Related Articles

The Snowman, directed by Lane Nakamura, will be screened as part of the Siggraph Computer Animation Festival.

The economy and a middle-of-Texas locale might keep attendance down at Siggraph 2002, but there are some very good reasons to make the trek to San Antonio.

How about the first (serious) 64-bit PC workstations, featuring a hot second-generation Intel CPU paired with a “glue” chipset from HP? Don't miss the breakthrough numbers generated by graphics accelerator boards from 3Dlabs and Nvidia. (And don't miss Nvidia's roll out of Cg, a new code architecture that could radically increase graphics innovation.)

While Apple won't have a booth, you won't be able to miss their presence. Add the astonishing mid-June announcement of its purchase of Silicon Grail's intellectual property to Apple's earlier buyout of Shake program designer Nothing Real, and the Cupertino, Calif.-based company now owns some of the very top high-end compositing software and coders available. Expect plenty of gossip as attendees speculate on Apple's moves into the professional motion-graphics market.

Also expect to see growing Linux support at the show — over 30 companies will demo penguin products. IBM's Scott Burnett, in describing Big Blue's $1 billion commitment to Linux, noted that worldwide some 2,000 major apps have already ported to the open-source software. “Linux is now a value proposition; it's no longer a black box you get off the shelf,” says Burnett, a vice president in the company's DCC division. “With Linux-based systems up to four times less expensive [including the software licensing charged on some other platforms], you'll see a big move of current DCC applications to it over the next 24 months.”

Even Sony's PlayStation 2 now supports Linux: a $199 Linux kit (40GB drive, Ethernet adapter, keyboard, and mouse) enables users to develop games and other graphics applications (For more info, see www.playstation2linux.com).

But this is all just in the exhibit hall. There's always more happening at Siggraph, of course. Visitors will have hundreds of courses, seminars, panels, demos, films, videos, VR rigs, and vanguard technology to attempt to cram in. It's going to be a busy show.

For more information about the show, visit www.siggraph.org/s2002/flashhome.html. And for more information about San Antonio, check out www.sanantoniocvb.com.

Here's an idea of what to expect from the products debuting at Siggraph:

For 2d3 (in Vicon's booth), Boujou forms the core of four new products for high-end film as well as entry-level TV production. Boujou VE is pegged as an entry-level package for studios with less intensive tracking needs, such as for TV production. 2d3 has also developed Linux versions of Boujou2 and Boujou VE in response to demand from 2d3's customers in high-end film and television postproduction.

2d3 also debuts Pixeldust, a new application that automates the removal of objects from film or video footage and rebuilds the background. Individual objects can be singled out for removal with a rough matte, leaving the rest of the scene unchanged. The tracking technology builds a detailed understanding of the scene for highly accurate differentiation of foreground elements and background reconstruction in both panning and free camera moves. Pixeldust ships in Q4 in Windows and Linux versions.

For years, 3Dlabs has ranked among the leaders in fast graphics accelerator cards. Now, with its recent acquisition by Singapore-based Creative Technology, creators of the hugely popular Sound Blaster audio cards, 3Dlabs will gain the financial resources and marketing might continue in an increasingly competitive hardware marketplace.

At the show, 3Dlabs introduces its next-generation Wildcat VP family of graphics accelerators. The VP's Visual Processing Architecture integrates over 200 32-bit SIMD-type processors into a single Visual Processing Unit (VPU). The resulting performance numbers are huge — 200 gigaflops and more than 1.2 TeraOps of programmable power — which has the company claiming it's on the way towards the Holy Grail of interactive rendering. That's right, realtime rendering, no waiting required. But they're not quite yet there.

At the Alias|Wavefront booth, check out the recently announced 4.5 version of Maya. Integrated fluids technology sets Maya 4.5 apart from the competition, says the company. Fluid Effects includes tools for creating atmospheric effects, viscous liquids, pyrotechnics, and space effects. One cool new capability: the Ocean Shader enables the creation of a whole range of open water effects. Also on tap are the latest versions of StudioTools, Maya 4.5 for OS X, Maya RTA, and Mental Ray.

Gjenta, directed by Erik Bakke, is featured in the Siggraph Electronic Theater.

Discreet's big news at the show is 3ds Max 5, the company's highly popular animation, modeling, and rendering app. New features include new floating licensing options, Spline IK, a Dope Sheet Editor, and a new character-based animation management system. Max 5 includes considerable improvement in rendering solutions, including radiosity, Toon Shading, Area Light Shadows, and a method for simulating high-resolution scenes on low-resolution geometry.

There's also a new release of Character Studio, an extension to 3ds Max software. Character Studio 4 provides improved creative control for building and refining characters, including new quaternion function curves, and a flexible nonlinear animation mixer.

