Strider's Sci-Fi

How an animator approaches the creation of and object/effect relationship can be really interesting. The examples I am including here are from recent postings by SIGGRAPH, an organization that has been at the heart of computer graphics since long before most people knew there was such a thing. And yes, many of them are professionals, [...]

The folks at APOD have done it again, with yet another amazing picture. This time Göran Strand did a mosaic image of the full moon over a snowfield, with the lights of Östersund, Sweden peeking over the horizon in all directions. Check out his other images at his site, he creates some truly astounding graphics.

If you are a digital artist or are just looking for some tutorials, check out Layer Paint, a new site full of resources to help out. This site really did just launch, so they are just beginning to compile their gallery and get their tutorials going. I found a free brush set there that was [...]

The APOD site at NASA, AKA the Astronomy Picture of the Day page, recently posted this 3D image of Helene, one of the Trojan Moons of Saturn. And yes, you will need to break out your red/blue glasses to see it properly. Helene is a tiny little thing measuring only 36 by 32 by 30 [...]

After watching this, I had to share it here. There are several excellent 3D illusions, a shoe shot that is almost as good, and a cat pretending to be 3D. Thanks to Vulture for the heads up on this one.

While this is a nice little astronomy video, it isn’t really about the stars at all. When you go to the 100,000 Stars web site the really interesting thing is the demonstration of WebGL. Currently WebGL is implemented by default in the latest release of Chrome, and it is available in Safari, Firefox, and Opera, [...]

From the web site Space Facts, this little infographic gives a very clean representation of the relative sizes of the planets in our solar system. I think if they would have included Pluto its size compared to the others would have made the not-a-planet argument obvious.

The 10th Visual Effects Society Awards were handed out this past Tuesday, and as is often the case, a small number of shows got several awards each. Transformers: Dark of the Moon seemed to get the most (no, I didn’t count them, so I could be wrong), but Hugo, the animated Rango, the semi-animated live [...]

The folks at io9 have put together a fun little chart graphing the science fiction after Star Trek (TOS). It goes rather nicely with one they posted a week ago, a timeline of Time Travel, which shows the start and end jumps of many fictional time travelers. Doctor Who was left off the chart, or [...]

Cory Doctorow worried that folks might not find the 404 Wine Bar for his pre-Play performance meet-and-greet the other night in Chicago. But everyone can find his latest story, serialized at TOR Online, and read it as each chapter gets uploaded. The story is Makers, and for those of us who get cross-eyed after staring [...]