The Road to SIGGRAPH 2006: What to Expect from Graphics and Effects

VFX Pro Feature

The Road to SIGGRAPH 2006: What to Expect from Graphics and Effects
By Staff
Aug 1, 2006, 09:09

Unlike the mammoth NAB show, which stays in Las Vegas because that's the only venue with a big enough convention hall and enough hotel rooms to accommodate it, SIGGRAPH is a more nimble event that moves from city to city. This year, from July 30 to Aug. 1, the 33rd annual SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference will meet in Boston, where the industry's kingpins will no doubt find kindred spirits among Beantown's brainy elite.

According to show organizers, SIGGRAPH 2006 will have even more exhibits than last year's show (about 250), which took place in Los Angeles.

Attendance is expected to top 25,000. SIGGRAPH-goers will be rewarded with a cornucopia of computer graphics goodies. Here are some of the show's highlights.

Software
Software is king at SIGGRAPH, and one of the star players in the world of visual effects and compositing software is Autodesk. If previous SIGGRAPH shows are any indication, Autodesk will make at least one major product introduction there.

Prior to the show, Autodesk confined its public announcements to saying it will showcase 3ds Max and Maya animation, modeling and rendering software, as well as the latest versions of MotionBuilder 3D character animation software, Combustion desktop visual effects software, VIZ 3D visualization software, Toxik collaborative compositing software and the Discreet Flame real-time visual effects design and compositing system.

Eyeon Software will unveil Fusion version 5.1, a major upgrade to its Fusion visual effects and compositing software that adds more than 25 features and capabilities.

Side Effects Software will show Houdini 8.1, the latest update to the Houdini family of 3D animation and visual effects software. The new version features an animator-friendly Auto Rig, Muscle System, Character Picker and Pose Library. Enhancements to the Rigid Body and Wire dynamic solvers and support for Collada file import are also included.

Side Effects has announced that, through Sept. 30, it is offering up to two copies of Houdini Master at the special price of about $10,000, a savings of more than 40 percent.

Digital Domain subsidiary D2 Software will unveil new features for its NUKE compositing software, which is scheduled to ship in December. Enhancements include a faster, more accurate tracker that is able to detect and adjust to subtle changes in the values of a tracking source, as well as optical flow retiming and an updated floating point Primatte Keyer.

Boris FX will show Boris Blue, its real-time 3D motion graphics software. Based on Boris Red, Blue addresses the needs of video editors and compositors who want to create 3D looks for their projects without the learning curves and render times associated with 3D applications. Blue makes maximum use of Nvidia display cards' OpenGL acceleration on Windows XP workstations to accelerate effects production workflows. It delivers real-time processing of 2D and 3D effects as well as real-time streaming of video and audio media within effects compositions.

Luxology will debut modo 202, the newest version of its modeling, painting and rendering software. Luxology will also present a series of modo training sessions covering topics including organic character modeling, advanced rendering, lighting effects and 3D painting techniques.

NewTek will demonstrate LightWave v9, the newest iteration of its 3D visual effects and motion graphics system. Additions include adaptive pixel subdivision, advanced camera tools, edges, n-gons, Catmull-Clark subdivision surfaces, node editor texturing and new shading models (including subsurface scattering). NewTek will also show 3D Arsenal, an integrated animation system for the creation of 3D motion graphics designed to meet the needs of video editors.

In the arena of motion capture, Vicon Motion Systems will show the 2-megapixel, full greyscale MX20+ camera, which joins the MX3+ (0.3 megapixel), MX13+ (1.3 megapixel) and MX40+ (4 megapixel) in the Vicon MX+ line. The MX+ camera line offers 10-bit greyscale processing, capture speeds of up to 2,000fps and surface-mount LEDs on its strobes. Enhancements to the MX hardware include MX Ultranet, which provides power, synchronization and communication between all cameras and the PC and supports up to 245 Vicon MX cameras in a single system. Vicon has also announced a range of surface-mount, near-infrared (NIR) strobes that offer double the illumination power and let customers use NIR while realizing greater and more uniform illumination in the capture zone.

Massive Software, the crowd animation software company spun off from New Zealand-based visual effects house WETA, will showcase new versions of Massive Prime and Massive Jet. The systems are designed to help studios address the epic-scale challenges of today's film production via artificial life-based animation. Additionally, Massive will roll out new Ready-to-Run Agents, including mayhem and ambient agents pre-built for quickly creating realistic scenes driven by motion capture data and Massive's artificial intelligence capabilities.

