For those of you interested in entering the Student Art Exhibit, please get your entries in by this Wednesday, Nov 3rd.

An excellent list of books related to:
Art and Design
Computer Graphics and Visualization
Philosophy of Vision
Vision Science
Visual Culture
Visual Literacy

Hi All,

I understand that there have been some issues with text objects using the NetRender render farm. As with Illustrator, InDesign or any other software package, text used in your document must be installed on the machine that is doing the imaging/rendering. In order to be sure your file will render correctly, please either use standard fonts (Helvetica, Garamond, Gill Sans, etc) or try making your text editable (effectors will not work on editable text). To test and see if the font is installed on the render farm machines, please make a quick 60 frame low resolution render using the font(s) you want to use and send to the render farm well in advance of using it in your project. If there are issues after this, email the font to me (travis.vermilye@ucdenver.edu) and I will install the font on the machines.
When using a render farm it is imperative to have your files ready to render well before they are due. This is the ONLY way to allow time for testing and to be sure your files render correctly. Waiting until the night before it is due to render will NEVER (well almost never) work.

Turns out that ugly and hard-to-read fonts are actually better when it comes to learning. Who would’ve guessed that?

The Brief is an art director’s event that is happening tomorrow night:

The Brief is a student design competition simulating a late night at an ad agency. A design brief will be developed by Jay Roth, a Sr. Copywriter and ADCD Chairman, for our beneficiary client DAVA, a local arts-education non-profit focused on serving underprivileged youth. Intercollegiate teams of four students (a Senior, Juniors and a Sophomore or Freshman) will be directed by senior creatives from the local design and advertising community through three hours of pencil and paper concepting and digital execution culminating in a client presentation.

The Brief is open to design and advertising students at all levels. Each team will have minimum one laptop (not required to participate) with the focus on traditional concepting – thumbnail-sketches and mind-maps followed by digital roughs. In addition to receiving valuable real world experience, and networking opportunities with local professionals and with each other, student winners will receive scholarship money.

Cool link from Elliot’s thesis blog:  Smash your food.  Doesn’t look like information visualization, but it is!  You tell it what food you want it to smash and it tells you what ingredients are in it. Pretty fun way to learn about nutrition.

Unity has finally launched version 3 of their program. I’ve been beta testing it for a few months now and they have added a lot of really nice functionality. I’m not crazy about the new War-oriented demo, but if you can get past the impending violence aspect, it does demonstrate a lot of the technical capabilities, such as better real time performance, shadows etc. It CAN in fact still make non-war games 🙂