JON PEDDIE’S TECH WATCH 5

SIGGRAPH REPORT positing and ActiveShade rendering for the Iray renderer from Nvidia. Autodesk is adding interoperability with After Ef- fects and Photoshop and it’s enabling .Net access within the 3ds Max SDK to expand the ability of developers to cus- tomize 3ds Max. The Softimage 2012 Advantage Pack offers new modeling tools and Softim- age’s Interactive Creative Environment (ICE) is getting rigid body dynamics. Also, the SDK is being extended. The Mudbox 2012 Advantage Pack has a new Gigatexel engine for adding detail—the Gigatexel engine scales with the users’ hardware. None of which means anything, does it? Product man- ager Andrew Camenisch created a You- ALMOST REAL. /WJEJBhT
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action on a GeForce gaming laptop – nothing super special. The demo shows "VUPEFTL the Gigatexel engine enabling painting with 1200 2K maps with total interac- ■ AMD is certified; 47 times ■ Autodesk announces tive feedback. Seeing the demo helps At Siggraph AMD announced that Advantage Packs for 2012 make it more clear. their latest generations of ATI FirePro And finally, we get to Creative Fin- AIBs have received 47 application certi- Entertainment Software ishing in Flame Premium 2012, Flare fications from ISVs. In addition, a soon 2012 and Smoke 2012 for Mac OS X. Autodesk has been adding sweeten- The Advantage Packs offer new stereo- to be released beta driver is expected to ers to its subscription deals in order to deliver considerable performance gains scopic viewing modes that let artists encourage people to buy subscriptions scan for differences between left and on popular CAD and DCC applications and to keep customers committed to over the previous generation. AMD also right eye clips. And, enhanced creative the subscription model. At Siggraph the tools for stylized graphics effects. In ad- demonstrated an ecosystem of software company announced the latest round. partners and customers to bring to life dition Flame Premium now gets HDRx These new bits of code and plug-ins support, MXF export, and AVCHD superior realism, workflow productivity may be early feature previews or nice- and application performance. codec import. Smoke for Mac gets sup- to-haves that Autodesk can test out with port for Apple ProRes QuickTime, IM, The new driver will offer users across its most active users. And, who better to the board performance increases for the and MXF P-1a export, RD Epic HDRx trouble shoot and find the best usage support, AVCHD codec import, and latest generation ATI FirePro graph- models. ics on the LightWave 3D subset of the Avid DNxHD export in a QuickTime In the announcement, Autodesk se- wrapper. new SPECviewperf 11 benchmark. And nior vice president, Marc Petit says AMD claims their entry-level ATI Fire- The new tools will be available to sub- “subscription Advantage Packs allow us scription customers in late-September 2011. Pro V3800 achieves a 62 percent perfor- to get new functionality out to our sub- mance gain and the ultra high-end ATI scription customers much sooner than What do we think? FirePro V8800 gets an 81 percent gain, would otherwise be possible.” Since the compared to the previous driver2. strategy was announced a couple of We think that was probably a lot Also at AMD was Chaos Group Autodesk Universities ago, the goodies more than you wanted to know about CTO, Vladimir Koylazov, who spoke have proliferated. Of course, it’s also a the Advantage Packs if you’re not an about “Interactive ray tracing for accel- swell way of doing stuff that Autodesk actual user of these products but it does erated visualization and decision mak- was going to do anyway. suggest several interesting directions for ing” at AMD’s theater. For instance, the Advantage Pack for Autodesk and content creation tools in Maya 2012 will include support for the general. There are a lot of tools here for Alembic point cache format that enables developers, which bodes well for future compact file exchange. Autodesk is sup- Advantage Packs. Throughout this issue porting the open source Bullet Physics we’ve talked about new tools for ren- engine from AMD, which enables soft dering, physics, texturing, as well as new and rigid body simulations. And the character creation tools. All those capa- Maya 2012 Advantage Pack will in- bilities are represented in the Advantage clude a new Node Editor that will help Packs. – K.M. people working with complex node net- works keep track and back track. ■ Blender Foundation The additions to Autodesk 3ds Max 3D EXTRUSION XJUIJO
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VOLUME 11, NUMBER 17 AUGUST 23, 2011 6 JON PEDDIE’S TECH WATCH

