A bold prediction slipped out of the lips of Wes Shimanek, manager of Intel’s workstation strategic marketing group, this afternoon at the Boxx Technologies booth. Wes and Francois Wolf, Boxx’s director of marketing, reviewed for me Intel’s partnership with Boxx regarding the new Boxx renderBOXX 10100 render farm series of products, designed to basically permit more powerful rendering in fewer, well, boxes, in space-constrained studios, along with remote management of such render farms.

During the course of the discussion, the ‘Holy Grail’ topic of real-time, game-engine-based rendering came up for discussion, and Wes assured me the boys in the lab at Intel are working on the issue every single day, and he boldly predicted that the transition will no doubt happen within “3-5 years.”

The Boxx folk also made the point that, these days, the entertainment space is driving technology on the hardware side into other business sectors, and used architecture as an example. Their high-end hardware, they say, is being used daily in the building and facility design space for airports, sports venues, entertainment facilities, and much more. An interesting shift from the days when entertainment technology was largely derived from other industries.

–Michael Goldman

Just ran into Dan Philips, VP and head of production at Portland animation studio LEIKA–the entity formerly known as Will Vinton Studios and now owned by Nike entrepreneur Phil Knight. I caught up with Dan several years after I penned a story about Dan’s work (in a former life) at an earlier iteration of DreamWorks Animation. (Dan, ironically, was carrying the clip of my old story around in his notebook, I’m extremely happy to report.)

Dan threw out a nice tidbit of information on the LAIKA (it’s a Russian word for “little barker” that Phil Knight fell in love with, reportedly because he has a particular affinity for the letter ‘K’) plan to move into animated feature filmmaking after spending the last few years bulking up the company’s commercial and short film division. The Henry Selick directed stop-motion feature, “Coraline,” based on Neil Gaiman’s scary children’s novel, will be, Philips says, the world’s very first stop-motion feature film shot in stereoscopic 3D. It’s currently in production for a 2008 release, so look for more coverage in Millimeter in the not too distant future.

–Michael Goldman

Mo cap developer Vicon ended three years of development with the debut of Blade, new customizable Windows-based motion-capture processing software that is said to more or less offer a one-size-fits-all approach to the complex task of handling motion-capture data. Whether you are a small studio with a single camera or a studio the size of Sony Pictures Imageworks (a customer), the software is said to be easy to use. The Sony‘s of the world can dig deep and tweak as needed; the rest of us get a ‘wizards‘ approach that walks you through actor setup, acquisition, solving, occlusion cleanup, and general data wrangling.

The company also noted the ‘enthusiastic‘ acceptance of its FK Extreme; Pixel Liberation Front recently used the $50,000 turnkey mo cap system (eight cameras and software) for previz on a feature.

For those who love a contest, the company announced a mo cap film festival with a $10,000 prize. Selected films will be posted, of course, to YouTube for the public to love you or not. Make a short film between two and five minutes with the provided Vicon mo cap data at www.vicon.com/filmfestival.

Nvidia Makes Re-Lighting Quick and Easy

Changing lights in an animated scene–moving a key light to heighten drama, or adding a diffuse background glow to separate out a background from a foreground–can be painfully slow. For a fully built scene, a graphics processor might have to run through hundreds of thousands of calculations for each tweak of a lighting angle.

Occlusions are another graphics intensive roadblock: in a busy graphics production pipeline, occlusion culling (removing hidden surfaces before shading and rasterizing take place) is key for cutting down rendering time.

At Siggraph, Nvidia previewed a combination of hardware and software technology that promises to drastically reduce the time necessary for these tedious re-rendering operations, boosting interactivity.

