🚀 Get started with Corona → https://bit.ly/chaos_corona Learn everything about the new Corona 13 features from our release blog post: https://www.chaos.com/blog/corona-13 It’s here! The latest version of Corona provides a new set of artist-friendly features that make perfect renders and speedy animations more accessible, and enjoyable, than ever. From toon shading to GPU-accelerated animations and AI-powered image enhancements. Corona 13 goes beyond photorealism with more creative control and faster workflows for 3D artists and visualizers.

🚀 Get started with the V-Ray ArchViz Collection → https://bit.ly/AnimateFaster V-Ray delivers world-class renders. But when your projects call for animated people, camera movement, or fast client feedback—traditional workflows can slow you down. In this video, we’ll show you how to combine V-Ray, Anima, and Chaos Vantage to create dynamic, animated scenes—and explore them in real time. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Imagine. Design. Believe. Chaos provides world-class visualization solutions helping you share ideas, optimize workflows and create immersive experiences. Everything you need to visualize your ideas from start to finish. From architecture and VFX to product design and e-commerce, Chaos empowers creators to bring their projects to life. Our industry-leading tools, including V-Ray, Enscape, and Corona, are built for architects, designers, AEC professionals, and CG artists. Whether you’re crafting photorealistic visuals, immersive real-time experiences, or cinematic VFX, Chaos delivers the power and flexibility to render anything. 🔎 Explore Chaos products → https://bit.ly/ExploreChaos 🎓 Learn more & get free tutorials → https://bit.ly/ChaosWebinars 🔔 Subscribe for the latest updates! 🔗 Follow us: 👉 LinkedIn: https://bit.ly/ChaosLinkedIn 👉 Instagram: https://bit.ly/ChaosIG 👉 Facebook: https://bit.ly/Chaos_Facebook #Chaos #V-Ray #3DRendering #Visualization

By CHRIS McGOWAN This image of Jupiter from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope’s NIRCam (Near-Infrared Camera) shows stunning details of the majestic planet in infrared light. (Image courtesy of NASA, ESA and CSA) Special effects have been used for decades to depict space exploration, from visits to planets and moons to zero gravity and spaceships – one need only think of the landmark 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Since that era, visual effects have increasingly grown in realism and importance. VFX have been used for entertainment and for scientific purposes, outreach to the public and astronaut training in virtual reality. Compelling images and videos can bring data to life. NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) produces visualizations, animations and images to help scientists tell stories of their research and make science more approachable and engaging. A.J. Christensen is a senior visualization designer for the NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. There, he develops data visualization techniques and designs data-driven imagery for scientific analysis and public outreach using Hollywood visual effects tools, according to NASA. SVS visualizations feature datasets from Earth-and space-based instrumentation, scientific supercomputer models and physical statistical distributions that have been analyzed and processed by computational scientists. Christensen’s specialties include working with 3D volumetric data, using the procedural cinematic software Houdini and science topics in Heliophysics, Geophysics and Astrophysics. He previously worked at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications’ Advanced Visualization Lab where he worked on more than a dozen science documentary full-dome films as well as the IMAX films Hubble 3D and A Beautiful Planet – and he worked at DNEG on the movie Interstellar, which won the 2015 Best Visual Effects Academy Award. This global map of CO2 was created by NASA’s Scientific Visualization Studio using a model called GEOS, short for the Goddard Earth Observing System. GEOS is a high-resolution weather reanalysis model, powered by supercomputers, that is used to represent what was happening in the atmosphere. