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

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.”

The Boxx folk also made the point that, these days, the entertainment space is driving technology on the hardware side into other business sectors, and used architecture as an example. Their high-end hardware, they say, is being used daily in the building and facility design space for airports, sports venues, entertainment facilities, and much more. An interesting shift from the days when entertainment technology was largely derived from other industries.

–Michael Goldman

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.

The company also noted the ‘enthusiastic‘ acceptance of its FK Extreme; Pixel Liberation Front recently used the $50,000 turnkey mo cap system (eight cameras and software) for previz on a feature.

For those who love a contest, the company announced a mo cap film festival with a $10,000 prize. Selected films will be posted, of course, to YouTube for the public to love you or not. Make a short film between two and five minutes with the provided Vicon mo cap data at www.vicon.com/filmfestival.

Nvidia Makes Re-Lighting Quick and Easy

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.
Occlusions are another graphics intensive roadblock: in a busy graphics production pipeline, occlusion culling (removing hidden surfaces before shading and rasterizing take place) is key for cutting down rendering time.

At Siggraph, Nvidia previewed a combination of hardware and software technology that promises to drastically reduce the time necessary for these tedious re-rendering operations, boosting interactivity.

“I can now redo the ambient occlusion for an entire (complexly shaded) scene in about 9 seconds, where previously it took 11 minutes,” says Eric Enderton, principal engineer on the Gelato renderer team. more

Contour Design is here with an erogonomic three-button optical mouse.

The company made a name in ergonomic mouse technology starting in the ’90s. Visual effects artists can thank Autocad designer Le Scenna and his injured colleagues for the idea. (Our blog sponsor Intel apparantly participated in mass CAD artists tests in the late ’90s at Rio Rancho, New Mexico). It’s out of CAD culture, but it can work for motion artists too. Contour brought seven sizes of the three-button mouse here–booth 1719 all the way at the far right wall. All seven sizes are here, so you can just go see for yourself.

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

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

SeeFile and Intelligent Gadgets Collaborate at Siggraph 2007

Complete Collaboration Bundle, Including Software Packages, Server and 1 Terabyte of Storage Hardware, Priced at $1,995

LOS ANGELES, CA and Boston MA – August 1, 2007 – Intelligent Gadgets (www.syncvue.com), the creators of advanced collaborative digital media review and approval tools, and SeeFile (www.seefile.com), a developer of web server software for sharing media files, today announced the two companies are joining forces at Siggraph 2007 in San Diego (August 7 – 9) to demonstrate the benefits of a combined video-enabled collaborative review and approval system. During the conference, the bundled solution will be demonstrated at the SeeFile booth, and will be available for immediate purchase. more

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

During SIGGRAPH 2007, NVIDIA (booth # 513) a recognized leader in programmable graphics processor technologies will usher in the era of “personal supercomputing” with NVIDIA® Tesla™, the company‘s new line of processors for high-performance computing coupled with the latest NVIDIA® Quadro® professional graphics solutions.

With Tesla, computations that previously took hours, days or even weeks are now taking only minutes and in some cases computing in real time – achieving performance improvements that are 45 to 415 times faster than traditional processors. more