“I can now redo the ambient occlusion for an entire (complexly shaded) scene in about 9 seconds, where previously it took 11 minutes,” says Eric Enderton, principal engineer on the Gelato renderer team. more

Ben Young at the Penton booth:

First off, San Diego rocks! I stopped by the reel-exchange booth to pick up my article in Digital Content Producer. Siggraph this year has been pretty cool. I went to a party last night on an aircraft carrier!! I texted a few people that and of course they didn’t believe me. Siggraph is all about networking and I’m trying to promote myself like crazy. My biggest regret thus far is I didn’t get on any of the event guest lists before I came. There will always be next year. Right now I’m really looking to meet new artists to collaborate with and cool projects to work on. Check out my reel at www.daylightproductions.com and at reel-exchange and lets make the next martial arts conspiracy theory movie!!

Cheers,

Ben Young

Director, Animator

www.daylightproductions.com

At the Maxon/Adobe booth, Tim Paul, lead animator from OXC St. Paul is dropping by to check up no new features–he’s a Cinema 4D user. Nothing new in the program itself, but the Cinema 4D/After Effects workflow is going from open secret to roadshow.

Picture Cinema 4D and After Effects working together on a time-saving broadcast motion design pipeline. If you can’t quite visualize it–or even if you can–you can see it work in person in Dallas Aug. 21 and Denver Aug. 23.

To register: tour.maxon3d.com.

Maxon and Adobe are co-hosting tonight at the Marriott Marina ballroom tower 6:30. Salsa band and some real salsa dancers to show you how.

Prizes–not for dancing–include Adobe software, Artbeats footage and a screaming Nvidia card. (There will be a drawing).

First come first serve, but when it’s full, it’s full.

Contour Design is here with an erogonomic three-button optical mouse.

The company made a name in ergonomic mouse technology starting in the ’90s. Visual effects artists can thank Autocad designer Le Scenna and his injured colleagues for the idea. (Our blog sponsor Intel apparantly participated in mass CAD artists tests in the late ’90s at Rio Rancho, New Mexico). It’s out of CAD culture, but it can work for motion artists too. Contour brought seven sizes of the three-button mouse here–booth 1719 all the way at the far right wall. All seven sizes are here, so you can just go see for yourself.

Pixellexis is gearing up for a new speedy rendering engine called Red Box. Aiming to launch the new processing solution by the end of the year, Pixellexis is clustering 16 or 32 floating point parallel processors to provide up to 8GB of raw I/O bandwidth–which they claim will significantly help rendering times for digital video and 2D or 3D imaging projects.

They’re currently setting up a few beta testers in the 2D broadcast market, which will help define the range of plug-in compatability. Pixellexis Prez Stefany Allaire says the Red Box will not only find a place in the 2D and 3D markets, but also in the HD realm–on digital cinema projects up to 4K. The high-end on just how many processing cores they’re going to build in their premium product is also yet to be determined–market, you will decide.

The Canadian-based company is still configuring what the first, basic offering will be (or be priced at) but any medium- to large-scale HD postproduction facility or animation studio should definitely stay tuned.

If ever there was a community of manufacturers that listened to their end users and actively worked to implement their ideas, it’s those wacky plug-in guys. That was the message I got a short while ago from Todd Prives, product marketing manager at GenArts, makers of Sapphire plug-in products for most major platforms (including the new version 4.0, for Autodesk systems).

I asked Todd how formal and layered is the system that GenArts uses to solicit input from its users and evaluate that input for possible inclusion in future products or versions of products. “They call us up or Email us,” Todd replied simply, and he went on to tell me the story of how Angus Kneale, creative director and co-founder of The Mill in New York, got into his ear many months ago with all sorts of specific suggestions for useful tweaks to add to Sapphire.

“He wanted racking focus with his own custom lens shape rather than just the ones we included, and along with that, to boost highlight parameters, and other things like that,” says Prives. “We thought he had a good point, so we came up with ‘Convolve’ (a defocus plug-in that is part of the new V. 4 for Autodesk users which lets users create various blur effects using arbitrary filter shapes and colors) to address those concerns.”

That sort of back-and-forth is happening continually at GenArts, according to Prives. So, if you have some suggestions, pop over to booth 321 and let him hear about them.

–Michael Goldman