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.

A new unified shader architecture optimizes performance, keeping the board‘s various processor units (vertex, pixel, and geometry) full to the brim and working flat out. Combined with DirectX 10- and OpenGL 2.1, demos of the cards show that users of apps like Autodesk Maya and Softimage XSI can expect significant speed boosts. (Watch for upcoming release of OpenGL 3 for added processing potency.)

Unique aspects of the FireGL series include the only support for dual monitor, 10-bit video, says product manager Rob Jamison. Jamison also made mention that the ATI division isn’t AMD-centric, but will be fully supporting Intel-based workstations, along with a new Linux initiative.

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

First, in case you don’t know what Fjorg! is here’s the blurb: The world‘s first international FJORG! competition is an “iron animator” event at SIGGRAPH 2007 in which 16 competing teams from around the world will have 32 hours to create the world‘s best character-driven animation in front of a live, “Gladiator-style” audience and judging panel.

And the winners are: First place, Team Mocap from Bowling Green State University for their animation “Switch.” The team consists of Jim Levasseur, Tomas Jech, and W. Jacob Gardner. Congrats to the team and you can see their winning entry later today at www.workstations.tv.

So why is the title of this post about the Art Institutes?

Because second and third place both went to AI teams. Picture This, a team from Miami International University of Art and Design came in second place and Impulse, from Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg, won third place. Their winning entries will also be avaialable to see later on today. I’ll also get back to you with the winning students’ names (my Exchange Server is down with that info stuck inside!). 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

My pal, Dan Ochiva, alluded in an earlier posting to Vicon’s new F40 camera system with its proprietary sensors, and many mo-cap hardware developments generally. But, in popping in at the busy Vicon booth (#902) today, I was also impressed with the company’s software work with the debut of its new Blade processing technology. Vicon’s approach seems to be to package the whole mocap workflow process inside a single, unified, proprietary toolset under the Vicon umbrella.

Vicon’s CEO, Brian Nilles, says clients wanted to keep data from capture onward inside a single pipeline as it gets pushed into the 3D animation process, and Vicon responded with Blade. The tool, he emphasizes, is scalable to fit with boutique pipelines to those of monolithic studios. And, he adds, it was also designed with plug-in architecture to easily bring in third-party applications, as studios figure out various new ways to integrate their mocap and animation pipelines.

Vicon also launched a mo-cap oriented film festival at Siggraph this week. The company is offering a $10,000 grand prize to artists who create original short films (between two to five minutes) incorporating motion capture data provided by Vicon on its festival web site (www.vicon.com/filmfestival/) in new and unique ways. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts, with the winner reeling in the grand prize.

–Michael Goldman

These have been the most AMAZING couple days ever. Being a winner of the HP/Saytek Team Animation contest has really gotten our team’s names out there. I worked on the short with my two close friends Danny Garnett and Manuel Sierra. Our school, The Art Institute of Philadelphia, has been doing a great job of introducing us to many people already in the industry.

Day 1 (Monday): Lay of the Land

After being in San Diego for a bit and checking into our amazing hotel (Hilton Gaslamp Quarters…conveniently accross the street from the convention haha), we headed out for some food. Stopped by “The Field” near fifth and market. We all decided to get boxties since we have never heard of them before. They were delicious, pretty much a potato pancake wrapped around bacon, cheese, and covered in a white wine sauce. Now onto the convention itself. 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.

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

At the beginning of their Monday afternoon press conference, Marc Stevens, vice president and general manager for Softimage, announced with a smile that the Montreal-based company had gone on a buying spree and bought Autodesk.

While no one took the bait–Autodesk is many times the size of Softimage‘s owner Avid, with a healthy balance sheet to boot–Stevens was reacting to that day‘s news that Autodesk was the one going on a buying spree with the announcement of its plans to purchase New Zealand-based Skymatter Limited, the developer of Mudbox 3D modeling software. (Somewhat similar to Pixologic‘s Zbrush software, Mudbox enables 3D brush-based modeling; users can sculpt organic shapes in 3D space with brush-like tools.) more

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

San Diego — Aug. 7, 2007 — Allegorithmic, an emerging 3D technology company developing advanced texturing tools for real-time 3D content, today announced ProFX 2.6, the newest version of its patented procedural texturing middleware. Featuring a newly optimized core that runs faster and on a wider range of machines (starting with Pixel Shader 2.0), ProFX 2.6 is the only middleware that allows game developers to professionally author and render high-quality procedural textures. Designed for use with MaPZone Pro 2.6, Allegorithmic‘s advanced texture authoring software, ProFX 2.6 lets game studios produce texture assets up to two times faster than with regular techniques. more