out paths for them to walk along, or defining areas in which they should stand.A Stadium mode adds seated or standing crowds to stadium shots.The add-on comes with a set of 48 photoscanned 3D characters and 55 stock animations, including walk, run, sports and idle motions, recorded by French mocap studio SolidAnim.The characters mostly white, to judge from the demo videos come with up to 8K PBR texture maps, and a shader-based system for creating color variations for clothing.Population 2: new Paint mode and updates to Follow Curve and Stadium modesTo that, Population 2 adds the option to paint characters into a scene directly.New Group and On Vertices modes provide alternative ways to distribute crowd characters throughout regions of a scene, with more realistically uneven spacing.The existing Follow Curve mode has been extended, with the option to have characters walk in both directions along a path, and to adjust the width of the path.Stadium mode now provides options to create empty seats within a stadium crowd, and to have the crowd characters turn to follow a look-at target. Price and system requirementsPopulation 2 is compatible with Blender 3.5+. A commercial Pro license costs $130; a 10-seat Studio license costs $282.There is also a non-commercial Lite license, which costs $41.90, and provides access to 15 of the 3D characters, and 20 of the stock animations.Read more about Population 2 on Blender MarketHave your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we dont post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.Latest NewsCheck out Blender crowd animation add-on Population 2Promising lightweight add-on for creating 3D crowds for animation or visualization now lets you paint crowd characters into the scene.Thursday, November 21st, 2024Download SideFX's free Project Greylight toolkit for HoudiniFree tools help artists and studios set up collaborative USD-based workflows without the need for a custom production pipeline.Thursday, November 21st, 2024Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Holiday 2024 deals for CG artistsUpdated 21 November: Discover over 60 seasonal offers on CG tools and hardware, now including Affinity, JangaFX and Modeler for HoudiniWednesday, November 20th, 2024Adobe releases Photoshop 26.1Update to the image editing and digital painting app makes it possible to edit color gradients from the contextual task bar.Wednesday, November 20th, 2024Chaos ships Corona 12 Update 1 for 3ds Max and Cinema 4DArchitectural renderer gets new live link to Chaos Vantage, better volumetric caustics, and new AI-based render upscaling system.Wednesday, November 20th, 20245 key features in Blender 4.3Now available: read our pick of the new features in the open-source 3D software, from Grease Pencil 3 to updates to Eevee and Cycles.Tuesday, November 19th, 2024More NewsBiteTheBytes releases World Creator 2024.3Free tool: Reallusion's Blender Auto Setup pluginDownload VFX Assets' free 2D Cloud Textures PackCreate perfect topology for animated charactersEphere releases Ornatrix 3 for Cinema 4DMaxon releases Red Giant 2025.2 and Universe 2025.1Nekki releases Cascadeur MobileUnreal Engine 5.5: discover 10 key features for CG artistsBlackmagic Design releases Fusion Studio 19.1Blackmagic Design releases DaVinci Resolve 19.1Get the Blender Studio's free Brushstroke Tools for BlenderFoundry releases Mari 7.1 in betaOlder Posts

LIVE NOW! Join us for another exciting #AskTheTrainer session as #Cinema4D Master Trainer Noseman answers your questions.Join us for another exciting #AskTheTrainer session on Thursday November 21st, 2024, at 8am Pacific, as Cinema 4D Master Trainer Noseman is going to answer y...

K-Pop, Cutting-Edge Tech and Other Ways Asia Is Shaping the World | Neeraj Aggarwal | TED

