NEC using Mediastation Graphics and Animation

NEC have been using examples of our graphics and animation to show of a new range of scalable display technologies to their best.

More from MTV on our commercial

http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2010/02/04/the-super-bowl-commercial-for-the-wizarding-world-of-harry-potter-is-right-here/

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter now online

Mediastation are proud to announce our involvement in the production of The Wizarding World of Harry Potter TV commercial & website experience. Both these are to officially launch at the US Superbowl on the 8th February (The most expensive 30 second advertising slot in the world!). Mediastation were commissioned by Rosso Media to produce the CGI and special FX for the commercial along with production of the high-profile website for Universal Orlando Resort.Click this to view our work: www.universalorlando.com/harrypotter

Watch the commercial here:

TV starting to cover it see here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHvtpHxQsyk

What’s really incredible is that all this was created with our in-house team, making them one of the only companies in the world which can handle the diversity and quality of production required to achieve all this under one roof. Goto www.mediastation.co.uk to find out more.

Mediastation open new motion capture (mocap) studio

To compliment our dedicated specialist 3D modelling and animation pipeline we are proud to announce the opening of our new motion capture studio.

Using motion capture data instead of key-framed animation not only speeds up the animation of characters it also gets much more realistic movement especially for secondary movements and weight interpretation which is easily recreated. This new expansion will be of real benefit to our customers in terms of realism, cost effectiveness and faster production time lines.

Rendered 3D vs Real Time 3D in Flash

With the latest versions of flash player it is now possible to create environments and 3D objects for use in the standard flash player - Here are two examples of using 3D in flash:

This first version is a rendered video - with the playback (Forwards and Backwards) programmed in flash to give interactivity:

www.mediastation.co.uk/flash3d

Now this version is using the 3D capabilities of the flash player, its much more interactive as we can control the model in real time (note by clicking and dragging you can rotate the object in all directions) and it is a much smaller file size for download. The disadvantage is that you can only use a limited amount of polygons in the mesh (note the round edges are squared off in places) It also suffers from rather flat shading.

www.mediastation.co.uk/flash3d/rt

Mediastation are currently developing out own proprietary flash 3D engine that will bring better shaders and lighting.

Tommy’s Fix your House for Free?

Mediastation have produced the title sequences and branding for Flame TV’s new production for Discovery Real Time: “Tommy’s Fix your house for free?”. Ground Force presenter Tommy Walsh and “scavenger” Liam Collins use materials they have blagged to make major changes to people’s homes.

Visit www.flametv.co.uk for more details.

Google O3D browser plug-in

At Mediastation one of our specialties is the production of real time 3D content but over the last few years we have experienced difficulty in delivering high polygon real time content to web browsers due to fall in popularity of Shockwave 3D and the lack of a suitable hardware accelerated browser plug-in to replace it.

After Adobe serious failings (far too many to list) of the ever so long awaited Director 11/11.5 up until now we have been no closer in finding a replacement. The only real contender being Unity 3D, but we’re yet to find a project with a client happy for their users to have to install this lesser known plug-in. In fact this year so far all of our web based real time 3D projects have been delivered using Flash 3D technologies such those brought by flash player 10 and third party engines such as Papervision 3D. Whilst this has been used to amazing effect in terms of 3D detail it’s been a step backwards due to the lack of 3D hardware acceleration in flash player.

Enter Google O3D:

http://code.google.com/apis/o3d/

Essentially its java scripted OpenGL, unfortunately the technology is not quite ready for use. The tech demos are reasonable and showing some promising features, but the thing that’s got us excited is in the name - Google! According to keynote speaker Michael Jones at GeoWeb in 2008 Google Earth at the time had 400 million users - that’s more than people in the United States! If Google pushed they could probably have the O3D plug-in installed on most PCs in no time and we certainly feel clients would be much more accepting of a plug-in backed by the mighty Google.

At Mediastaion we always like to stay ahead of the game by being the first to use the latest in multimedia technologies. We all ready have our 3D developers assessing O3Ds capabilities and will be watching this space closely to see if O3D becomes the plug-in we have been waiting for!

Large area 3D scanning

Mediastation have teamed up with professional surveyors at www.msasurvey.com to offer a unique visualisation service. MSA use state-of-the-art 3D scanners to scan and survey any environment - from a single room to a whole complex. While primarily this technology is used for fast and accurate environment surveying, the data produced can be used in virtual worlds as well - giving us endless possibilities to blend the real with the virtual.

