Computer Graphics World

August 2009 28 n n n n Rendering rendering. e company bought Exluna, maker of Entropy, to develop its Gelato rendering tools. It bought RayScale for its fast raytracing technology, and it bought the very well established Mental Images to take it deeper into the process of rendering for entertainment and design visualization. ese moves have paid off for the compa- ny. Nvidia's expertise and development in software graphics has enabled it to develop powerful professional graphics systems. e company's Quadro line has greatly benefit- ted from the relationships, and Nvidia is determined to keep leveraging its work in graphics software to sell hardware systems. Nvidia's Mental Images has worked closely with companies to integrate its ren- dering software into Autodesk's 3ds Max, Maya, and Softimage, as well as other companies' 3D content creation software. Mental Images' shader creation technol- ogy, Mental Mill, now is an integrated tool within 3ds Max 2010. It lets designers create custom shaders with adjustable pa- rameters that are available to artists as they work. Complex effects can be created by combining shaders into phenomena—and, the Mental Mill promise is that these tools can be created without the user having to program. Mental Images has developed an overall format for its shader technology, called MetaSL. e firm is hoping that as companies adopt Mental Images' technol- ogy, they'll take advantage of the MetaSL format to share shaders and phenomena across product platforms. AMD's ATI had a leading position in the market with its FireGL graphics prod- ucts, but let its position in the professional graphics market erode. For too long, the company failed to recognize the shift in the professional market that was once again ty- ing hardware and software together. In the past two or three years, however, AMD has gotten control of the reins, and it is taking a much more active role in working with software developers. Most recently, AMD has announced a strategic relationship with StudioGPU. ere's money involved, but neither side is saying how much. As a result of the re- lationship, StudioGPU's MachStudio Pro visualization and rendering software will be sold as part of a system with ATI FireGL V8650 graphics boards. e two compa- nies will work together to optimize the rendering software and graphics hardware to further improve StudioGPU's already amazing render times. Intel is also enthusiastic about the ability of ren- dering to sell proces- sors—lots of them. In the case of Intel, of course, this already has occurred. For the most part, rendering has been done on CPUs, and as the company readies its Larrabee processor—a m ulti-multicore CPU— Intel sees no reason why rendering can't sell a whole bunch more proces- sors. Intel is avidly poking around com- panies with rendering software and taking a keen interest in the careers of those doctoral candidates men- tioned earlier. It, too, sees opportunity in moving the rendering phase up earlier into the production process and in allowing it to happen more often. Unquestionably, a Larrabee processor with anywhere from 16 to 64 processing cores (the actual number, as of this writing, is unannounced) is go- ing to change the equation for rendering on the desktop. And, playing out in left field is another interesting contender, Caustic Graphics. Caustic's CTO James McCombe has iden- tified the computer's basic hardware as a major culprit in creating bottlenecks for rendering, specifically raytracing. Caustic Graphics has developed an API—Caus- ticGL based on OpenGL and a tiny bit of hardware IP (a raytracing controller, if you will)—that can accelerate the feed to memory and take advantage of the proces- sors on a workstation graphics card. Obvi- ously, Caustic Graphics sees the advantage in linking hardware and software, but McCombe isn't religious about these things. He says his technology will work with the GPU or the CPU, and systems can be de- veloped to combine raytracing and raster- ization technologies. It's all good. Smart Design used Bunkspeed's HyperShot raytracing visualization tool to illustrate this unique-looking juicer model. A creation of Mark Sullivan, this character was rendered using ArtVPS's interactive raytracer, Shaderlight.

• Cover