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At Siggraph 2002, graphics cards and vendors lead to expansion from high-end to mainstream.

Tigar Hare Studios, Sherman Oaks, Calif., created the above animation, an excerpt from a :20 spot for Fandango.com, in 3ds Max with the aid of several plug-ins from Cebas Computer. Both Cebas and Discreet announced upgrades to their products at this year’s Siggraph.

The annual Siggraph convention always offers leading-edge thinking in computer graphics, with vendors showing new products that often incorporate breakthrough concepts presented in previous years' panels and papers. (If you've ever wondered, Siggraph is academic speak for “Special Interest Group — Graphics.”)

This year's show, held in San Antonio, was no exception. Top researchers from graphics card companies Nvidia and ATI, for example, held forth in a panel discussion on When Will Ray-Tracing Replace Rasterization?.

While that topic might sound a little arcane, the gist is that the capabilities of consumer-priced graphics cards will soon deliver enough processing power to rival that available previously to only the top Hollywood studios.

Only a few years ago that debate would have been more science fiction than fact. But like much of today's computer technology, not only is the capability there, but you can probably afford it.

Graphics Cards

The development cycles of graphics cards, which are closing in on a 12-month pace, outrun even the vaunted Moore's Law of CPU growth, which sees a doubling of transistors — and processing power — every 18 to 24 months. The latest GPUs (graphics processing units) exceed the approximately 55 million-transistor count of Intel's flagship Pentium 4.

3Dlabs didn't debut a new card at the show, though you can expect an announcement in October about the next-generation Wildcat IV. The company did showcase its new Wildcat VP mid-range cards, which offer good price/performance along with the latest trend of on-the-fly programmability. That capability supports the new generation of advanced shading algorithms within graphics software, bringing the holy grail of interactive RenderMan-class rendering a step closer.

ATI’s AGP 8X Fire GL X1 workstation graphics board, essentially a larger memory (256MB) version of the Radeon 9700 consumer line, offers a fully programmable floating point architecture.

Usually playing second fiddle to Nvidia, ATI jumped to the head of the pack with the debut of the AGP 8X Fire GL X1 workstation graphics board, basically a larger memory (256MB) version of the Radeon 9700 consumer line introduced in July. It's fast — ATI claims anywhere from a 2X to 4X advantage over anything currently delivering. Another claim is that the GL X1 is the first card to offer a fully programmable floating-point architecture.

Matrox's Parhelia-512 uniquely offers TripleHead, said to be the only card that can support three monitors at once. While much is being made of its application to the financial and games crowd — already some 20 games are supporting Matrox's Surround Gaming technology — editors too can benefit from the extra screen space. The card also offers an improved version of its DualHead-HF (High Fidelity) capability, which allows two fully symmetric 2048×1536 analog outputs or dual 1920×1200 digital outputs, both at 32-bit pixel depth.

Although Nvidia didn't show a new card, it did talk about its AGP 8X NV30 GPU architecture, another considerable step up from its current product line. That's due out this fall.

Not part of the show announcements: Nvidia acquired “look” developer Exluna, a new company creating advanced rendering software. Nvidia is expected to incorporate Exluna's experience writing shaders for feature films into its Cg initiative.

Workstations

Workstations continue to improve as Intel keeps pushing out faster Pentium 4 chips at a steady clip. Buyers are becoming savvy to the deep price drops that follow the introduction of a new top CPU and buy the former leader at deep discounts. At press time, for example, Intel introduced a 2.8GHz Pentium 4, dropping the price on the previous leading 2.53GHz chip — introduced in May — by 62%.

HP helps the next stage of Linux implementation by working with leading Linux vendor Red Hat Software to create a 64-bit Linux version that ships this September.

DreamWorks now has two of HP's new Itanium-based zx2000 workstations in house to evaluate for desktop graphics use. HP is also working with DreamWorks to port its graphics software to a 64-bit Linux format. HP claims a 15-20% speed improvement over other implementations of the Itanium “glue” chipset by IBM and Intel.

SGI officials made no bones about moving out of the lower end of the graphics business. As ever higher-speed CPUs and GPUs become commodity items, SGI knows its proprietary hardware can't compete, so the company is going upmarket.

“Film mastering is the next challenge,” according to Chris Golson, senior director, media industry marketing at SGI. The company already interfaces its Onyx2 with all the current telecines, but a new push is on to further integrate it with other mastering gear, including output to film recorders. SGI is pushing SAN CXFS, an extension to its file system that enables high-speed transfers between heterogeneous operating systems, as well as non-computer devices such as the film recorder.

A dearth of graphics and animation products for the Solaris operating system has kept Sun Microsystems a distant player in the DCC market. But at Siggraph, the company sketched out plans for further involvement in high-end post with a number of product announcements, including the $30,000 XVR-4000 3D graphics accelerator card for “workgroup visualization.”

Sun also touted the new graphics technology included in Java 3D. The company introduced Sun Grid Engine software, which allows Side Effects to offer a render farm for Houdini that lashes together as many free computers as possible. Sun also highlighted a project with Christie that developed a 3D Cinema Server that uses only a single projector and server.

Graphics, Animation, Effects, and Modeling Software

For years, high-end graphics, animation, and effects software existed out of the range of all but the well-funded. But what do you do after everyone who might buy your program has one? As sales slowed down, vendors such as Alias realized they needed to expand beyond the limited number of facilities creating animation for feature films and commercials. So stay tuned: the price drops will continue, and with today's more capable computers and graphics cards, it may be time to consider some of these powerful packages.

