Computer Graphics World

CGW Announces SIGGRAPH 2011 Silver Edge Awards SIGGRAPH 2011 welcomed nearly 16,000 artists, research scientists, gaming experts and developers, fi lm- makers, students, and academics from 74 countries around the globe to Vancouver, British Columbia. As always, the focus of SIGGRAPH was on infor- mation, delivered through various talks, sessions, panels, papers, presentations, and more. On the vendor side, more than 150 industry organizations exhib- ited at the conference, representing 17 countries—with approximately half from outside the US. "It was both an inspirational and incred- ibly fulfi lling week," says Peter Braccio, SIGGRAPH 2011 conference chair from Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. "Vancouver was an awesome home for SIGGRAPH, and people are leaving with a renewed sense of passion and motivation in both their professional and personal lives. Vancouver delivered on its reputation as a world-class city." As expected, there were a number of impressive technologies at the show, so selecting the Silver Edge Award winners was certainly challenging. Yet, there were some offerings that stood out from the rest as having the potential of greatly impacting our industry now and in the future. Nvidia's Project Monterey. The Quadro Virtual Graphics Technology, also known as Project Monterey, is not a product per se. It is a high-performance solution that moves the Quadro graph- ics card from the desktop to a remote server, allowing a user to take advantage of a Quadro graphics card via a network connection, essentially boosting the resources available to that user. Simply put, it lets users take advantage of cloud- like resources (Quadros) for visualization and rendering. Product or not, this solu- tion defi nitely deserves applause. 8 October/November 2011 Sony Pictures Imageworks'/Lucas- fi lm's Alembic 1.0. There's nothing like top studios sharing their technology, either among one another or with a soft- ware vendor that can take the technol- ogy and continue to develop it. Alembic is an open-source CG exchange format jointly developed at Sony and Lucasfi lm for effi ciently storing and sharing anima- tion and VFX scenes across various software applications. In a nutshell, it handles massive animation data, distilling complex animation scenes—even those that are created with proprietary soft- ware—so they can be shared among vari- ous facilities. The tool fi ts within existing pipelines but can be customized. that can t Maxon's Cinema 4D Release 13. As Maxon celebrates its 25th birthday, it is apparent that it has focused on Cinema 4D, packing the new release with a bunch of new character tools. But perhaps most impressive is the integrated stereo work- fl ow capabilities, as well as the physically accurate rendering for generating photo- realistic imagery. Based on real camera properties, the new render engine accu- rately calculates 3D motion blur, depth of fi eld, and lens distortion based on the focal length, aperture, and shutter speed of the camera. Optis's Theia RT. Theia is a true phys- ically correct real-time renderer, perhaps the fi rst on the market, enabling engi- neers and designers to drag and drop physically correct materials and light sources to achieve immediate photoreal- istic representations within any environ- ment and within any lighting scenario. The technology takes into account human vision, ensuring that results correlate exactly to the way the human eye perceives an object. IKinema's animation plug-in. IKine- ma's animation plug-in for Maya streams (in real time) and records motion- captured data from Vicon and Xsens systems directly into Autodesk's Maya. The product turns any skeleton into a complex and full-featured rig in minutes. Tandent Vision Science's Trillien. Tandent Vision Science introduced a beta version of its Trillien software, which automatically separates illumination from an image and removes shadows. The company purports to have spent 60 "person years" of R&D and has numerous patents issued and pending on its tech- nology, which is inspired by new insights about illumination perception from the company's human vision lab. The tech, which is in beta, operates between image capture and existing computer vision systems, factoring a single image from a standard digital camera into two images: one representing invariant surfaces and the other representing the spatial and spectral variation in scene lighting. Trillien then replaces normal input images with these preprocessed images. Pixologic's ZBrush 4R2. Even though this is a new release, not a new version, it generated show buzz never- theless. (It will also be a free upgrade to registered users.) For years, the ZBrush digital sculpting tool has been in a cate- gory all its own. The new ZBrush 4R2 contains a number of new features and enhancements, including an improved BPR renderer that has been updated to full 32-bit fl oating-point HDR, enabling users to render high-quality images while utilizing improved materials, lights, and environment mapping. The new Light- C GW

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