IBM originally envisioned the new HC-10 Workstation Blade as a workstation replacement, say IBM’s Dave Laux and George Dolbier. It‘s a high density server with embedded GPU acceleration. “We found it also worked incredibly well as a headless render node,” Laux says a little wryly. Isn’t interesting when hardware reveals its own mission?

First let’s just say that a workstation blade is an interesting idea for those who can afford the infrastructure. It means that every seat in the house can share a common pool of workstations easily (in theory). more

If you hurry (you have until 2 p.m. today) down to the bowels of the San Diego Convention Center (rooms 15 and 16 on the Mezzanine Level), you can still enjoy the Guerilla Studio experience, make some art, meet some collaborators, or just goof around.

With Gibson guitars wailing in the background, I discovered artists, students, and curiosity seekers “playing with lots of cool toys,” as one of them described it. Down there earlier, I watched a young man get his face scanned using a Polhemus handheld scanner so that he could “play with myself,” so to speak, using animation software. I also watched artists sketching on Wacom tablets, people animating stacks of colorful teacups, folks printing out all sorts of CG drawings, sketches, and previsualizations, and I listened in as artists hotly debated new ways to animate organic shapes to do all sorts of “reverse engineering,” whatever that is. In other words, this is the colorful, expressive, and free little corner of Siggraph where anything goes. more

Finally got a chance to sneak over to the Electronic Theater at the San Diego Civic Center Theater last night for the 7pm showing. As with every Electronic Theater from Siggraph’s of yesteryear, the pre-show is just as entertaining as the actual clips.

For ‘07 the committee offered a tribute to some of the ground-breaking innovations in game technology–from the ’80s. They projected three different laser-based Atari games onto the huge movie screen and invited industry pros to try their hand at the joystick classics. 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.

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

SAN DIEGO (SIGGRAPH Booths #1249, #127), Aug. 8, 2007 - Sony and Side Effects Software Inc. announced today that they are working together to provide Side Effects Software‘s award-winning Houdini server tools (Houdini Batch and Mantra) for Sony‘s new Cell Computing Board. This joint effort can empower a new generation of content creators with the seamless integration of high-performance hardware and software. more

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

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

Much like children, technology eventually needs to find its own way in the world, and the slow but steady development path of Cinital’s Previzion HD studio (basically, an advanced camera motion tracking/previsualization technology for visual effects work) exemplifies that. I had a nice chat with Cinital’s founder, Eliot Mack, this morning and the very first thing he told me illustrated that point. Previzion, Eliot explained, was very much developed for the broadcast/corporate end of the video production spectrum initially, only to find itself instead drawing interest primarily from the Hollywood visual effects community for high-end work as a possible tool for efficient on-set previz in real time.

It’s in that arena that Cinetal is primarily testing the technology today, and in recent months, the company has been putting the system through its paces at Stargate Digital in Los Angeles–a company known for doing extensive greenscreen work for high-end computer graphics projects. Eliot says the process has brought the technology to “a whole new level of performance,” by solving or improving issues related to the system’s keyer, real time depth of field, better tracking, and rapid encoding of HD background imagery, among other things.

He seemed confident that the system will shortly be applied to a major Hollywood feature for the first time, but what I f ound particularly refreshing was that Eliot admitted it’s been a long haul to develop the system to meet Hollywood’s specifications, and that it hasn’t always been easy going.

“About three years-plus of very hard work,” he told me. “We had the system quite advanced for some time. But now, we’re working on that little difference between being almost there and being all the way there. We’ve made such great strides in how we match lighting, even sunlight, for instance. We’ve got more work to do, but we’re pleased with how things are shaping up.”

–Michael Goldman

The premier annual event for the world’s most innovative, accomplished, and amazing digital film and video creators. An internationally recognized jury receives hundreds of submissions and presents the best work of the year in daily Animation Theaters and the Electronic Theater (matinée and evening shows). Selections include outstanding achievements in time-based art, scientific visualization, visual effects, real-time graphics, and narrative shorts.

The Computer Animation Festival is recognized by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as a qualifying festival. Since 1999, several works originally presented in the Computer Animation Festival have been nominated for or have received a “Best Animated Short” Academy Award.

Animation Theaters

Sunday - Thursday, 5-9 August

Room 24 & 25

Electronic Theater

Monday - Wednesday, 6-8 August

San Diego Civic Theatre

1100 Third Avenue

For a video preview of this year’s Computer Animation Festival, click here.