On a smaller scale, Andersson Technologies will introduce an update to its SynthEyes 3D camera tracker system, with enhanced auto-tracking, optimization for multi-core processors, a 3D curve recovery system and automatic greenscreen tracking.

Caligari will show its 3D design software, trueSpace 7.1, which features real-time collaborative authoring technology to allow remote product design teams and graphic artists to create, manipulate and edit 3D objects within a shared virtual workspace over the Internet.

NaturalMotion highlights include the launch of morpheme, an animation SDK and authoring environment that allows animators to author and preview in-game animation in real time. NaturalMotion will also demo euphoria game-development technology and endorphin 2.6, the latest version of its real-time 3D character animation software. Euphoria and endorphin are based on NaturalMotion's Dynamic Motion Synthesis behavior technology, which produces interactive 3D characters that animate themselves and generate constantly unique, realistic movements.
Wondertouch will show off particleIllusion, its particle effects software for visual effects production. The software is used by game developers.

Hardware
What's software without the hardware to run it? Many hardware manufacturers will be on hand to demonstrate the ever-increasing horsepower of their products.
Chief among them is HP, whose workstations support content creation efforts worldwide. The company will showcase several of its solutions at SIGGRAPH, including two mobile workstations: the HP nw8440 with 15.4-inch display and ATI Mobility FireGL V5200 graphics, and the HP nw9440 with 17-inch display and Nvidia Quadro FX 1500M graphics.

In addition, HP will show four desktop workstations: xw6400, Intel-based xw8400, AMD-based xw9300 and its latest entry, xw4400, which will be unveiled at a press conference.

SGI is introducing the Altix 450, a mid-range server featuring the modular blade design introduced in SGI's Altix 4700. Both the 450 and the 4700 are now equipped with dual-core Intel Itanium 2 processors, which significantly boosts their capability. These Linux systems from SGI are designed to deliver double the performance of today's Altix servers while drawing less power and offering more density and flexibility for data-intensive applications.

BOXX Technologies will debut the 3DBOXX 8300 series workstation, which is based on Intel's dual-core Xeon processor and is designed to help visual effects artists derive maximum benefit from multi-core processing and multi-threaded applications. BOXX will also showcase the 64-bit BOXX APEXX 4 and APEXX 8 workstations. The latter can handle 2K and 4K film, working on large files in real time.

1 Beyond, along with its 1st Design storage division, will be showing a range of affordable graphics workstations, storage systems and render farms. New among these items is the 1 Beyond HD OctoFlex, the first eight-processor workstation to support Windows XP. The OctoFlex video workstation can handle uncompressed 2K and 4K film, multiple layers of uncompressed real-time effects and uncompressed HD.
Also new: 1st Design's IntelliRaid FC-XPR (Fibre Channel, eXtreme Performance and Reliability), a storage system featuring 16 SATA II drives with RAID 6 protection and dual 4-Gigabit Fibre Channel connections. Offering high levels of protection against disk failure and achieving a sustained data rate of more than 450MB/s, the system is available now.

AJA's flagship video capture products are Kona 3 for Mac and Xena for Windows XP. AJA will be showing Kona 3 v2, a software update for the uncompressed HD/SD capture card. Version 2 adds 2K resolution video support, including ingest and output of 2K footage at 23.98fps, and support for hardware-based 1080-to-720 or 720-to-1080 cross-conversion.

For the Windows community, AJA will show Xena 2K and the v2 software upgrade to the Xena LS and LH line of video playback and capture cards. Xena v2 software offers support for Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 across the Windows-based Xena product family.

In the storage arena, Ciprico will show its MediaVault RAID array-the MediaVault 4440-which debuted at NAB in April. The unit delivers scalable RAID storage and is designed for desktop or portable digital media applications, including nonlinear editing, real-time 2K and 4K film playback and conforming, uncompressed HD capture to disk and digital intermediate work.

Sandio Technology says it has an answer to problems posed by the obsolescence of a 2D mouse in a 3D design environment. The company is showing the 6 Degrees-of-Freedom (6DoF) 3D Mouse, designed to be used with all 3D applications. With it, graphic artists can move a cursor along the x, y and z axes. The price of the 6DoF mouse is comparable to a 2D mouse. Sandio will provide 1,000 conference attendees with a chip to test the new mouse.

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