HP TV
Curious about all things HP? Well, there‘s a pretty painless way to keep up to date via the computer maker‘s new video-fueled Web site, Workstations.tv (http://workstations.tv).
Customer stories are the name of the game here, and you get an ever expanding selection from this ‘online television station‘ as the company describes it. Sure, it‘s not the most objective of reporting, but nonetheless they do a pretty good job of presenting a good variety of applications that use the company‘s workstations without too heavy a hand in promoting the house brand.
You‘ll find video footage of the inaugural international FJORG! “iron-animator” competition that‘s co-sponsored by DreamWorks Animation SKG and AMD. FJORG! features 15 three-person computer graphics animation teams from around the world competing in a 32-hour competition to create the best 15 second or longer animation using HP xw9400 Workstations.
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.” 
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.) 
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.
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. 
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.
