I’m sitting in the Electronic Theater with my old pal Dan Ochiva blogging on my iPhone. I mention this only to indicate how trippy it is to realize how fundamentally the world has changed with the technology revolution that entertains us and let’s us communicate in new ways. The festival BTW is amazing … Glad I made it over here…

MG

The guys at Reallusion gave me a look at iClone3 a little while ago, as well as their philosophy that there is a market for “simple 3D” work and a merging of the ergonomics that video gamers are used to with the requirements and mindset that animators have. They call iClone3 an affordable and “complete 3D movie machine with real-time animation and actor creation tools for rendering movies with ultimate detail.” The software has a library of characters, bodies, limbs, faces, expressions, sets, and so forth, and is designed for ease of import of elements from places like the Google’s 3D Warehouse, as well as other software packages. Users can animate out of a library of movements, or do basic keyframe work, as well. more

On the convergence trail once again this afternoon, I learned a bit of the Bunkspeed story (booth #311). What intrigues me most about the company’s 3D rendering engine, created specifically for product designers and engineers (starting with the auto industry folks in 2002), is that it has potential to be a pre-viz tool for Hollywood–another example of technology crossing over from one application to the next.

Bunkspeed marketing chief Thomas Teger told me the company’s HyperShot technology, introduced last year as a simplified and way to render and move photographic images in real-time was used a while back for pre-viz and storyboarding work by a freelance artist who worked on Transformers, for example. He adds that the focus of the company remains on design applications, but increasingly, that world requires movement, and so, this year, Bunkspeed announced the addition of enhanced animation capabilities with its new HyperMove tool (slated for an October debut). HyperMove is basically a tool for moving photo-real imagery rendered in the Bunkspeed world for display purposes (driving a car, posing a cell phone on a turntable, etc), without requiring the artist to have any significant computer animation skills particularly. more

An interesting early-morning panel today at Siggraph was the videogame panel Games: Evolving on an Order of Magnitude, which featured apropos comments about where the industry is going technically and from a business point of view from some heavy hitters in the game world. The panel, moderated by Michel Kripalani of Autodesk, included Lyle Hall of THQ Inc., Martin Walker of Artificial Mind & Movement, Steve Theodore of Bungie, Steve Sullivan from Lucas Arts, and Jeff Lander of Electronic Arts. more

About 10 minutes before I visited the Avatar Reality booth (#727), someone on the show floor told me “people have been talking about virtual reality forever, but we never really get there.” In many ways, of course, he’s right. That notion of giant goggles and wacky gloves, or entering the holographic cube, while all technically possible more or less right now, have largely failed to take off as a consumer entertainment industry thus far. More successful in luring real people into different planes of digital existance have been those online 3D virtual games and worlds that are all over the internet. Some are more focused on being multi-player, online games that take place in virtual environments, like “World of Warcraft,” while a few others are trying to create real socially-based online societies largely designed and built by its residents, like “Second Life.” more

The “Neurosymphonic Self Reflection” image posted by my pal, Amanda Fletcher, along with some of the other tripped-out images from the Slow Art Gallery is part of Kevin Mack’s burgeoning abstract digital art career. Mack, of course, won an Oscar for his visual effects work on What Dreams May Come (1998), which, if you remember, was itself a very early use of stylized, painterly CG along the lines of his growing roster of “digital paintings.” He’s still part of the Sony Pictures Imageworks’ stable of supervisors, and is also the guy responsible for creating the opening of this year’s Computer Animation Festival. more

Having covered the motion capture beat for years, I have found in recent years the most interesting stories for our magazine(s) have always been application-specific stories–how it was used on a particular project like Beowulf , Polar Express , etc. In terms of the technology specific stories, I’ve felt we havent’ received earth-shattering news from the industry in a long while–either the technology was optical or it was tethered or it was some kind of wireless gyroscopic transmission system. Either it was high end or it was low end, and either it was put to good use or it wasn’t.

While it’s still not earth-shattering given the rapid pace of today’s IP-based developments, I did see today something on the technology side I had not seen before, and something that I think has some interesting applications. That something was Animazoo’s IGS-190 system, which the company dubbs “live Internet animation.” By that, they mean that they have come up with a pretty seamless approach for live streaming of motion-capture data in real time, creating all sorts of interesting possibilities on the remote collaboration front. more

Eyeon quietly doubled its product line at Siggraph with the announcement of its new Generation product line, which includes all sorts of management tools for artists, integrated composting/editing tools, and so forth.

“We’ve been pretty busy,” marketing chief Donovan Zulauf conceded. And the company’s reliable compositing technology, Fusion, has been in the thick of that frenzy. Eyeon is showingFusion 6 at Siggraph, expected to be shipping later this year, and now incorporating a stereoscopic and multi-layer imaging system, and a new 3D system that Donovan was particulary proud of. more

Far from the Siggraph show floor, on the third floor of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, I saw the best 3D display demo I’ve encountered to date from a company out of Paris called Alioscopy. What particularly intrigued me about what they showed me was the fact that the technology has great crossover potential for all sorts of markets as the professional and consumer 3D revolutions march onward. In fact, and although I didn’t ask, this is probably one reason why Alioscopy is demonstrating its technology away from the show floor—the Siggraph market probably is far from the biggest potential market for Alioscopy’s technology. more

The major studios are finally starting to get the hang of this viral video business. Tippett Studio’s marketing chief Lori Petrini pointed that out to me a few minutes ago as she showed me a couple of YouTube! videos created by Tippett to strategically help promote Disney’s upcoming film,Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

Tippett is doing some of the effects on the film, but also made the videos “Viva Chihuahua” and “Heel Chihuahua” that you can easily find on YouTube (but in case you can’t, try: www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vr3ZL-Ykdo or www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pt5eXc6RwEU). more