Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/30784
Best in Show at GDC This year’s Game Developers Confer- ence (GDC), held during early March in San Francisco, saw a healthy attendance: More than 19,000 gaming profession- als reportedly attended the conference and exhibition. In fact, if those fi gures are correct, that is a record attendance for the show—and an excellent turnout during a time when interest in large trade shows is on the decline. So, what awaited this crowd? There were a number of tutorials and summits, hundreds of lectures, and, of course, the annual Independent Games Festival and Game Developers Choice Awards. Augmenting the conference and co- located events was the expo fl oor. This year, the exposition seemed to be divided into two nearly equal segments: those vendors offering video game develop- ment tools, and studios either showcas- ing their new titles and/or recruiting talent (schools also shared this area, pitching their programs to would-be students). Encompassing all these areas were the “world showcase” pavilions featuring vendors from a common state or coun- try—from Germany, Canada, and Scot- land, to Georgia and other regional and national locales. While the number of vendors showing off their digital content creation software and hardware seemed to be lower this year than in the past, that does not mean the quality of those tools was lacking. In fact, some of the products—either making their initial debut or having recently been released—are quite impressive and have the potential to make a positive impact on game development. With that said, Computer Graphics World has named its selections for the magazine’s Silver Edge Awards at GDC 2011. The newly unveiled Edge Awards are presented to companies whose product represents the best of show at the CG industry’s leading conferences 6 April 2011 and exhibitions, including GDC. “There are a number of products—soft- ware, hardware, or possibly something that falls into a totally different catego- ry—that cause excitement and buzz at a trade show, or have the potential to greatly impact the industry. We wanted to formally recognize these cutting-edge offerings following the industry’s most important exhibitions,” says CGW chief editor Karen Moltenbrey. Autodesk’s 2012 Entertainment Creation Suites. The various software releases that are part of the suites—the 2012 versions of 3ds Max, Maya, Mudbox, Softimage, and MotionBuild- er—are impressive on their own, leverag- ing the latest advances in hardware. But when bundled together within the new suites, they are unmatched in terms of giving users advanced tools for advanced graphics creation in games. Image Metric’s FaceWare 3.0. The company has been providing amaz- ing facial animation for many triple-A game studios for years, and recently the company began offering this markerless analysis technology to animators, giving a studio’s artists creative control over the content. To this end, Version 3.0 contains some new key features, such as auto- pose, a shared pose database, and curve refi nement. Dassault’s 3DVIA tools. This prod- uct continues to intrigue. The purpose of 3DVIA is to make 3D content creation easier, and it does just that. There are a number of tools under the 3DVIA umbrella, and they all serve in helping to democratize 3D development, including 3DVIA Studio for building high-quality 3D games on the Web. Unity’s game engine. It is the game engine that could, a development plat- form for games and interactive 3D on the Web, iOS, Android, consoles, and more. Introduced in 2005, the Unity game engine’s popularity has soared. At the show, the company released Unity Android, enabling developers to easily port Unity-based games to the Android platform. Autodesk’s Project Skyline. Unlike the other offerings here, Project Skyline— discussed openly at GDC—is best described as a concept technology than an actual product at this time. Neverthe- less, it is quite intriguing and could have a radical effect on future game develop- ment. Skyline proposes to open up the current closed development pipeline to give content creators the ability to do live content authoring within a game engine. In short, it would put more control in the hands of the animators rather than code writers. Adobe’s Molehill. While not yet a shipping product, Molehill (code name) is a new set of low-level, GPU-acceler- ated 3D APIs targeted at experienced 3D developers for delivering sophisticated 3D experiences. Using the new 3D APIs in Adobe Flash Player and AIR will make it possible to deliver sophisticated 3D experiences across almost every comput- er and device connected to the Internet. Comprehensive coverage of GDC 2011 can be found at www.cgw.com/ Press-Center/GDC.aspx.