Computer Graphics World

February 2009 31 Visualization n n n n Snepvangers. "It has to be shaders, real-time shaders." If you think you've heard the magic word, you're right. "Shaders" means graph- ics processors, and RTT has been working closely with Nvidia, using the company's CgFX tools to create realistic procedural shaders that can be changed according to characteristics, such as color or thread count, to see what might work better. In the same way, RTT is also working on ways to reproduce paint. "e paint companies are very interested in spectral rendering, trying to figure out when paint jars with an environment. It's a hot topic," says Snepvangers. "3D is going way beyond just 3D shapes; it's now going into more of 'what can I know through my eyes?' e brain can imagine how material feels, what the characteristics of the material are, how it stretches and moves, how soft. We believe you can do a lot with your eyes." Autodesk is pursuing a strategy similar to RTT's, but is building it from a different direction than RTT is. Autodesk acquired Alias, and along with it, the company's in- dustrial design software, Studio. e com- pany added on to its portfolio with the raytracing company Opticore from Go- thenburg, Sweden, and is putting its tools together in Showcase to create easy ways for companies to visualize designs. e offering is compatible with all CAD products and allows users to grab a model and put it, ren- dered, into an environment. On the one hand, the firm is building easy desktop visualization. "Our goal is to de- mocratize visualization, to make it very easy for the designer to get to a presentation quickly," says omas Heermann, product line manager at Autodesk's Manufacturing Solutions Division. On the other hand, however, Autodesk ran into the same op- portunities that Mechdyne and RTT have seen on the high end of visualization—the ability to reproduce materials and textures. e firm saw that on the marketing side as companies in the car business wanted to reproduce colors and materials; this has escalated to a point where companies are forming consortiums to try and figure out ways to measure color and material, and reproduce it with shaders. It's an effort that is similar to the development of ICC stan- dards, which have been developed to com- municate color information between PCs and printers. "It's the Holy Grail, to be as real as you can in the unreal world," says Heermann. Distributing the Vision For the future, there are probably two models that will be used most often by businesses, and that will be to have some form of visualization on site—the best that can be afforded by the company—and also some networked collaboration. Brum, making the case for on-site systems, points to a study performed by Volkswagen sev- eral years ago in which engineers were asked how likely they were to use a visu- alization center if it was off-site, in another building, down the hall, or at the desktop. Like the people Briggs is working with at Headwave, most users said they might walk down the hall but they'd prefer to sit at their own desk. e next step for visualization is to get all the realism of high-end visualization centers close to home. It seems clear now that for visualization to be most useful, it has to be down the hall and at the desk, but what hall, and what desk? And as Snepvan- gers points out, collaboration, increasingly, is not real time. Globalization means that people are working at different times and in differ- ent places. RTT has developed its Picture Book software that lets users share images and access a model in RTT's DeltaGen viewer, the firm's raytracing application that takes advantage of the GPU for fast rendering. e Picture Book applications let users work with a server-based database to upload and access files at any time. is model also makes it easier for companies to work with outside suppliers. In addition to RTT, Autodesk and Men- tal Images (now owned by Nvidia) have similar strategies. One of the most vener- able companies in rendering in the enter- tainment sector and for industry, Mental Images has gone to work enabling long-dis- tance collaboration based on its high-speed rendering technology with its RealityServer, which maintains and processes content on the server. Images are streamed on-demand, giving access to huge datasets anywhere they are located. And, by never leaving the server, the system satisfies the need for security. Users gain a close-up view of complex data from the inside the C6 CAVE at Iowa State. The setup, which supports wireless tracking, is capable of presenting 100 million pixels.

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