As mentioned Monday by Senior Editor Michael Goldman, Pixar and Disney Animation Chief Ed Catmull met with the press Monday to celebrate the 20th’ anniversary of the debut of RenderMan and its subsequent impact on the computer graphics industry. Hear a few of Catmull’s comments about the anniversary and the software’s many accomplishments.

Although Siggraph doesn’t get rolling in earnest until the show floor opens on Tuesday, Monday was a plenty busy day for the legendary Ed Catmull. Ed, of course, is now president of both Pixar and Disney Animation Studios, but Monday, he went back to his computer graphics roots with a full schedule that included a featured speech, a press conference celebrating the–believe this if you can–20th Anniversary of RenderMan (it’s in version 14.0! has any software ever gone to a 14th version without changing its name or ownership?), and a book signing on behalf of a legion of CG geeks who were lined up down the hallway on the second floor of the West Hall of the LA Convention Center today. (He was signing “To Infinity and Beyond! The Story of Pixar Animation Studios” by Karen Paik–Catmull penned the forward.) more

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

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

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

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.

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

SAN DIEGO (SIGGRAPH Booth #1249) Aug. 7, 2007 – Sony and mental images are announcing a joint project that will allow the Academy Award® winning mental ray® high-end rendering software to operate with Sony‘s new prototype Cell Computing Board in a range of visualization workflows that feature Cell Broadband Engine™ (Cell/B.E.) technology. more

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

San Diego, CA – SIGGRAPH 2007 (August 6, 2007) – Massive Software, the leading developer of AI driven 3D animation systems, and mental images®, the premier rendering software for entertainment, scientific and architectural visualization, today announced native support for mental ray® in Massive. mental ray is software for high-end, photorealistic rendering. Massive is artificial life-based software for producing realistic character animation with up to hundreds of thousands of autonomous performances. more