AMD has struggled over the past year with production and marketing snafus, and some worried that the well-regarded ATI FireGL series cards would be in trouble. After all, AMD, which spent $5.4 billion to buy graphics card maker ATI last year, had long-time ATI CEO Dave Orton leave the combined company this past month. (While some speculated that there were problems over the buyout, Orton has only said that he was tired of the long-distance commute from his Ontario home.)

No need to worry, it seems. At the show, AMD announced five new ATI FireGL workstation graphics accelerators, ranging from the $299 ATI FireGL V3600 to the first card to support 2GB of RAM, the top-of-the-line $2799 ATI FireGL V8650. more

Why does a visual effects company sell plug ins? Frantic Films made their reputation with the huge bullet-time shot on Swordfish and their Emmy-nominated work on Storm of the Century. More recently: the VES-nominated Superman Returns and Poseidon, and currently Eric Brevig‘s Journey to the Center of the Earth in 3D.

From the start, says Bond, Frantic was conceived as a collaborative company both internally among their three offices and in their relationships with industry peers. To that end, they wanted to share the fruits of their painstaking R&D.

“A lot of companies keep the stuff proprietary. But for us, there‘s nothing to gain from being closed.” he says. But as it turned out, sharing wasn‘t so easy. At first, Frantic simply gave code from their products away for free. But the purpose-built code didn‘t translate one-to-one into new situations. more

Grimage
Put any object into the interaction space and it is intantaneously modeled in 3D and injected into a virtual world.

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

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.

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

Expect mobile workstations (and the IO to go with them) to become an increased area of focus in the coming year. For example, after spending much of this year deploying and supporting a range of new multi-core chips for powerful new generation workstations, Intel says they will next increase the spotlight on mobile.

You just need to look around Siggraph to see the power of fixed workstations–the Autodesk and Softimage user groups literally gasped at the level of realtime and near realtime rendering they were seeing on stage. Guerilla Studios provides a hands-on chance to see for yourself. And the 32-hour animation contest at the Fjorg! would have been pretty impractical even last year. So we’ll see how much power ends up hitting the mobile workforce in the coming year. more