Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/589428
s e p t e m b e r . o c t o b e r 2 0 1 5 c g w 7 S P O T L I G H T Honorable Mention Faceware Technologies' Faceware Live UE plug-in – Although Faceware introduced its Faceware Live two years ago, integrating it into Epic Games' Unreal Engine is a move to be applauded. This will allow UE 4 developers to capture facial movements with any camera and apply them to characters in the Unreal Engine. The resulting facial animation can be used for a range of applications. Reallusion's iClone Character Creator and Live Motion Capture System – Character creation is a complex process, but Reallusion has simplified this with its iClone Character Creator, a real-time 3D character design application that creates fully rigged characters on the fly that are ready for face, body, and lip-sync animation. The soware enables users to build custom characters with dynamic morphs, ethnicity, aging, skin, conforming cloth, cosmetics, and fabrics. The company's iClone Live Motion Capture System also simplifies a complex process, allowing users to import any character rig, which it then "characterizes" to iClone so the motion performance can be seen on the rig, in real time during the performance, thus reducing capture time and editing. The Live Motion Capture System is a result of a partnership between Reallusion and Noitom, makers of the Neuron mocap suit. Thinkbox's Deadline and Sequoia – Deadline 8, in beta, offers a number of valuable features. One of the more useful offerings is the new ability to purchase rendering by the hour via a metering license, letting users ramp up service when needed. Another impres- sive feature introduced recently in 7.2 is Dra, a tool that provides simple compositing functionality. Available as a stand-alone tool or integrated with Deadline, Dra lets users perform simple compositing operations on rendered frames aer a render job is complete. Perhaps most impressive is Sequoia, a stand-alone application for point cloud processing and meshing, making it easy for users to work with very large produc- tion data sets. Autodesk's Stingray – It's been no secret that Autodesk has been focused on the gaming industry, and various acquisitions during the past few years have furthered that effort. Yet, the acquisition of Bitsquid last year led to perhaps the biggest news of all when Autodesk announced its new Stingray game engine. The engine supports many standard game development work- flows, including those, of course, in- volving Autodesk soware (as well as those that do not). In fact, the engine is tuned to take advantage of the capabilities in Autodesk's products, resulting in efficient, opti- mal performance. Moreover, the en- gine uses a lightweight code base, letting users make major changes to the engine and renderer without needing source-code access. Special Recognition Christie's projection technology – When it comes to display technology, it's difficult to ignore Christie and its wide array of projec- tors and display offerings. At this year's show, the vendor exhibited the latest in projection mapping within the Emerging Technologies' Sandbox. With auto-calibration and a patent- ed process, Christie condensed a complicated procedure whereby a 3D-printed apartment building was projection-mapped in real time. Also, those walking into the Emerging Technologies area were met by a huge 3D projection-mapped skull created by artist Josh Harker and Theatrical Concepts. Presented as a 360-degree display onto the 12-foot skull, the projection mapping was powered by four Christie Roadster HD20K-J projectors. Special Recognition Pixar's USD (open source) – Pixar says it intends to release its Universal Scene De- scription (USD) soware next summer as an open- source project, which is expected to lead to increased efficiencies across workflows. USD addresses the need in the CG film and game industries for an effective way to describe, assemble, interchange, and modify highly complex virtual scenes between digi- tal content creation tools. With USD, artists can simultaneously work on the same col- lection of assets in different contexts, using separate layers of data that are composited together at various production stages. USD generalizes these concepts so they are available to any DCC application.