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) “The NASA Scientific Visualization Studio operates like a small VFX studio that creates animations of scientific data that has been collected or analyzed at NASA. We are one of several groups at NASA that create imagery for public consumption, but we are also a part of the scientific research process, helping scientists understand and share their data through pictures and video.” —A.J. Christensen, Senior Visualization Designer, NASA Scientific Visualization Studio (SVS) About his work at NASA SVS, Christensen comments, “The NASA Scientific Visualization Studio operates like a small VFX studio that creates animations of scientific data that has been collected or analyzed at NASA. We are one of several groups at NASA that create imagery for public consumption, but we are also a part of the scientific research process, helping scientists understand and share their data through pictures and video. This past year we were part of NASA’s total eclipse outreach efforts, we participated in all the major earth science and astronomy conferences, we launched a public exhibition at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History called the Earth Information Center, and we posted hundreds of new visualizations to our publicly accessible website: svs.gsfc.nasa.gov.” This is the ‘beauty shot version’ of Perpetual Ocean 2: Western Boundary Currents. The visualization starts with a rotating globe showing ocean currents. The colors used to color the flow in this version were chosen to provide a pleasing look. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) The Gulf Stream and connected currents. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Venus, our nearby “sister” planet, beckons today as a compelling target for exploration that may connect the objects in our own solar system to those discovered around nearby stars. (Image courtesy of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center) WORKING WITH DATA While Christensen is interpreting the data from active spacecraft and making it usable in different forms, such as for science and outreach, he notes, “It’s not just spacecraft that collect data. NASA maintains or monitors instruments on Earth too – on land, in the oceans and in the air. And to be precise, there are robots wandering around Mars that are collecting data, too.” He continues, “Sometimes the data comes to our team as raw telescope imagery, sometimes we get it as a data product that a scientist has already analyzed and extracted meaning from, and sometimes various sensor data is used to drive computational models and we work with the models’ resulting output.” Jupiter’s moon Europa may have life in a vast ocean beneath its icy surface. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) HOUDINI AND OTHER TOOLS “Data visualization means a lot of different things to different people, but many people on our team interpret it as a form of filmmaking,” Christensen says. “We are very inspired by the approach to visual storytelling that Hollywood uses, and we use tools that are standard for Hollywood VFX. Many professionals in our area – the visualization of 3D scientific data – were previously using other animation tools but have discovered that Houdini is the most capable of understanding and manipulating unusual data, so there has been major movement toward Houdini over the past decade.” Satellite imagery from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) shows the Sun in ultraviolet light colorized in light brown. Seen in ultraviolet light, the dark patches on the Sun are known as coronal holes and are regions where fast solar wind gushes out into space. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Christensen explains, “We have always worked with scientific software as well – sometimes there’s only one software tool in existence to interpret a particular kind of scientific data. More often than not, scientific software does not have a GUI, so we’ve had to become proficient at learning new coding environments very quickly. IDL and Python are the generic data manipulation environments we use when something is too complicated or oversized for Houdini, but there are lots of alternatives out there. Typically, we use these tools to get the data into a format that Houdini can interpret, and then we use Houdini to do our shading, lighting and camera design, and seamlessly blend different datasets together.” While cruising around Saturn in early October 2004, Cassini captured a series of images that have been composed into this large global natural color view of Saturn and its rings. This grand mosaic consists of 126 images acquired in a tile-like fashion, covering one end of Saturn’s rings to the other and the entire planet in between. (Image courtesy of ASA/JPL/Space Science Institute) The black hole Gargantua and the surrounding accretion disc from the 2014 movie Interstellar. (Image courtesy of DNEG and Paramount Pictures) Another visualization of the black hole Gargantua. (Image courtesy of DNEG and Paramount Pictures) INTERSTELLAR & GARGANTUA Christensen recalls working for DNEG on Interstellar (2014). “When I first started at DNEG, they asked me to work on the giant waves on Miller’s ocean planet [in the film]. About a week in, my manager took me into the hall and said, ‘I was looking at your reel and saw all this astronomy stuff. We’re working on another sequence with an accretion disk around a black hole that I’m wondering if we should put you on.’ And I said, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve done lots of accretion disks.’ So, for the rest of my time on the show, I was working on the black hole team.” He adds, “There are a lot of people in my community that would be hesitant to label any big-budget movie sequence as a scientific visualization. The typical assumption is that for a Hollywood movie, no one cares about accuracy as long as it looks good. Guardians of the Galaxy makes it seem like space is positively littered with nebulae, and Star Wars makes it seem like asteroids travel in herds. But the black hole Gargantua in Interstellar is a good case for being called a visualization. The imagery you see in the movie is the direct result of a collaboration with an expert scientist, Dr. Kip Thorne, working with the DNEG research team using the actual Einstein equations that describe the gravity around a black hole.” Thorne is a Nobel Prize-winning theoretical physicist who taught at Caltech for many years. He has reached wide audiences with his books and presentations on black holes, time travel and wormholes on PBS and BBC shows. Christensen comments, “You can make the argument that some of the complexity around what a black hole actually looks like was discarded for the film, and they admit as much in the research paper that was published after the movie came out. But our team at NASA does that same thing. There is no such thing as an objectively ‘true’ scientific image – you always have to make aesthetic decisions around whether the image tells the science story, and often it makes more sense to omit information to clarify what’s important. Ultimately, Gargantua taught a whole lot of people something new about science, and that’s what a good scientific visualization aims to do.” The SVS produces an annual visualization of the Moon’s phase and libration comprising 8,760 hourly renderings of its precise size, orientation and illumination. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) FURTHER CHALLENGES The sheer size of the data often encountered by Christensen and his peers is a challenge. “I’m currently working with a dataset that is 400GB per timestep. It’s so big that I don’t even want to move it from one file server to another. So, then I have to make decisions about which data attributes to keep and which to discard, whether there’s a region of the data that I can cull or downsample, and I have to experiment with data compression schemes that might require me to entirely re-design the pipeline I’m using for Houdini. Of course, if I get rid of too much information, it becomes very resource-intensive to recompute everything, but if I don’t get rid of enough, then my design process becomes agonizingly slow.” SVS also works closely with its NASA partner groups Conceptual Image Lab (CIL) and Goddard Media Studios (GMS) to publish a diverse array of content. Conceptual Image Lab focuses more on the artistic side of things – producing high-fidelity renders using film animation and visual design techniques, according to NASA. Where the SVS primarily focuses on making data-based visualizations, CIL puts more emphasis on conceptual visualizations – producing animations featuring NASA spacecraft, planetary observations and simulations, according to NASA. Goddard Media Studios, on the other hand, is more focused towards public outreach – producing interviews, TV programs and documentaries. GMS continues to be the main producers behind NASA TV, and as such, much of their content is aimed towards the general public. An impact crater on the moon. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Image of Mars showing a partly shadowed Olympus Mons toward the upper left of the image. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Mars. Hellas Basin can be seen in the lower right portion of the image. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Mars slightly tilted to show the Martian North Pole. (Image courtesy of NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio) Christensen notes, “One of the more unique challenges in this field is one of bringing people from very different backgrounds to agree on a common outcome. I work on teams with scientists, communicators and technologists, and we all have different communities we’re trying to satisfy. For instance, communicators are generally trying to simplify animations so their learning goal is clear, but scientists will insist that we add text and annotations on top of the video to eliminate ambiguity and avoid misinterpretations. Often, the technologist will have to say we can’t zoom in or look at the data in a certain way because it will show the data boundaries or data resolution limits. Every shot is a negotiation, but in trying to compromise, we often push the boundaries of what has been done before, which is exciting.”