The scanning equipment produces something called “point cloud data”, the video below shows the detail that is captured.

This technique means we can produce extremely accurate assets for visualisation and animation. Once captured our 3D artists remove any unrequired data and convert it to a 3D model to use in the virtual environment.  The scan also cpatures colour so texturing is much easier and realistic.

This process can be used for any number of visualistation services, it is specifically usefull for visualising how a new building is going to look it the current environment rather than single flat artist impressions. We can put the camera in any position and output videos or stills for marketing and communications.

Mediastation CGI aired on BBC Newsnight

3D CGI produced  by us showing the Future Carrier was used by BBC Newsnight last week as part of a piece discussing possible defence cuts.

21Terrabytes of storage

Apparently it was a “good idea” to upgrade our storage capacity from the standard nas devices to a full on  raid 6 array containing 16x 1.5tb drives stored in a rack to protect our ever growing invaluable data.

Over the past week, me and Ben have been setting up our newly acquired areca 1680 and the drive array with the fedora 10 distro.

Our first attempt went as follows:

1. Ensure pci-e adapter from array is in a slot running at 8x = check motherboard
manual to ensure speed isn’t downgraded if running other cards (like ours was! - stupid Asus p5q deluxe)…

2. We installed the areca raid card driver onto fedora using the download links on their website, along with the archttp64 proxy so we could access and configure the card through a web browser.

3. Fedora recognised the raid array as an sdb which is the name it assigns scsi drives. We then tried formatting using cfdisk, but after trying to work out why it would not format past the second drive, we found that it does not support partitions greater then 2tb. Enter parted.

4. Using parted, we managed to get our partition tables as we wanted them, using these commands:

i. parted /dev/sdb

ii. mklabel - gpt

iii. mkpart - name - ext3 - 0TB - 21TB

We then used the print command to view our tables, which sure enough gave us the full 21Tb support.

5. We quit out of parted, and then ran mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 (sdb1 was created by parted during mkpart) to format this partition.

6. We could then mount sdb1 using mount /dev/sdb1 /mnt/bigdisk and then used vi /etc/fstab to mount this at start-up

This seemed to all be working fine, and had no issues with samba sharing the raid array with windows, and could read/write to it perfectly fine.

So we thought, cool this is working!

### [BAD IDEA AHEAD] ###

Next step, remove a drive in the hope it would detect this and attempt a rebuild… so we removed drive 6 from the array, turned it back on, and found that 2 drives were missing… 2!? Interesting…

Checking the error logs we had the missing drive - as to be expected, and a random drive (14) had timed out and didn’t boot. Our array was sitting there in degraded mode feeling rather sorry for itself. After a restart we still had 2 drives down, but this time 14 had spun up fine, but 8 had timed out… wonderful!

After a day fiddling, we decided to do a full raid rebuild to see if we could fix these timeout errors, to no avail.

A few support calls later, and a trip to Maplin for some floppies, we found ourselves with the WDtler utility, the Western Digital hard drive timeout adjuster thingymajig.

We generated a bootable dos floppy, copied over the wdtler utlity and the hdaccess exe which was “supposed” to detect our drives on the raid card, and booted up

Once in dos, we called: hdaccess, then  wdtler -r15 -w15…

… “no drives detected”… AAARG

I had the joyful task of pulling out each individual drive consecutively and plugging it directly to the motherboard, and run the utility that way, which thankfully worked.

Since then, we’ve recreated a raid 6 set, partitioned and formatted successfully, and written data to it with no timeouts or errors of any kind. YAY back to square one!

OK so, time for the break testing again! Turns the server off, *squints, squishes face up, pulls out drive 1, puts it down and runs away at a brisk pace*.

Upon return (and no nuclear disasters) we turned the array on, ran the proxy utility from a browser, and saw our raid was in “incomplete” state. Great, that’s to be expected, and we have no timeout errors!

So we manually put our array into degraded mode, inserted a blank drive, and to our dismay, it’s started to rebuild itself!

As I write this, its currently at 29.7% rebuilding, and its been about 2 hours. NO TIMEOUT ERRORS YET!!!

We shall see in the morning once it’s complete…