Discreet will also debut Plasma, its 3D web-design software. Plasma, based around 3ds Max, employs a web designer-style UI and an extended toolset that integrates with Macromedia Shockwave and Flash.

It's also the 10th anniversary of Flame 8, a software/hardware system that's brought great changes to motion design. Discreet will showcase the recently announced releases of Inferno 5, Flame, and Flint 8 systems. New functionality features include mixed-resolution support, new timeline editing, a unified animation channel, and support for Kaydara's FBX file format. Don't forget to check the most recent version of Combustion, now in version 2.

Eyeon Software releases the ninth major update of Digital Fusion, version 4.0. The DF4 feature list includes a realtime caching system with instant playback for effects and sequences; an improved tracking module with unlimited tracking points and motion prediction; a new grid-warping tool; integrated scripting, allowing for custom tool control and interfacing to other programs; and auto-roto, an automatic roto-scoping tool that will fit splines around subjects and images to track them throughout a sequence.

Continuing its push into the DCC space, HP presents a wide range of integrated hardware and software packages for post. To win the hearts and minds of motion-graphics artists, the company now positions itself as a “buck stops here” vendor, one that takes responsibility to ensure that any combo package it sells works, whether PC- or Linux-based. The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company's Workstation x4000, for example, will be shown demonstrating a variety of supported 3D animation and compositing apps, including Maya, 3ds Max and Combustion, Softimage|XSI 2.0, Kaydara's MotionBuilder, and Houdini.

The company has crafted what look like good deals; check out its 2D cartooning solution built around an entry-level Workstation x1100 running Toon Boom. Another lower-cost offering includes a capture, edit, and DVD-burning production bundle.

Also on display: DreamWorks staff will demo some of its proprietary Linux apps. HP's graphics labs engineers worked closely with DreamWorks to port these applications to Linux, optimizing them to improve performance. Look for the 64-bit Itanium workstation with an Intel CPU running alpha copies of various DCC software apps. The box is a first for HP, running the new, speedier second generation of Itaniums. HP has also created its first “glue” chipset that is said to utilize more fully the considerable chops of this next-generation CPU.

IBM scored a win a few months ago with the announcement that it signed a deal to help move Weta Digital, the New Zealand-based facility that handles all the Lord of the Rings graphics and effects, to Linux. Weta plans to move a significant portion of its production work on the movie serial to IBM's Digital Content Creation platform, which features IBM IntelliStations running Linux.

The company launches two new IntelliStations featuring the latest Pentium 4 processors — which now run up to 2.4GHz — as well as advanced 2D and 3D graphics in a highly scalable tower design. Stop by for new promotional 3D animation bundles and one-stop, integrated, turnkey Linux-based solutions. Big Blue is emphasizing the basics, which the company describes as “application-focused performance, cost-saving tools, outstanding price/performance ratios, and highly reliable standards-based technologies.”

Kaydara unveils MotionBuilder 4.0, the next generation of its award winning realtime 3D character-animation software, previously named Filmbox. A completely redesigned drag-and-drop user interface now fronts this 3D app. The company claims MotionBuilder 4.0 is the only realtime 3D character animation software package on the market today, one which integrates with all the major 3D packages, providing a hub for game, film, or broadcast production pipelines. For more on Kaydara, see page 58 of this issue.

Nvidia takes the wraps off its Cg Compiler, a new computer graphics programming language. This is big. In short, it allows shader programmers and other essential visual creators to program in standard high-level languages such as C+, rather than at the highly arcane assembly or machine language level. Although it might not seem that the artists will be directly affected, they will be, as their graphics toolboxes expand with new creative options.

Cg's high-level graphics programming language provides content developers with a complete programming environment “to ease and speed the creation of special effects and realtime cinematic quality experiences,” says the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company. “We are entering a brave new world of graphics software development,” said Peter Glaskowsky, editor-in-chief of In-Stat/MDR's Microprocessor Report. “The announcement of Cg signals a revolution in computer graphics — and for the first time in years, we can say this without exaggerating.”

NewTek shows LightWave 7.5, its popular modeling, rendering, and animation package. New for this version, users can build a custom slider to control anything that LightWave can animate, including characters and lighting rigs. The Expression Builder speeds the building of expressions without having you memorize a long series of commands. Enhanced OpenGL feedback boosts interactivity. And new multiple-bounce radiosity adds realism to LightWave's well-regarded global illumination rendering capability. A new duo-dongle allows users to have a single license for both Windows and Mac machines. An upgrade is free for current 7.0 users.

At the show, SGI celebrates 20 years of innovative graphics leadership. But who has time for parties? The Mountain View, Calif.-based company will announce InfiniteReality4, its next-generation high-end graphics system that delivers on-air HD and SD graphics, virtual sets with higher realism, and higher performance for editing and compositing, says the company.

