An interesting early-morning panel today at Siggraph was the videogame panel Games: Evolving on an Order of Magnitude, which featured apropos comments about where the industry is going technically and from a business point of view from some heavy hitters in the game world. The panel, moderated by Michel Kripalani of Autodesk, included Lyle Hall of THQ Inc., Martin Walker of Artificial Mind & Movement, Steve Theodore of Bungie, Steve Sullivan from Lucas Arts, and Jeff Lander of Electronic Arts. more

Eyeon quietly doubled its product line at Siggraph with the announcement of its new Generation product line, which includes all sorts of management tools for artists, integrated composting/editing tools, and so forth.

“We’ve been pretty busy,” marketing chief Donovan Zulauf conceded. And the company’s reliable compositing technology, Fusion, has been in the thick of that frenzy. Eyeon is showingFusion 6 at Siggraph, expected to be shipping later this year, and now incorporating a stereoscopic and multi-layer imaging system, and a new 3D system that Donovan was particulary proud of. more

InterSense, a market leader in precision motion technology, announced its IS-900 VCam Virtual Camera Tracking System, a precision, inertial-ultrasonic virtual camera tracking system for use in the pre-visualization of virtual content. Combining InterSense’s industry leading motion tracking technology with powerful virtual production software, the new system enables producers of animated & 3D feature film, game and video to increase productivity, streamline workflow and lower production costs. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

3D models and datasets have become too large for the standard desktop workstation to handle. To help combat the problem, NVIDIA Corporation, a worldwide leader in visual computing technologies, announced the D Series of NVIDIA Quadro Plex Visual Computing Systems (VCS) available in deskside or rackmount configurations. Engineered to provide the most robust NVIDIA Quadro GPU visualization performance to date, the Quadro Plex systems are ideal for the styling and design, geosciences and scientific visualization industries, working with extremely large 3D models, datasets and power walls. The new Quadro Plex series provides performance improvements of up to 100% over previous versions and offers massively parallel processing capabilities using multiple Quadro graphics cards for visualization, large-scale projection and display, or computation with the NVIDIA CUDA Parallel Computing Processor. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

At SIGGRAPH 2008, HP expanded its DreamColor technology portfolio with the introduction of a powerful mobile workstation – the HP EliteBook 8730w Mobile Workstation with DreamColor Display – that offers professionals exceptional color accuracy.

In addition, HP introduced the HP EliteBook 8530w Mobile Workstation, the HP EliteBook 8530p Notebook PC, a customer calibration kit for the now-shipping DreamColor LP2480zx Professional Display, and two additional high-performance displays to meet the demands of a new generation of visual computing customers. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

Following his Tuesday blog posting on new developments with NewTek’s LightWave software, milllimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman sat down for a chat on the Siggraph show floor with Jay Roth, president of NewTek’s 3D Products Division to elaborate on those developments and discuss LightWave’s place in the animation world these days. Listen to Goldman’s conversation with Roth.

HP will unveil unmatched, powerful computing solutions for creative professionals at SIGGRAPH 2008, and provide multiple opportunities to see them at the show.

Demonstrations and talks from HP include:

• HP DreamColor Display technology

o Demonstrations of the technology offered at the bottom of every hour.

o Customers share their experiences at the top of every hour.

o Demos and customer talks held in HP booth #739. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

The Pixel Farm, a leading developer of innovative Film and Television digital post-production tools, pushes matchmove technology on again, offering a new dimension in Tracking: PFTrack 5.0. Just 12 months after the groundbreaking release of version 4.0, PFTrack 5.0 reasserts itself as the most advanced camera tracking and motion analysis solution available. Already considered an industry standard, PFTrack now reaches new heights of functionality, operability and ease of use, with exclusive new features including: true stereoscopic tracking with the ability to export anaglyphs, a totally new camera solver providing greater accuracy and improved Z calibration, reference frame support, more robust Z-Depth Extraction, pattern-based User Feature tracking and many UI and workflow improvements. Read on at The Briefing Room

More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room

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

Some sightings:

60 Dell Precision dual core Intel-Xeon based systems in the Guerilla Studio.

At the Autodesk users’ group Monday night (dual quad cores). At the Softimage users’ group Tuesday night (same). At the Autodesk gathering–which was big, I’m going to say easily over 1000, but I’m not good at counting heads. Anyway big enough that when everyone started to murmur about the real time performance they were seeing on Maya and Max, the demo artist finally stopped and said “yes, these are really fast machines.” more