SIGGRAPH REPORT

Blender tools. motion media solutions for hobbyists The 2.5 series has and aspiring professionals (AKA Pro- completely revamped sumers) that Boxx developed in con- the Blender interface, cert with Intel’s Platform Marketing & added new anima- Software and Services Groups. Boxx tion tools -- making showed off their wares in Intel's booth. everything animat- The highlight of the series is me- able with a system diaBOXX Xtreme, a performance-en- of layers. And it has hanced, liquid-cooled system capable added volume ren- of reaching 4.5GHz—32% faster than dering and ray trac- standard speed. ing features in the Available with 2nd generation Intel product. It even has Core i5-2500K or i7-2600K proces- sculpting tools. The sors, IntelTurbo Boost Technology 2.0, emphasis is on ease and the Intel Z68 chipset, mediaBOXX of use, and improved includes a host of additional Intel tech- GUI, but Blender 2.5 BLENDER 2.59 CSJOHT
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nology which allows users to store fre- fact, it looks like a toy quently accessed files on the solid state shop window for 3D drives. and animation tool. The change has modelers and animators. come with the growth of the Blender As a turnkey solution, mediaBOXX Foundation, formed in 2002 after the What do we think? includes Cyberlink PowerDirector 9, a parent company Not A Number (NaN) Blender helps the 3D modeling and 64-bit video editing product with Cy- shut its doors. At his Siggraph presenta- animation industry by providing a free berLink’s TrueVelocity Technology for tion, Blender founder Ton Roosendaal training ground and community for faster editing, previewing, and render- said Blender now has three staff devel- would-be 3D artists. The organization ing. The software enables filmmakers opers and is also supported by a com- says that 3.4 million copies of Blender to directly upload HD quality videos to munity of 60-70 active developers and are downloaded a year. The product is Facebook or YouTube, and features Me- even more irregular contributors. This getting more attention and is becom- diaEspresso, a media converter that can year’s Blender Conference in Amster- ing broadly used professionally and the transcode video, photos, and music files dam attracted 250 attendees. booth was flat-out hopping through and then output them to iPad, iPhone, At Siggraph this year, the Blender the whole show. Blender also provides iPod, BlackBerry, and other mobile de- Foundation presented their latest re- a serious prod to the tools vendors. vices. lease, Blender 2.59. The ongoing 2.5x Blender’s new features were not so dif- All that at a starting price of $1698. version of Blender was started in 2007 ferent from those being proudly showed as a major overhaul of Blender. The by the commercial vendors and Blender ■ CLO Virtual Fashion, Inc. Foundation, led by Roosendahl, has de- is unique in offering so much in one veloped a strategy of producing major package. Suddenly, CAD is fashionable. No, projects under the auspices of the Blend- Roosendaal says that at this year’s never mind, CAD is being used in er Institute. The list of movies is grow- Siggraph, Blender was getting serious at- fashion. We noticed the CLO Virtu- ing Elephant’s Dream was the first tention from Intel, Nvidia, and AMD as al Fashion booth along the edges of and Big Buck Bunny is widely shown a platform for testing and development the Siggraph Show floor. The company, to demonstrate the 3D capabilities of and “especially to get OpenCL to work CLO3D is based in Korea and they have hardware. Most recently the Institute decently all over.” Roosendaal says he developed tools for creating 3D fash- has released Sintel, a fantasy quest film, took Autodesk’s slo- ions on models that correspond to 2D and the Institute has developed a game, gan at the show: “Don’t patterns. In the demos we saw, patterns "Yo Frankie!." Like Blender, the con- blend in, stand out!” as can be chosen, fitted to a model, fur- tent is open, it may be freely shared a personal complement. ther adjusted and then the adjustments and displayed on a non-commercial – K.M. translate to the 2D patterns. The com- basis. At Siggraph this year, Roosend- pany was at Siggraph to help promote aal announced plans for the next movie ■ BOXX Partners a coming English version of CLO3D. Mango, which will be directed by Ian It will be competing directly with Opti- Hubert. It’s a science fiction film and with Intel on New tex. Optitex is an Israeli company that the ambition is to explore special ef- Motion Media box builds clothing design software for the fects, motion tracking, keying, compos- apparel industry. iting and color correction. The schedule In addition CLO3D has a tool called calls for the movie to be finished by July Low cost video editing Marvelous Designer, which enables 2012. system is impressive users to create, drape, and design cloth- The projects show off Blender’s ca- ing and create animations, but it doesn’t pabilities but also in the process of BOXX Technologies long known for allow the clothing to be imported and developing these projects, the Blender their post- production systems announced exported in transferrabe formats like Foundation has been able to develop at Siggraph. their cleverly named new DXF. DXF-AAMA is a standard in the some prioritization around updating the mediaBOXX. A new series of turnkey apparel industry for pattern creation

VOLUME 11, NUMBER 17 AUGUST 23, 2011