The battle between Gen Z and Gen XPublished inThe Medium BlogSent as aNewsletter3 min read8 hours ago-- Thursday! This week is whooshing by.Issue #212: lowercase diary entries, Angulars latest update, and the 4,000 weeks of your lifeIt was Netflixs first-ever livestreamed sports event: 27-year-old Jake Paul (masculinitys answer to the Kardashians?) v. 58-year-old Mike Tyson (once the youngest heavyweight champion in history). Actually, Paul is a pro boxing champ, too his record is 111. Tysons is 507.Netflix claims 108 million viewers tuned in. I didnt watch live, but I did watch the highlights. It looked like a draw to me? Definitely not a knockout, but Paul won.The fight itself wasnt eventful (both of them seemed tired), but the conversations around it were more interesting. Deadspin founder Will Leitch highlighted the hype-y moment at the beginning of every fight when the announcer bellows out the name of each contender, explaining why they should be feared or revered (think: introducing THE BONECRUSHERRR). His intro for Paul? In this attention economy, HE COMMANDS IT AND HE TURNS IT INTO CAPITAL!Wild. That sentence encapsulates what was at the heart of this fight, to me: a battle between Gen Z and Gen X. Two generations, two strategies. One demands respect through understated yet powerful actions. The other builds its reputation on image, influence, and visibility.One last note: Many of you couldnt watch at all, because Netflixs servers got overloaded during the stream. Moses Mwemezi Kemibaro, in Kenya, tried to watch on a few different internet service providers to no avail. Data scientist Risto Trajanov took us deep inside Netflixs tech stack to uncover what went wrong: the video couldnt be pre-cached, and Netflix wasnt prepared. Netflixs CTO apologized for the outage, but claimed the event was still a huge success. One man in Florida already sued the platform for interfering with his viewing pleasure.If you werent caught in buffering hell: What did you think? By 2030 will Netflix beat ESPN at its own game? Harris Sockel Two more things Im readingFeed Me, a newsletter by former Meta creative strategist Emily Sundberg, started as a venue for freaky little fictional horror stories like this one about a female founder who hides her employees in her basement. (I died at the baguette-shaped lamp.) Its now the fifth most popular paid newsletter on Substack in the business category. Sundbergs most popular story examines the dynamics of Substack itself, specifically how the platform spawns millions of lowercase diary entries that sound the same. (Semafor)Angular, the Google-built framework for creating digital interfaces used by everyone from Tesla to Microsoft to a humble blogging platform called Medium just released version 19. It includes new features to help your UI load more quickly, like incremental hydration (turning static HTML into a dynamic, interactive experience) and event replay enabled by default. (Angular Blog) Your daily dose of practical wisdomIf youre reading this at age 40, you have around 2,000 weeks left to live. Most lifetimes are ~80 years, or 4,000 weeks. Do something good with this one.

Iznik tile, 16th to 17th century, Syria or Turkey. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ArtWhen Hamid Hemat accepted a curatorial post at Connecticuts Wadsworth Atheneum in 2022, the refugee from Kabul, Afghanistan, was surprised by what he found. The Wadsworth is the oldest public art museum in the United States, home to a trove of European and American paintings. But it also holds one of the worlds best collections of Islamic art. Im traveling 7,000 miles from my home country, and I came here and found this amazing collection, says Hemat, who has spent the past two years studying the Wadsworths delicate miniatures, medieval Qurans and ornate glassware from the Middle East, North Africa and South Asia for a show, Divine Geometry, that runs through April 13, 2025. Although donated by American art patrons in the early 20th century, some of these works have never been exhibited before, let alone together. Theres many things going on in Islamic art, and each place has their own culture, their own language, their own style, says Hemat, who hopes the show will spark a dialogue between different human civilizations. This miniature depicting figures from Persian mythology was painted on ivory, likely with a brush made from a single cats hair, in 18th or 19th-century Iran. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ArtUnderglaze-painted tile, late 19th century, Iran. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ArtNastaliq Calligraphy of Shah Mahmud Nishapuri, 16th century, Nishapur, Iran. Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of ArtSubscribe to Smithsonian magazine now for just $19.99This article is a selection from the December 2024 issue of Smithsonian magazineGet the latest Travel & Culture stories in your inbox.Filed Under: Africa, Art History, Exhibitions, Islam, Middle East , New England, South Asia

