The exhibition portion of this year’s Siggraph will be open Aug. 1-3 at the Boston Convention Center. As in years past, the event is expected to play host to some of the latest visual effects technology introductions, as well as feature guest presenters demonstrating techniques in the creation of features, commercials and other creative content.
There will of course be continued movement toward faster, more powerful hardware at new price points, as well as refinement in software. The compositing space may generate some added interest thanks to Apple’s recently announced Shake strategy (sees Siggraph preview in news section of this issue). And 3D is as always an area to watch. Siggraph ’06 will be the first since Autodesk acquired Alias. Meanwhile Softimage celebrates a milestone 20-year anniversary.
Below is a preview of what some of the exhibitors are planning for Siggraph. Others (such as Autodesk and NVIDIA) declined to publicly announce Siggraph plans until closer to the event date.
Softimage/Avid Softimage–a subsidiary of Tewksbury, Mass.-headquartered Avid Technology that opened 20 years ago as a privately held company based in Montreal–will celebrate its company anniversary with its latest releases, customer presentations, a peek at future plans and a celebration at its annual User Group event.
Highlighted products will include Softimage|Face Robot, an application launched earlier this year to enable the creation of more believable facial animation for high-end film, post and games productions.
With Face Robot software, artists directly manipulate various anatomical features such as the mouth, eyebrows and jaw. With the ability to exercise precise control, Face Robot is designed to offer the ability to sculpt the nuances of an expression at any point during the animation process. With the software’s soft-tissue “solver,” Face Robot simulates how facial tissue slides and deforms during the formation of expressions and includes a corrective sculpting system for detailed art direction. It offers built-in support for importing and exporting of Autodesk 3ds max and Maya file formats.
Santa Monica-based Blur Studios will present recent projects created with Face Robot. Softimage will also demonstrate the current version 5.11 of its XSI 3D software, as well as offer a technology preview of future character animation tools.
The Software booth will include a training area (first come, first served).
Eyeon Software
Also celebrating a company milestone is Toronto-headquartered Eyeon Software. On the occasion of its 10th year in business, Eyeon plans to showcase its new Fusion version 5.1 compositing software. The company says the version will introduce more than 25 new technologies to the application.
Eyeon actually spent more than two years redeveloping the core architecture of Fusion 5. “We want the community to know that we stand behind our product, that we’re not going anywhere and that we’ll tirelessly support the artists that use our products,” says senior product manager Isaac Guenard.
D2 Software/Digital Domain D2 Software, Inc. a subsidiary of Venice, Calif.-based Digital Domain, will preview new features for its Nuke compositing software, planned for release later this year. The company says this will include a faster, more accurate tracker that is able to detect and adjust to subtle changes in the values of a tracking source, along with optical flow retiming, an updated floating point Primatte Keyer, UI enhancements including an updated color picker, and support for popular file formats such as Quicktime, HDR and CRW. FrameCycler Professional 2006 will be bundled with the new version providing Nuke users with uncompressed playback and new review and analysis features.
The D2 Software main stage will feature guest demonstrations. For instance, visitors will see how Digital Domain created shots for My Super Ex-Girlfriend, how Reel FX created a sequence for The Wild, and how DNA Productions used Nuke to handle lighting and compositing for The Ant Bully.
A number of applications that feature prominently in the Nuke workflow will be showcased throughout the booth, including: Imagica’s Primatte keyer, PipelineFX’s Qube! render farm management system, NVIDIA Quadro FX and Iridas’ FrameCycler.
“Compositing doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” explained D2 Software’s product and operations manager Dominick Spina. “Artists need to know how Nuke fits in with other tools they have or need. We work very closely with partner applications to make sure customers have an efficient pipeline, and by taking more of a workflow approach to demonstrating products, we’re giving artists a feel for how they’ll work in their own environments.”
SGI/PipelineFX
Mountain View, Calif.-headquartered SGI, which will be at the PipelineFX booth this year, will feature some of its recently announced new technologies: SGI unveiled a line of cluster systems based on dual-core Intel Xeon processor 5100 series, introduced the new SGI Altix 450 mid-range blade server based on dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors, and doubled the performance of its SGI Altix 4700 servers.
These releases underscore SGI’s new strategy to extend its presence within its existing high-performance computing markets, as well as to reach new customers.
The SGI Altix XE line of Linux OS-based servers and factory-integrated clusters are custom-configured to optimize applications. The technology is driven by a pair of dual-core Intel Xeon processor 5150, packing a total of four processor cores and supporting up to 32GB of memory in each server.
SGI also plans to offer application-specific bundles. The first of these is a customized rendering bundle that incorporates PipelineFX Qube! Render Manager software. Built around the Altix XE and SGI Infinite Storage NAS technology, the new Render Management System is offered for applications including animation, special effects and game development. Designed for multiple operating environments, Qube! interfaces directly to modeling and rendering applications, including Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Studio, Avid Softimage XSI and Mental Images mental ray.
“With the launch of the Altix XE servers, SGI is getting back into digital media in a big way and it’s just the perfect time to team with SGI, in part because of their long history and understanding of the digital media space and what’s important to those companies,” said Troy Brooks, CEO, PipelineFX. “We know SGI has the right background and Intel’s new multi-core architecture creates an ideal platform for a rendering solution that offers effective workflow management, excellent price performance and cost of ownership metrics.”
