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www.postmagazine.com 12 POST SEPTEMBER 2018 SIGGRAPH 2018 with 48GB memory is priced at $10,000 (ESP); Quadro RTX 6000 with 24GB memory priced at $6,300 (ESP); and Quadro RTX 5000 with 16GB memory priced at $2,300 (ESP). Prior to introducing Turing and the Quadro RTX GPU line, Huang opened up his address with a look at the computer graphics industry, Nvidia's own his- tory and some of the key milestones — all building up to the announcement of realtime ray tracing, helping to frame its significance. The company featured a number of technology demos around its booth throughout the show, high- lighting a number of its key markets, including film, gaming, architectural and automotive applications. "There's no question in my mind," stressed Huang, "that this is the single greatest leap in one generation. Computer graphics will never look the same again." CHAOS GROUP INTROS REALTIME RAYTRACING TECHNOLOGY CULVER CITY, CA — At SIGGRAPH 2018, Chaos Group (chaosgroup.com) offered a first look at Project Lavina, a new technology designed for photorealistic realtime ray tracing — what is often considered 'the Holy Grail of computer graphics.' By leveraging the dedicated RT Core within Nvidia's Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs, Project Lavina fundamentally changes the direction of computer graphics, introducing a new level of visual quality for realtime games, VR and 3D visualization. Project Lavina, named after the Bulgarian word for "avalanche," debuted as a SIGGRAPH tech demo, depicting a massive 3D forest and several ar- chitectural visualizations running at 24 to 30 frames per second (FPS) in standard HD resolution. Rather than using game engine shortcuts, like rasterized graphics and a reduced level of detail, each scene features live ray tracing for truly interactive photo- realism. Lavina is able to handle massive scenes at realtime speeds — over 300 billion triangles in one case — without any loss in detail. The SIGGRAPH tech demo used 3D scenes exported from V-Ray-enabled applications directly in Lavina. Unlike a traditional game engine, which requires assets to be rebuilt and specially opti- mized, Lavina dramatically simplifies this process with direct compatibility and translation of V-Ray assets. Upon loading the scene, the user can explore the environment exactly as they would in a game engine, and experience physically-accurate lighting, reflections and global illumination. This is Chaos Group's second realtime announce- ment in the last year, following the beta release of V-Ray for Unreal. VICON SHOWS LOCATION-BASED VR SOLUTION, ORIGIN OXFORD, ENGLAND — Vicon (www.vicon. com) showed off Origin, a comprehen- sive location-based virtual reality (LBVR) system that blends the com- pany's tracking abilities with tools that make it easy for anyone to setup and operate. Building on nearly 35 years of R&D, Vicon's new, fully-scalable solution is designed to empower VR creators big and small by offering high quality and reliability. Origin includes three brand new pieces of hard- ware, along with software created specifically for Vicon's new LBVR system. Following three years of development working alongside creators like Dreamscape Immersive, Origin contains everything a commercial enterprise would need to drive a fully-immersive experience. Auto-healing software capable of repairing calibrations between sessions, paired with tracking that never fails also ensures that the system requires minimal training and main- tenance in order to operate perfectly every time. At SIGGRAPH, the company offered attendees an unforgettable LBVR adventure (photo, above) , in partnership with Dreamscape Immersive. The Origin suite consists of several components. Viper is a compact, lightweight tracking camera specifically designed to work with active marker technology. Pulsar are wearable tracking clusters that emit unique, active infrared LED patterns synchronized to ensure optimal battery life. They are designed to easily attach to a participant's body, limbs and head-mounted displays. Beacon creates a synchronized wireless network connecting to Pulsar clusters (or other devices), allowing them to communicate with Viper cameras and provide seamless connectivity. Evoke is a highly automated software platform featuring unbreakable tracking and auto-healing between sessions. With Origin, multiple participants can ap- pear simultaneously as characters in the LBVR environment, each with fully-animated avatars driven by Evoke's realtime tracking. Participants wear the Pulsar clusters on their body, limbs and head-mounted displays, contributing to creating a fully immersive experience where their every move- ment is recreated in the virtual world. Participants can also interact with others and react to them based on their movements. Tools and props can utilize clusters as well, allowing them to be passed between participants to increase the immersion. FOUNDRY LAUNCHES NUKE 11.2, UPDATES MARI & KATANA LONDON — Foundry (foundry.com) has launched Nuke 11.2, bringing a range of new features and updates to the compositing toolkit. The latest ver- sion lets artists work quicker through upgraded UI features and performance capabilities, alongside a new API for deep compositing that can increase the speed of script processing. Key features for Nuke 11.2 include a new API that delivers 1.5x faster processing. In this installment, the Nuke Tab menu and UI for creating user knobs have been enhanced to improve user experience for some of the most common tasks: adding nodes and cre- ating Gizmos. The updated Tab menu allows artists to find nodes using partial words, set 'favorite' nodes and organize them via a weighting system. These im- provements add up to substantial time savings when building scripts with a large number of nodes. A new UI allows user knobs to be linked between nodes by simply dragging and dropping. Artists can add, rearrange or remove user parameters using the same interface. The Smart Vector toolset is now even faster to use and more effective in shots with occluding objects. Smart Vector and Vector Distort have been optimized for the GPU, allowing users to generate Smart Vectors on the fly and preview the result without needing to pre-render the vectors. A new mask input allows artists to identify areas of motion to ignore when generating the Smart Vectors and warping the paint or texture. As a result, the Smart Vector toolset can now be used on shots with occluding objects with less laborious manual clean-up, speeding up the use of the toolset in more complex cases. Nuke Studio now benefits from an updated project panel UI, providing the artist with new visual controls for managing and organizing complex proj- ects. For quick visual reference, artists can assign colors to items in the project bin and the timeline, based on file type and other parameters accessible via the UI and python API. Nuke 11.2 is available for purchase on Foundry's Website and via accredited resellers. Foundry also introduced updates to its flagship lighting, 3D painting and look development and lighting tools — Katana and Mari. The updates pro- vide a more user-friendly experience and improved response times. OPTITRACK PREVIEWS LATEST MOCAP TECHNOLOGY CORVALLIS, OR — OptiTrack (http:// optitrack.com) previewed the light- weight Active Puck Mini, its latest advancement in VR player tracking and full body motion capture. While at the show, Post got a demo from company CSO Brian Niles (pictured above). With a reduced form factor and the added tracking benefits of an inertial measurement unit (IMU), OptiTrack's newly-designed pucks build on its technology already implemented by leading