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

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

Press Release:

BOSTON, Mass., August 3, 2006 - SPEC/GPC‘s OpenGL Performance Characterization (SPECopc) project group announced plans for SPECviewperf 10 during a press conference yesterday at the SIGGRAPH 2006 trade show in Boston. SPECviewperf 10 - the next version of performance evaluation software for systems running popular CAD/CAM, digital content creation, and visualization applications - is anticipated for release in the fourth quarter of 2006.

The SPECopc group expects that SPECviewperf 10 will include the following new features and upgrades: more

Here’s a bit more from yesterday’s meeting with SGI’s ever gracious Louise Ledeen and PipelineFX’s Eric Solituro, senior vp of engineering. Louise’s comment that SGI recently decided to re-enter the rendering business had caught me by surprise, so I wanted to give a little detail about that change of direction.

I thought SGI had left the rendering market for good, driven out by the low cost, off-the-shelf PCs and blade servers of the world.

But only a few months ago, SGI decided to have a go at it again. As mentioned in an earlier posting, the Mountain View, Calif.-based company was encouraged in part by the price/performance numbers delivered by its new Altix XE servers (based on Intel’s latest generation of Xeon dual-core processors). Also in the mix: the interest expressed by engineers at high-end facilities for pairing the cost effective hardware with software that could better handle batch queuing, distributed processing, and render farm management.

SGI feels that PipelineFX’s Qube! product can deliver that. more

Press Release:

Faster Rendering Speeds and Improvements to Modeling, UV Editing and Paint Tools; Free Full-featured Evaluation Version Now Available

Boston — Luxology®, LLC today announced the immediate availability of modo™ 202, a robust update to its innovative 3D modeling, painting and rendering software. Boasting a peak rendering speed that is over 40 percent faster than modo 201, modo 202 features performance gains, tool improvements and innovative extensions to its overall toolset to create an enhanced workflow for artists working in game development, film visual effects, video production, graphic arts and design visualization. Registered modo 201 customers can upgrade to modo 202 free of charge, and a free 30-day full-featured evaluation version is now available for immediate download from www.modo3d.com. more

Press Release:

BOSTON, MA — At the Siggraph 2006 Conference in Boston (booth 2629), Seefile Software LLC is unveiling new software that supports video and web animation file formats in addition to the photo and print formats previously supported. SeeFile‘s product for photo and print media has been praised in recent reviews by Seybold and Studio Photography and Design magazines, and was rated best of Show at the PMA 2005 conference by Shutterbug Magazine. The new 2.5 release adds video and Flash support, plus a number of additional features, and is being offered in new low-priced configurations for as little as $399, or $549 bundled with Mac hardware. An unlimited-user license for SeeFile 2.5, for corporate applications, is priced at $3,995. more

If you’re here, check out booth 202 for the launch of Darwin Dimensions. This is something really new (and fun). It’s a character animation software that works kind of like an audio loops program where you can assemble a unique mix by blending and morphing among pre-built assets.

In this case, database of high quality pre-built models (called Ancestors) can be combined in an infinite number of ways–you use shaders to tweak the mix, creating a kind of gene matrix from up to four ancestors at a time; you can end up using all the models if you like. You can combine their gross body structures such as proportion, cranium shape and size, etc ; you can also access details like noses, ears, eyes, etc. and combine elements of multiple models or just a few to build distinctive features, while watching it all take place in real time.

The software can then give you a fully rigged wire frame, or a finished Maya-ready textured character (built from the library of textures). more

Last night Ken and I hit the Houdini party. It was fun but I was just too tired to do anything - so I split early.

Today is going great. I spoke to the Laika for a while. They are doing really great stuff. It is so nice to see a studio that is not affraid to do something different!! The staff was nice and really helpful.

Then off to a visit at the Pixar booth. Busy! The staff was doing a great job of answering questions in the chaos the surrounds their booth.

More Later

-Chris Myers

www.chrismyers3d.com

Solomon Grundy

Savannah College of Art and Deisgn

Met with Vicon this morning. The Brit-based company, which has been a leading supplier of motion capture hardware/software for years, created a bit of stir when they bought service company House of Moves a few years back. What’s a manufacturer doing going into competition with potential customers?

Whatever you think of that situation, what it has done is bring to the fore the sorts of creative, workflow, and budgeting issues all of its customers face. Earlier this year, House of Moves moved in with Vicon’s LA-based Entertainment services headquarters; this has not only helped to consolidate product design and product use, but also created a feedback loop that seems to have benefited both. more

Eric Saindon on the Massive booth (1023) showing how he did the crowds on King Kong with Stephen Regelous now-famous software.

While you’re there check out the latest edition of Massive 2.6 . Just some highlights;

Now Massive agents can be assigned render attributes and shader visibility on a per-render basis, allowing even more customization. Agents are smarter and can do better stunts, support for sub-D geometry gives you better quality and the new integrated Velocity renderer can render at film quality at killer speed (30x faster than supported software renderers, Massive says).