“With the introduction of the Altix XE servers, and with partners like PipelineFX, SGI is now positioned to re-address the requirements of this important market segment: rendering and content creation,” said Louise Ledeen, market segment manager, Media Industries, SGI. “Productivity is what makes a company successful as we have learned in recent years with designing content management infrastructures for post, broadcast and digital intermediate facilities.”
Also in recent SGI news, the company is introducing the configurable Altix 450 blade server for the mid-range market, which SGI says would deliver up to 2.5 times the system performance of the current Altix 350 server at a lower system cost. SGI also is equipping its SGI Altix 4700 blade server line with new dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors, and says new Linux systems are expected to deliver at least double the performance of today’s Altix servers.
The products are expected to ship during Q3, and new pricing was announced. The Altix 450 is priced from under $15,000, and Altix 4700 system configurations start at less than $75,000.
1Beyond Somerville, Mass.-based 1 Beyond and its storage division, 1stDesign, will feature the 1 Beyond HD OctoFlex, an eight-processor workstation to support Windows XP.
Available immediately–with prices starting at $9,995–the OctoFlex system is designed to handle resolutions including uncompressed 2k and 4k film, multiple layers of complex uncompressed real-time effects and high-resolution uncompressed HD projects.
The company will also demonstrate the 1stDesign IntelliRaid FC-XPR (Fibre Channel, eXtreme Performance and Reliability), a storage system featuring 16 SATA2 drives with RAID 6 protection and dual 4 Gigabit Fibre Channel connections. This system is designed to offer video professionals protection against disk failure without reduced processing performance problems or high costs.
Available immediately with prices starting at $14,995, IntelliRaid FC-XPR is designed to achieve more than 500 MB/s or more than 1 GB/s aggregate in a SAN configuration.
The 1 Beyond booth will also show its Redline Render Farm, a scaleable shared render engine for offline graphics rendering, starting at $4,995.
Boris FX Boris FX will be putting its best foot forward when Siggraph arrives in its hometown of Boston, exhibiting Boris Blue, which is suggested for post facilities with client-supervised sessions or demanding deadlines. Boris Blue is designed to offer real-time processing of 2D and 3D effects as well as real-time streaming of moving video. Blue users can adjust effect parameters during playback–what Boris FX describes as a “front room capability that is ideal for working side by side with clients.”
It’s available for $1,995, or bundled with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 for $3,495 and NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX for $2295.
Vicon Vicon Motion Systems–a subsidiary of OMG with global headquarters in Oxford, U.K., and U.S. headquarters in Lake Forest, Calif.–plans to demonstrate some hardware advances to its Vicon MX motion capture system. The company reports that new features were designed to simplify high camera-count motion capture set up, automate simultaneous live-action footage capture, provide powerful and production-friendly near-infrared strobes and round out the MX line with a two million-pixel, full grayscale MX camera, Vicon MX20+. One of the new hardware units, MX Ultranet, is designed to streamline connectivity for Vicon MX systems.
Vicon reports that customers can connect up to 245 ViconMX cameras in a single system, support and sync multiple sub-systems and PCs, have direct General Purpose Input Output (GPIO) and capture DV/DCam video fully synchronized with motion capture without additional hardware components and controls.
NaturalMotion
NaturalMotion, which will be sitting in the Autodesk and NVIDIA booths, is launching morpheme, a new animation SDK and authoring environment designed to allow animators to author and preview in-game animation in real time. NaturalMotion will also demonstrate euphoria, its animation technology for next-generation game development and game play.
And, it will demonstrate endorphin 2.6, the newest version of its real-time 3D character animation software. euphoria and endorphin are both based on NaturalMotion’s proprietary Dynamic Motion Synthesis (DMS), which the company describes as adaptive behavior technology that produces interactive 3D characters, generates movements that are unique and that allows animators and visual effects artists to create 3D character animation faster and easier than with traditional key-frame or motion capture techniques.
Luxology San Mateo, Calif.-based Luxology–which will exhibit in the ATI booth–plans to debut modo 202, the newest version of the company’s modeling, painting and rendering software. The company will also offer free training sessions led by artists and visual effects professionals, which will cover a variety of topics ranging from character modeling, rendering to lighting effects, 3D painting techniques and using modo alongside of other tools.
GenArts Cambridge, Mass.-based GenArts will show its Sapphire image processing and effects plug-ins used on a range of platforms including Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro, Eyeon Fusion, Apple Shake and Final Cut Pro, Avid Xpress Pro and Autodesk Combustion. The exhibit will include new versions of Sapphire plug-ins for Apple Shake 4.1, Final Cut Pro 5.1 and Autodesk Combustion 4.
Wondertouch Wondertouch’s product demonstrations will include particleIllusion 3.0, the latest version of the company’s particle effects software application, currently available on the Windows and Mac OS X platforms. Wondertouch will also exhibit the Pro Emitters for particleIllusion 3.0, a collection of six individual libraries that feature ready-to-use particle effects covering popular themes including real-world effects such as explosions, auroras and breaking glass; motion graphics and artistic backgrounds; text and abstract effects.
