The bitmobile pulled up to the convention hall curb and I got my first limo meeting at NAB. Luxology showed me the new version of Modo, due out in a few weeks, and it was a convincing demo. I usually withhold judgement on products until I take them for a test drive or use them in production. But having seen the product over the past year and going on gut I believe Modo will become a very important 3D product. This is the Stuart Ferguson, Allen Hastings, and Brad Peebler follow up to their other product Lightwave, and a good case can be made for software developers that have the opportunity in their careers to create the same category of product twice.

Adobe Premiere honcho Randy Ubillos got to do this with Final Cut Pro, and Modo may be a similar situation. OK, Modo. It‘s was first a polygonal modeler and the latest version adds texture painting, mapping and rendering. It runs on Windows and natively on the Mac. The render, shown to me on the latest Mac laptop is very, very fast. Yes, I did not hammer it, but I asked the right questions and it looks very promising. No animation yet, which is a too bad, but this time next year we may be seeing the app that professionals begin to include in the fraternity of high end 3D apps.

You can always count on Apple for style and design in its products. Apple‘s new 17in., Intel powered laptop adds speed to the superlatives, but with a caveat; the big speed gains are largely for natively written apps. The new Macbook Pro is a slim 1in.-thick, Intel Core Duo with lots of small refinements and great performance. It will take most software companies several months to get caught up with native versions to take advantage of the chips and the big speed gains but for anyone using Apple‘s studio tools, this is a long awaited answer to the Motorola problem. Modo, by the way, runs natively.

I used to own a 67 Mustang GTA fastback that I restored, so I have a fondness for an engineering approach that is a bit like cracking a nut with a sledgehammer. Bad metaphor because when it comes to processing 3D animation, the problem is not nut sized. Boxx computer‘s solution, however, is a very much a fuel-burning funny car. I‘m referring to the companies monster 8 proc, 16-core workstation. This is basically the kind of solution SGI supplied in the old days. If you are doing DI at 4K or calculating global illumination, this is perhaps the only answer for fast feedback on a single workstation.

HP also rolled up to the starting line with its latest offering that makes use of new Intel dual-core technology, but with a price that individual artists can handle. The new HP workstations can hold up to 2.5 terabytes that can be RAID-configured. I‘ll be looking at this machine in a upcoming review.

Change of topic: NAB is reporting slightly higher attendance this year, but that‘s not what I‘m seeing or hearing on the show floor. This is the second year of good times after the post-200o recession, but IPTV and other major industry change has everyone slightly confused about purchasing gear. Even the developers I spoke with had more questions then answers on the format side particularly hardware is discussed. Mbits have entered the conversation for many companies used to dealing in MBs because hand-held entertainment is upon us. We don‘t even know what to expect from wireless which is likely to be important in the last mile to the home. Is change good? For NAB, only when it’s matched with confidence. Today we have guarded optimism.