That Viral Banana Duct-Taped to a Wall? It Just Sold for $6.2 MillionMaurizio Cattelans perishable piece soared above the pre-auction estimate of $1.5 million and was the subject of an intense bidding battle at a Sothebys auction on Wednesday Maurizio Cattelan'sComedian sold for $6.2 million at auction. Cindy Ord / Getty ImagesArtist Maurizio Cattelans viral duct-taped banana has sold for a total of $6.2 million. The piece, called Comedian, soared past its pre-auction estimate of $1.5 million at a Sotheby's auction on Wednesday.The banana transcends geographies, language, understanding, cultural differences, David Galperin, head of contemporary art for Sothebys, told the Washington Posts Ashley Fetters Maloy after the auction. And the high price tag it commanded spoke to its universality, the way it kind of pierces through the cultural zeitgeist to the very center, he added.Crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun beat out six other collectors after a five-minute bidding war for the piece. He gets the banana, plus a certificate of authenticity and installation instructions in case he decides to replace the fruit once it rots.For Sun, Comedian symbolizes a cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes and the cryptocurrency community, he says in a statement. Now that the piece is officially his, he says he plans to personally eat the banana as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture.The artworka yellow banana duct-taped to a white wall exactly 160 centimeters (63 inches) above the groundhas been a controversial conversation-starter ever since it debuted at Art Basel Miami Beach in December 2019.At the art fair, the piece attracted huge crowds and, at one point, was even snatched off the wall and eaten by performance artist David Datuna. (In 2023, a university student ate the banana again while it was on display at Seouls Leeum Museum of Art.) It went viral online and landed on the cover of the New York Post. Three versions of the banana sold for $120,000 to $150,000 each; one was later donated anonymously to the Guggenheim Museum in New York City.Cattelan has been described as a provocateur, a prankster and a poseur joker. His past works have included a fully functioning, 18-karat gold toilet called America, and a sculpture of the Pope being crushed by a meteorite called La Nona Ora.In Cattelan's view, Comedian is not a joke but rather a sincere commentary and a reflection on what we value, as he told the Art Newspapers Gareth Harris in 2021. He hoped the piece would break up the normal viewing habits and open a discussion on what really matters, he told the publication.The World's Most Expensive Banana: Maurizio Cattelan's 'Comedian' Sells for $6.2 Million | Sotheby'sWatch on The banana that sold at auction this week was purchased earlier that same day for 35 cents from a fruit stand on Manhattans Upper East Side, reports the New York Times Zachary Small.But Sun wasnt just buying a piece of potassium-rich fruit. He was paying for the story of Comedian, the publicity and his own version of how he wants to be seen as a collector, which are seemingly priceless, says Melanie Gerlis, an art market columnist and author, to the Guardians Tim Jonze.To many people, the concept of paying anything more than the value of paint on canvas is baffling, she tells the Guardian. And yet there are plenty of people in the art world elite who spend thousands and even millions on paintings. Cattelan is pushing this idea to its logical conclusion.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Sarah Kuta| READ MORESarah Kuta is a writer and editor based in Longmont, Colorado. She covers history, science, travel, food and beverage, sustainability, economics and other topics.Filed Under: Art, Artists, Arts, Auctions, Contemporary Art, Visual Arts

This view is just part of a new, high-resolution image of the sun's full surface captured bythe Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) on the Solar Orbiter spacecraft. Screenshot. ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / PHI & EUI teams; Data processing: J. Hirzberger (MPS) & E. Kraaikamp (ROB)The European Space Agency (ESA) has just released four new, stellar images of the sun, including the highest resolution views to date of its full, visible surface, called the photosphere.Each image is actually a mosaic of 25 high-resolution shots snapped by the Solar Orbiter mission on March 22, 2023. The spacecraft captured all 100 total images when it was less than 46 million miles from the sun. The process took more than four hours, since the spacecraft had to change position for each individual photograph. In the final mosaics, the suns diameter is almost 8,000 pixels across.The closer we look, the more we see, Mark Miesch, an astrophysicist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administrations Space Weather Prediction Center who wasnt involved with obtaining the images, tells CNNs Ashley Strickland. To understand the elaborate interplay between large and small; between twisted magnetic fields and churning flows, we need to behold the sun in all its splendor. These high-resolution images from Solar Orbiter bring us closer to that aspiration than ever before.The Solar Orbiter is a joint mission between the ESA and NASA, operated by the ESA, that launched in February 2020 and released its first images the following July. Since its launch, the program has hit many milestones, capturing both the closest-ever images of the sun and the first close-up images of its polar regions.While the spacecraft totes six imaging instruments, the newly released images were captured with just two: the Polarimetric and Helioseismic Imager (PHI) and the Extreme Ultraviolet Imager (EUI). The PHI is responsible for three of the new solar viewsan image in visible light, a map of the direction of the magnetic field and a velocity map featuring the speed and direction of parts of the suns surface. The EUI, meanwhile, produced an image of our stars outer atmosphere, called the corona, in ultraviolet light.These new high-resolution maps from Solar Orbiters PHI instrument show the beauty of the suns surface magnetic field and flows in great detail. At the same time, they are crucial for inferring the magnetic field in the suns hot corona, which our EUI instrument is imaging, Daniel Mller, a Solar Orbiter project scientist with the ESA, says in a statement. The suns magnetic field is key to understanding the dynamic nature of our home star from the smallest to the largest scales.The four images offer a high-definition tour of the sun. First, the visible light image below depicts the stars constantly moving surface of hot plasmaor charged gas, simply put. This layer has a temperature between 8,132 and 10,832 degrees Fahrenheit and emits most of the suns radiation. The sun in visible light ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / PHI Team CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOBeneath the surface is the suns convection zone, in which dense plasma swirls around, rather like the magma in Earths mantle. This phenomenon makes the suns surface look grainy, and scientists say the stars magnetic field is driven by the churning plasma.Dark shapes called sunspots are seen in both PHIs visible light image and its magnetic map, shown below. The suns magnetic field is stronger at the sunspots, with red in the image indicating where it moves outward and blue indicating where it moves inward.Sunspots are concentrated tangles of magnetic fields, where plasma is diverted from the suns heat-mixing convective flow, making it cooler than surrounding areas. As a result, the plasma in sunspots gives off less light and appears dark in the visible light image. This map, showing the line-of-sight direction of the sun's magnetic field, is also called a magnetogram. ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / PHI Team CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOIn the third imagethe velocity map, shown belowthe PHI captures the movement of parts of the suns surface, with blue indicating movement toward the Solar Orbiter and red indicating movement away from it.This map shows that while the plasma on the surface of the sun generally rotates with the suns overall spin around its axis, it is pushed outward around the sunspots, according to the statement. The velocity map, also called a tachogram ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / PHI Team CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOLastly, the EUIs ultraviolet light image captures the suns coronaits wispy outer atmosphere that can only be seen from Earth during a total solar eclipse. The image depicts interesting activity once again around the sunspots: plasma shooting outward along magnetic field lines, which occasionally connect sunspots close to each other. This high-resolution image shows the sun in ultraviolet light, revealing its outer atmosphere, thecorona. ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team CC BY-SA 3.0 IGOThe image processing that produced the PHIs images was new and difficult, per the statement, but moving forward, ESA experts expect to produce similar images with greater speed, potentially releasing two a year.This mission is such a treasure and important to science, Gnther Hasinger, director of science for the ESA, told Space.coms Amy Thompson at the time of its launch.Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.Filed Under: NASA, Outer Space, Photography, Solar System, Sun

