My pal, Dan Ochiva, alluded in an earlier posting to Vicon’s new F40 camera system with its proprietary sensors, and many mo-cap hardware developments generally. But, in popping in at the busy Vicon booth (#902) today, I was also impressed with the company’s software work with the debut of its new Blade processing technology. Vicon’s approach seems to be to package the whole mocap workflow process inside a single, unified, proprietary toolset under the Vicon umbrella.

Vicon’s CEO, Brian Nilles, says clients wanted to keep data from capture onward inside a single pipeline as it gets pushed into the 3D animation process, and Vicon responded with Blade. The tool, he emphasizes, is scalable to fit with boutique pipelines to those of monolithic studios. And, he adds, it was also designed with plug-in architecture to easily bring in third-party applications, as studios figure out various new ways to integrate their mocap and animation pipelines.

Vicon also launched a mo-cap oriented film festival at Siggraph this week. The company is offering a $10,000 grand prize to artists who create original short films (between two to five minutes) incorporating motion capture data provided by Vicon on its festival web site (www.vicon.com/filmfestival/) in new and unique ways. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts, with the winner reeling in the grand prize.

–Michael Goldman

Mo cap is entering a golden age–or maybe a green one, as both new and established companies alike are churning out product to get or gain market share. As I mentioned in two earlier postings, established companies like Vicon as well as newcomers like Reallusion are just two companies at the show with cool gear in the booth or promised ‘real soon‘.

In part, it‘s because of the growing popularity of a more sophisticated generation of mo cap-based projects like Pirates of the Caribbean (just saw behind the scenes previews of Zemeckis‘ Beowolf at the Electronic Theater–looks great!).

The elements used in mo cap technology are being spun off for other uses too. Long-time motion tracking manufacturer InterSense (www.intersense.com) collaborated with 3D virtual studio developer Cinital (www.cinital.com) to create the latest in previsualization stages for Stargate Digital, which recently opened a virtual studio in Van Nuys, California. more

This morning, Eyeon announced Fusion 64; Fusion 5.2 comes to Siggraph with a list of previously unannounced features, among them 3D LUTs, FBX, 3DS, OBJ and Collada import improvements, Python scripting, a vector motion blur tool, and lots more.

Fusion 64 brings 64 bit to desktop compositing. This is one of the bigger responses to the opportunity presented by multi-core and multi-processor workstations. Hopefully more to come. Fusion 64 shares a lot (all?) of the new feature in 5.2.

The popular software-that-could is in its second decade of being used on too many big effects films and games to name.

Cafe FX built its business on a Fusion foundation some 12 years ago and stuck with it, now using their Fusion pipeline on Frank Darabont’s take on Stephen King’s The Mist and on the HBO mini-series biography on John Adams.

One of the Cafe FX artists–Richard Reed–is demoing on the Eyeon booth and points out that Fusion suits the increasingly blurry line between 2D and 3D. A Shake/Nuke vet, Reed found the transition to Fusion pretty easy overall. “It’s an excellent resource for artists,” he says, “lighters are becoming compositors, the lines between artists are disappering. Fusion supports that well because of the 3D workspace and it’s only getting better.”

If you’re here, try to catch Rob Taylor (Pendulum Studios) demo on Stuntman 2: Ignition.

Be sure to check out the Art Gallery located on the upper floor. Here is a sampling of some of the astounding artwork up there:

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If you’re here, you won’t want to miss this. Starting at 6pm go to Room 28B and C at the convention center to see the unveiling of the 32-hour animation contest winners otherwise known as the Fjorg! Iron Animators. They’re tired, but they’re happy.

Videos are rumored to be hilarious, winners will be announced at 6:55. In the meantime if you want to see the scene (or if you’re not here) go to workstations.tv .

All contest videos will be posted to workstations.tv tonight. Stop by and see what these creative CG animators have put their hearts and souls into.

These have been the most AMAZING couple days ever. Being a winner of the HP/Saytek Team Animation contest has really gotten our team’s names out there. I worked on the short with my two close friends Danny Garnett and Manuel Sierra. Our school, The Art Institute of Philadelphia, has been doing a great job of introducing us to many people already in the industry.

Day 1 (Monday): Lay of the Land

After being in San Diego for a bit and checking into our amazing hotel (Hilton Gaslamp Quarters…conveniently accross the street from the convention haha), we headed out for some food. Stopped by “The Field” near fifth and market. We all decided to get boxties since we have never heard of them before. They were delicious, pretty much a potato pancake wrapped around bacon, cheese, and covered in a white wine sauce. Now onto the convention itself. more

A word from our sponsor: Dan Snyder at the Penton booth:

Wow, what a phenomenal showing for our just one-year-old baby Core 2 Duo and Core Xeons here at Siggraph. HP, Boxx, Dell, Alienware and tons of others are showing these systems really being pushed to their limits. I am still reeling from French food envy after seeing Ratatouille (every frame of that was touched by an Intel CPU, thanks to a 30% speedup of Renderman on the new architecture!)… Softimage’s gig last night with the behind the scenes of “300″ would boggle even the geekiest computer guy’s mind. Great to see the software and hardware coming together here, we’re glad to be a little bit of the glue that makes this magic happen. Kudos to the artists–where it all starts!

–Dan Snyder, Intel 3D and Audio/Video Group

A steady crowd for has hovered around the Animation Mentor (animationmentor.com) booth the last couple days, as young artists flock to find out about the school’s totally virtual approach to educating character animators in preparation for industry careers. Animation Mentor offers an 18-month program to train students across the globe in the ways of character animation, using “mentors” who are really working industry professionals, to guide their work and progress, critique them, and teach them the latest techniques, tools, and innovations. The two-year-old program was recently approved by Sony Pictures Imageworks to join its growing roster of IPAX schools, dedicated to training animation professionals.

Judging from the crowds around the booth, this virtual education concept has merit, particularly in an industry that, by its very nature, is on the cutting edge of technology.

I chatted with one of Animation Mentor’s founders this afternoon–Shawn Kelly, a feature film animator at ILM, and will be uploading a slice of that conversation to this blog site a bit later today, so check back later for that podcast.

–Michael Goldman

Yesterday the ZBrush booth was completely out of control. The ammount of polys that were flying around the mesh they were murdering was so grossly insane that I literally gagged. They looked to be adding a baboons rear end (when in heat) to a poor human models face, and they were doing it extremely fast. It reminded me of the scene in Total Recal when their oxygen masks explode and their faces get all re-mixed. Barf. So Zbrush is totally crazy. I can’t wait to start playing with it when I get back to Phoenix. In other Siggraph related news I was assaulted by a June Bug. My lawyers are already on it.

SupaCam, which is backed in part by Panasonic, is selling their popular DVi handheld, tapeless, digital movie recorder for only $328 over at their booth (booth #853)-about $500 less than you would pay at B&H or other resellers. Up for grabs are black, white, and silver models.

The camera, about the size of your hand, does 24 bit color at 30 fps at 720 x 480, both NTSC and PAL, in MPG 4 or dvx formats. It can also serve as a webcam, with a 25 ft. remote and 180 degree motion sensor triggered when activity occurs within it’s optic range–and can stream online in HD quality. For digital photographers, 12 megapixels.