A swirling sea of pink, where fluffy tufts float majestically upward, while elsewhere violet plumes rain down from above. This is the Sun as seen in groundbreaking new images — and they're unlike anything you've ever laid eyes on.As detailed in a new study published in the journal Nature Astronomy, scientists have leveraged new coronal adaptive optics tech to bypass the blurriness caused by the turbulence of the Earth's atmosphere, a time-old obstacle that's frustrated astronomers' attempts to see features on our home star at a resolution better than 620 miles. Now, they've gotten it down to just under 40 miles — a light year sized leap.The result is some of the clearest images to date of the fine structures that make up the Sun's formidable corona, the outermost layer of its atmosphere known for its unbelievable temperatures and violent, unpredictable outbursts.The authors are optimistic that their blur-bypassing techniques will be a game-changer."These are by far the most detailed observations of this kind, showing features not previously observed, and it's not quite clear what they are," coauthor Vasyl Yurchyshyn, a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology's Center for Terrestrial Research (CSTR), said in a statement about the work."It is super exciting to build an instrument that shows us the Sun like never before," echoed lead author Dirk Schmidt, an adaptive optics scientist at the US National Solar Observatory.Stretching for millions of miles into space, the corona is the staging ground for the Sun's violent outbursts, which range from solar storms, to solar flares, to coronal mass ejections. One reason scientists are interested in these phenomena is because they continue to batter our own planet's atmosphere, playing a significant role in the Earth's climate and wreaking havoc on our electronics. Then, at a reach totally beyond our very limited human purview, is the corona's mighty solar wind, which sweeps across the entire solar system, shielding it from cosmic rays.But astronomers are still trying to understand how these solar phenomena occur. One abiding mystery is why the corona can reach temperatures in the millions of degrees Fahrenheit, when the Sun's surface it sits thousands of miles above is no more than a relatively cool 10,000 degrees. The conundrum even has a name: the coronal heating problem.The level of detailed captured in the latest images, taken with an adaptive optics system installed on the Goode Solar Telescope at the CSTR, could be transformative in probing these mysteries.One type of feature the unprecedented resolution revealed were solar prominences, which are large, flashy structures that protrude from the sun's surface, found in twisty shapes like arches or loops. A spectacular video shows a solar prominence swirling like a tortured water spout as it's whipped around by the sun's magnetic field.Most awe-inspiring of all are the examples of what's known as coronal rain. Appearing like waterfalls suspended in midair, the phenomenon is caused as plasma cools and condenses into huge globs before crashing down to the sun's surface. These were imaged at a scale smaller than 100 kilometers, or about 62 miles. In solar terms, that's pinpoint accuracy."With coronal adaptive optics now in operation, this marks the beginning of a new era in solar physics, promising many more discoveries in the years and decades to come," said coauthor  Philip R. Goode at the CSTR in a statement.More on our solar system: Scientists Detect Mysterious Object in Deep Solar SystemShare This Article

Photo Credit: Schmidt et al./NJIT/NSO/AURA/NSF New optics show coronal rain and strange plasma features in the sun’s outer atmosphere Highlights Ultr-detailed images reveal fine plasma structures in the sun’s corona Scientists observe a high-speed plasma ‘plasmoid’ racing across the sun Coronal rain threads seen in sharpest detail, just 12 miles in width Advertisement In a landmark achievement for solar astronomy, scientists have unveiled the most detailed view ever of the sun's corona — its superheated outer atmosphere — revealing bizarre, never-before-seen plasma features including delicate “raindrops” and a snaking, high-speed plasma stream. Captured using a cutting-edge adaptive optics system named Cona, installed at the Goode Solar Telescope (GST) in California, the new footage offers unmatched clarity of phenomena long obscured by Earth's turbulent atmosphere. The images, coloured to represent hydrogen-alpha light, show cooler plasma tracing the sun's magnetic fields in mesmerising loops and arcs.Sharpest Solar Views Yet Reveal Coronal Rain, Racing Plasmoid, and Twisting ProminencesAs per researchers at NJIT's Centre for Solar-Terrestrial Research, the adaptive optics allow the 1.6-metre telescope to reach its theoretical resolution limit of 63 kilometres. Among the findings is the sharpest view yet of coronal rain — narrow filaments of plasma falling back to the solar surface along magnetic field lines, some just 20 kilometres wide. Unlike Earth's rain, these plasma threads arc and loop in response to the sun's magnetism. Another striking discovery is the observation of a fast-moving ‘plasmoid' — a stream of plasma racing across the corona at nearly 100 kilometres per second.The footage also captured a rapidly reconfiguring solar prominence—plasma loops anchored to the sun's surface, twisting and dancing under magnetic tension. Scientists believe such observations could illuminate the mechanisms behind coronal mass ejections and solar flares, major drivers of space weather. Researchers note that the sun's surface appears soft and "fluffy" due to short-lived plasma jets called spicules, whose origins remain mysterious.The team's findings were published Tuesday, May 27, in the journal Nature.Study co-author Philip Goode mentioned that "This marks the beginning of a new era in solar astronomy." Researchers now hope to implement similar technology in larger instruments such as the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope in Hawaiʻi.  For the latest tech news and reviews, follow Gadgets 360 on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News. For the latest videos on gadgets and tech, subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you want to know everything about top influencers, follow our in-house Who'sThat360 on Instagram and YouTube. Further reading: sun's corona, plasma stream, coronal rain, solar telescope, space weather, solar prominence Gadgets 360 Staff The resident bot. If you email me, a human will respond. More

News Planetary Science Venus’ tectonics may be actively reshaping its surface The planet’s surface may be tectonically active in ways that are similar to Earth’s The 1989 Magellan mission captured images of Venus’ rounded mountain belts called coronae (four shown), which may be evidence of tectonic activity. JPL-Caltech/NASA By Nikk Ogasa 17 seconds ago Things may be moving on Venus’ surface. In 1983, researchers discovered that the planet’s surface was speckled with strange, circular landforms. These rounded mountain belts, known as coronae, have no known Earthly counterparts, and they’ve remained enigmatic for decades. But hot plumes of rock upwelling from Venus’ mantle are shaping the mysterious landforms, a new analysis suggests. If true, that mean that Venus’ surface is tectonically active, and not merely a stagnant layer, researchers report May 14 in Science Advances. Sign up for our newsletter We summarize the week's scientific breakthroughs every Thursday.