Blind Squirrel Gamesm, previously best known for its co-development work, has revealed its new Cosmorons, an original IP.Read More

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn MoreThe next phase of agentic AI may just be evaluation and monitoring, as enterprises want to make the agents theyre beginning to deploy more observable.While AI agent benchmarks can be misleading, theres a lot of value in seeing if the agent is working the way they want to. To this end, companies are beginning to offer platforms where customers can sandbox AI agents or evaluate their performance.Salesforce released its agent evaluation platform, Agentforce Testing Center, in a limited pilot Wednesday. General availability is expected in December. Testing Center lets enterprises observe and prototype AI agents to ensure they access the workflows and data they need.Testing Centers new capabilities include AI-generated tests for Agentforce, Sandboxes for Agentforce and Data Cloud and monitoring and observability for Agentforce.AI-generated tests allow companies to use AI models to generate hundreds of synthetic interactions to test if agents end up in how often they answer the way companies want. As the name suggests, sandboxes offer an isolated environment to test agents while mirroring a companys data to reflect better how the agent will work for them. Monitoring and observability let enterprises bring an audit trail to the sandbox when the agents go into production.Patrick Stokes, executive vice president of product and industries marketing at Salesforce, told VentureBeat that the Testing Center is part of a new class of agents the company calls Agent Lifecycle Management.We are positioning what we think will be a big new subcategory of agents, Stokes said. When we say lifecycle, we mean the whole thing from genesis to development all the way through deployment, and then iterations of your deployment as you go forward.Stokes said that right now, the Testing Center doesnt have workflow-specific insights where developers can see the specific choices in API, data or model the agents used. However, Salesforce collects that kind of data on its Einstein Trust Layer.What were doing is building developer tools to expose that metadata to our customers so that they can actually use it to better build their agents, Stokes said.Salesforce is hanging its hat on AI agents, focusing a lot of its energy on its agentic offering Agentforce. Salesforce customers can use preset agents or build customized agents on Agentforce to connect to their instances.Evaluating agentsAI agents touch many points in an organization, and since good agentic ecosystems aim to automate a big chunk of workflows, making sure they work well becomes essential.If an agent decides to tap the wrong API, it could spell disaster for a business. AI agents are stochastic in nature, like the models that power them, and consider each potential probability before coming up with an outcome. Stokes said Salesforce tests agents by barraging the agent with versions of the same utterances or questions. Its responses are scored as pass or fail, allowing the agent to learn and evolve within a safe environment that human developers can control.Platforms that help enterprises evaluate AI agents are fast becoming a new type of product offering. In June, customer experience AI company Sierra launched an AI agent benchmark called TAU-bench to look at the performance of conversational agents. Automation company UiPath released its Agent Builder platform in October which also offered a means to evaluate agent performance before full deployment.Testing AI applications is nothing new. Other than benchmarking model performances, many AI model repositories like AWS Bedrock and Microsoft Azure already let customers test out foundation models in a controlled environment to see which one works best for their use cases.VB DailyStay in the know! Get the latest news in your inbox dailyBy subscribing, you agree to VentureBeat's Terms of Service.Thanks for subscribing. Check out more VB newsletters here.An error occured.