Until recently, most laser scanning systems—whether for use in films, games, or other applications–were pretty big pieces of gear, designed for capturing a car, or on a slightly smaller scale, a full body. While some companies did make small desktop rigs, these mainly captured small objects—say the size of a soda can—that had to be placed on a revolving stage attached to a workstation. Pretty complicated for the most part.
At the show, Quebec-base Creaform, which develops and makes the Handyscan 3D line-up of handheld and self-positioning laser scanners, debuted an innovative, lightweight handheld 3D color scanner that only needs to be attached to laptop to deliver near real-time scans. more…
A lot of focus this year at Siggraph has been on stereoscopic 3D and its emergence as a new language of filmmaking. If 3D is a new way of making movies, then the vast visual effects team that worked on Speed Racer discovered a reinvention of 2D filmmaking.
Visual Effects Supervisor John Gaeta calls the style pioneered on Speed Racer many things. Among them: “virtual cinematography,” “photo-anime,” and “2 1/2 D” layering. When he and Dan Glass first started working on the project, it was a liberating experience to force themselves to let go of the need for any kind of photorealistic element. This quality is something ingrained into any visual-effects artist worth his salt from the get go. Letting go of that instinct is like asking a cat to ignore a mouse. more…
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Related Topics: 2D, Animation, CG, Compositing, Digital Cinema, Editing, Future Technology, Graphics, HD, Motion Capture, Production, Siggraph News, Visual Effects
LoiLo, today introduced LoiLoScope at Siggraph, their breakthrough video editing software that redefines the video editing experience with speed, sophistication and playfulness never before seen in video editing software. LoiLoScope introduces an entirely new user interface based on an unconstrained, infinitely zoom-able workspace. Their pioneering direct interface with the graphic processing unit (GPU) lets users create and manipulate HD videos freely with one-touch operation and without time-consuming rendering. Read on at The Briefing Room
More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room
SPEC’s Graphics and Workstation Performance Group (SPEC/GWPG) announced a wide range of upcoming benchmarks at the Siggraph 2008 conference in Los Angeles.
The new offerings will include a power-performance benchmark for workstations, a new version of SPECviewperf, and new and updated application benchmarks. All are slated for release before spring of next year.
“Under our expanded charter announced last year, we are branching out in new directions such as power consumption, while continuing to move ahead with our graphics and workstation application benchmarks,� says George Chaltas, SPEC/GWPG chair. “The overriding objective is to apply SPEC’s expertise and proven methodologies in areas that provide the most value to users, vendors and testing labs worldwide.� Read on at The Briefing Room
More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room
SPHERON-VR AG has attracted one of the UK’s VFX industry leaders, The Mill London, an Oscar and multi-award winning company with offices in L.A and New York. The Mill selected the innovative SpheroCam HDR.
Jordi Bares, Joint Head of 3D at The Mill, said “The Mill has invested in the SpheroCam HDR to further improve the output of our work by bringing the latest photographic technology to our projects, which will benefit on all aspects of lighting.” Read on at The Briefing Room
More Siggraph 2008 news from The Briefing Room
In four hours you need to be at West Hall Room 503 for the World Wide User Group. Pizza, Kai Pedersen and Rick Barrett giving tips and tricks on 11. A CEO guy from Maxon Germany and one of the four core original programmers of Cinema 4D doing a developer Q&A.
As the Siggraph show floor closed Wednesday, millimeter Senior Editor Michael Goldman had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with the creator of Massive AI software technology, Stephen Regelous. With Massive well on its way to becoming a ubiquitous tool in the visual effects world for realistic movement simulations in crowds large and small, they chatted about additions and improvements made to the software in its new version, 3.5, introduced this week at Siggraph. Listen to a portion of their conversation.
mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools, unveiled RealityServer 2.2, the server-based, highly-scalable 3D web application and services platform available to developers and system integrators. The new version is particularly geared towards providers of 3D web application services, including Software-as-a-Service solutions.
RealityServer software platform was designed from the ground up to be the web application services platform for achieving the highest-quality renderings for large large-model visualization in 3D. It allows users to create and deploy 3D interactive web services and applications across numerous disciplines including aerospace, automotive, architecture, product design, product showcasing and product configuration. Ideal for geographically dispersed collaboration, RealityServer enables real-time viewing and interaction with high image quality across the web without the need for downloads or client side viewer applications. Read on at The Briefing Room
More Siggraph 2008 Show news from The Briefing Room
Team Grojf was chosen as the 2008 FJORG! winner at Siggraph for the animated reel “The Red Truck.” Composed of Jacob Patrick, John Nguyen, and Kevin Rucker, Team Grojf was chosen from a field of 16 three-member teams that competed for 32 straight hours to create character-driven animations under extreme pressure and multiple staged distractions. Watch the winning FJORG! animation.
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…
Until recently, most laser scanning systems—whether for use in films, games, or other applications–were pretty big pieces of gear, designed for capturing a car, or on a slightly smaller scale, a full body. While some companies did make small desktop rigs, these mainly captured small objects—say the size of a soda can—that had to be placed on a revolving stage attached to a workstation. Pretty complicated for the most part.