SGI will also introduce a new standard-definition video option, DMediaPro DM6, bringing realtime graphics and video manipulation to the Silicon Graphics Fuel visual workstation. DM6 will also be offered as a standard-definition option for Silicon Graphics Octane2 visual workstations. SGI joins the move to high-speed, networked collaboration with its Visual Area Networking concept that employs the SGI VizServer.

Marc Downie's Experiments on Intelligent Forms will be displayed in the Siggraph Art Gallery.

Side Effects Software's Houdini family of 3D apps will be in several of its partners' booths at the show. Look for Houdini 5.5 and Houdini Select, joined by two new products to be announced, a standalone compositor and a character-animation product.

Houdini 5.5 boosts productivity and streamlines workflow, the company says, by extensive use of VOPs, an interactive node-based shader and effects builder. Houdini 5.5 also features an expanded Shader Gallery, a new compositor, a drag-and-drop interface, simplified installation and keying, and enhanced character and animation tools.

There's a price break on Houdini Select, now available at $1,299 for a node-locked version and $1,599 for a floating license. The software features modeling, animation, texturing, shading, and Mantra rendering tools identical to those of the full version of Houdini.

Check out Softimage's flagship Softimage|XSI version 2.0, with its huge number of new components; the company counts over 2,500 added since last year's 1.5. Features include an integrated compositor to speed workflow; integrated interactive Mental Ray 3.0 renderer; a unique interface enhancement — Synoptic View — that offers a way to create custom interfaces using HTML; crowd simulation; and realtime, interactive shaders.

But change is in the air. In June, Softimage, perhaps responding to competitive pricing pressures from the recent Maya reduction, halved the price (to $1,495) of Softimage|3D, its original 3D character-animation and effects software. Currently in version 4.0, the software was used extensively by ILM on the latest Star Wars epic.

Although only Side Effects' Houdini and Electric Image continue as the main graphics and animation apps on Sun Microsystems' workstations, the company continues its introduction of fast dual-processor workstations and graphics accelerators.

The Sun Blade 2000 Personal Visualization Systems include two 1050MHz UltraSPARC III Cu processors with 8MB of “Ecache,” 8GB of main memory, 146GB internal disk drives, and one Sun XVR-1000 graphics accelerator. One neat point: the system supports resolutions of up to 1920×1200 with 30-bit color, which results in what the company says “is likely the best color fidelity in the workstation industry.”

The panels continue to be one of the best places to have fun while learning something. Where else will you find groups of experts and “adventurers” (as the convention organizers like to put it) who argue and debate topics as diverse as animation, art, games, education, entertainment, human-computer interaction, film, modeling, rendering, virtual reality, visualization, and web graphics?

Here are just a couple of choices to check out. For more, visit www.siggraph.org/s2002/conference/panels/index.html.

Driven by trends in silicon and software, computer gaming is the medium that will define 21st century recreation in the way that motion pictures and their offspring, television, defined the culture of the 20th century, or so some say. This panel of believers, skeptics, and observers debates whether and how gaming will dominate the future.

In recent years, motion capture has been used more often and more intensively in the movie industry, for applications ranging from background action to major characters. This panel examines the critical motion-capture questions: When should motion capture be applied? How has it affected animators? How does the technology, both hardware and software, need to change?

\On display at the Emergin Technologies section, Public Anemone: An Organic Robot Creature, created by Cynthia Breazeal, responds to people's gestures and tank tapping.

Emerging here means “Just (barely) out of the lab.” This grownup's version of a science fair displays inventions that sometimes seem to be from an alternate universe. (Tap on the glass terrarium case of Public Anemone: An Organic Robot Creature to attract this very organic-looking critter.)

You'll find a range of projects that explore human-machine integration and interaction — devices that go well beyond button clicks and mouse moves. The systems on display use high-res or 3D simulations, miniature robotics, haptics (the science of integrating the sense of touch into human/computer interactions), advanced display systems (we're talking retinal display), and artificial intelligence. For more, visit www.siggraph.org/s2002/conference/etech/index.html.

Face it: you'll never come across a school that teaches anywhere near this number and range of CG courses, and forget about finding one stocked with so many of the leading names in their respective fields, whether it's rendering, lighting, or animation. The 59 courses include 25 full-day, 26 half-day, and eight tutorials. For more, visit www.siggraph.org/s2002/conference/courses/index.html.

An introduction to motion capture, from initial planning to final mapping of data to characters. A wide variety of motion capture uses, including dance, human motion analysis and recognition, character animation, and facial animation are presented. Using Maya, attendees gain hands-on experience with applying motion to characters.

This course outlines a step-by-step process for getting your movie or research into a video product, which you can present with confidence to colleagues and future employers.