html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd" Itoosoft has released RailClone 7, the latest version of its 3ds Max parametric modelling plugin.The update introduces a new set of Spline Operators for manipulating splines in a wide range of ways, comprising 10 new nodes with 19 separate features. Users of the paid Pro edition get RailClone Systems, a new set of readymade procedural assets for generating common architectural structures like windows, curtain walls, and cabling. A popular parametric modelling tool for architectural visualisation work First released in 2010, RailClone makes it possible to generate complex 3D models by defining procedural construction rules using a node-based workflow.Users can create complex 3D models by repeating simple base meshes, or ‘Segments’, along splines, using Generators to arrange them into arrays, and Operators to control their properties. Although the workflow applies to visual effects or motion graphics, the plugin is most commonly used to generate buildings and street furniture for architectural visualisation projects. It is compatible with a range of third-party renderers, including Arnold, Corona, FStorm, OctaneRender, Redshift and V-Ray. RailClone 7: new multi-purpose Spline Operators RailClone 7 adds a new category of Spline Operators to the software’s graph editor.The 10 new nodes include Basic Ops, a new ‘multi-tool’ for performing common operations on splines, like transforming, breaking, combining, flattening or chamfering splines. A new Boolean node performs standard Boolean operations on regions bounded by splines. Other new nodes include Offset, for creating repeating clones of splines; Catenary, for creating the catenary curves generated by cables hanging under their own weight; and Conform, for projecting splines onto terrain. The images in Itoosoft’s blog post show potential use cases ranging from creating road networks to structures like wiring, railings and gantries. In addition, a new Draw Splines mode makes it possible to preview the result of spline operations directly in the viewport. New version-independent portable file format, and updates to point clouds Other new features include the Itoosoft Portable file format, making it possible to save RailClone objects in a file format independent of the version of 3ds Max used to create them.The point cloud display mode has been updated, with each RailClone object now using a fixed number of points, rather than point density being dependent on distance from the camera. According to Itoosoft, the new mode is optimized for modern GPUs and versions of 3ds Max. There are also a number of smaller workflow and feature updates, especially to macros, array generation, and handling of V-Ray Proxies when rendering with V-Ray GPU or Vantage. Pro edition: new RailClone Systems procedural assets Users of the paid Pro edition also get RailClone Systems, a new set of customizable readymade procedural assets for creating common architectural elements like windows, suspended ceilings, curtain walls, boardwalks, and cabling.You can see the new assets in the online preview of RailClone’s asset library. Price and system requirements RailClone 7.0 is available for 3ds Max 2022+. Feature support varies between the compatible renderers. New licences start at $275, including one year’s maintenance. There is also a free, feature-limited Lite edition of the plugin. Read an overview of the new features in RailClone 7 on iToo Software’s blog Read a full list of new features in RailClone in the online release notes. Visit the RailClone product website (Includes a download link for RailClone Lite at the foot of the page) Have 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 don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.