Alias|Wavefront claims that its Maya 4.5 is the first CG software to fully integrate fluid dynamics.

Alias|Wavefront introduced Maya 4.5, claimed by the company to be the first CG software to fully integrate fluid dynamics. Many of the other new features help improve workflow. For example, users can now quickly switch between NURBS and subdivision surfaces within a model as necessary. A section around a mouth might need the improved control of subdivision surfaces, while the rest of the character works fine using more generalized NURBS.

Digital Fusion 4.0 from Eyeon Software sports new features including a cleaner, less cluttered interface, a simple-to-use 2D grid-warp tool, a much-improved tracker, floating point color depth processing, concatenated transformation, auto-roto, and network rendering and clustering.

Discreet's 3ds Max version 5 delivers numerous improvements including spline IK, a dope sheet editor, a character-based animation management system, and a variety of advanced rendering solutions. The company, celebrating the 10^th anniversary of Flame, also showcased its other latest updates: Inferno 5, Flame 8, and Flint 8.

Featuring a redesigned interface, Kaydara’s latest version of MotionBuilder more easily handles content from a variety of sources.

Kaydara unveiled version 4.0 of MotionBuilder (formerly Filmbox), its realtime 3D character-animation software. Featuring a completely redesigned drag-and-drop user interface, the product also includes automatic character rigging and motion blending, which allows the use of content from a variety of sources in the same work environment.

NewTek introduced LightWave 7.5 with new features including sliders, a tool the user can build to control anything that LightWave can animate, such as characters and lighting rigs. Luxigons attach lights to polygon normals in modeler, making models intelligent enough to carry their own lighting. Also new is Multiple Bounce Radiosity.

Side Effects showcased an expanded line of animation tools, including the entry-priced Houdini Select ($1,299).

Side Effects announced a number of new and upgraded products. Version 5.5 of Houdini 3D includes new operators for its shading language VEX (called VOPs), an expanded shader gallery, a new compositor, a drag-and-drop interface, and enhancements to character and animation tools.

The new entry-priced Houdini Select ($1,299) also uses VOP (Visual Operators) technology. A new standalone compositing package, Houdini Halo includes a floating license enabling users to work with any of the supported platforms. Also new, Houdini Escape builds on the capabilities of Houdini Master but is dedicated to modeling and character work.

Another debut: Softimage XSI 3.0 adds improved interactivity while simplifying the creation of complex rigging tasks. Improved workflow ranks high among the new features. Templates for character construction and setup, for example, help to quickly generate fully customizable, film-quality biped and quadruped setups and rigs, according to the company.

One neat new feature: a behavioral animation and crowd simulation toolkit featuring behavioral scripting, visual state-graph editing, and dynamic motion synthesis.

Graphics Software and Systems

While 2d3 wouldn't go into too many details, the British company was previewing Pixeldust, described only as an “automated compositing assistant.” The program builds from the capabilities developed in its well-regarded Boujou motion-tracking package, but this time it automates time-consuming compositing tasks while synthesizing the correct background “behind” the object.

Cebas Computer and Trinity Animation announced FinalRender Stage 1 rendering/global illumination plug-in for 3ds Max. There's many new capabilities, including networked global illumination and raytrace rendering, new displacement mapping, light-particle models, and 3D motion blur. Flat-out rendering speed improvement of large scene files made quite a demo as a 3 billion-polygon scene rendered out within a few seconds.

Realviz launched MatchMover 2.5 Professional, an updated version of its automatic 3D camera and motion data tracker. New features include a matte drawing tool, an ability to work with color info, a refined set of filtering parameters, new camera constraints, and support for anamorphic lenses.

SplutterFish drew crowds to the Discreet booth for its long awaited Brazil Rendering System. Initially designed as a plug-in for 3ds max (a Maya plug-in is next), Brazil brings a point-and-click interface to an extensive feature set that includes camera and film effects, motion blur, depth of field/bokeh (lens out of focus) simulation, filtering, and anti-aliasing. For many, it's the highly evolved illumination and shading models that attract, including “super-fast” raytracing, “over-the-top” photon mapping/caustics, task-specific accelerators and shaders, global illumination, and non-photoreal capabilities.

Motion capture leader Vicon recently introduced iQ, which relies on body measurements to eliminate headaches caused by occlusions.

Vicon's new iQ product delivers what could be the holy grail of motion capture: automatic processing of motion data from capture to animation with no need to worry about occlusions. How does it work? Each actor has unique body measurements that are first keyed into the system. After that, the system — which can measure down to the millimeter — extrapolates which arm or other body part belongs to what actor or creature throughout the whole session.

Digital Asset Management

Munich-based NXN Software, a maker of digital asset management software, announced Pixar will be using NXN Alienbrain VFX, which not only handles asset management but also incorporates production management. NXN describes Alienbrain as the first such system designed specifically for high-end computer graphics projects.

“No major studio uses an asset management system because none of the available products understands and works with the industry's workflow methods,” says Gregor vom Scheidt, founder and CEO of NXN Software. Pixar president Ed Catmull said he expects the software to enable staff reductions even as the studio ramps up to deliver more projects.

Avtoma, a special-effects production company moving into developing asset management products, announced Evolution at the show. Working with Softimage and motion analysis company BTS/eMotion, Avtoma spots Evolution as a method to bridge the gap between physical production pipelines and digital production.

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Dan Ochiva is technical editor of Video Systems and Millimeter magazines. Email him at dochiva@primediabusiness.com.

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