Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/65907
material. However, in the case of this very character-driven spot, the welding sparks, and rivets had to be in 3D, so the team wrote an effects rig to drive the robots' tasks with a variety of looks, leaving behind shavings, sparks, and various types of molten metal. The tool could be dropped into shots interac- tively, set to whatever variation of effect was required based on a given robot's function on the assembly path. All the effects were pre-animated so the artists could modify the strength of an effect, but the performance was fast because they didn't have to render a new simula- tion from scratch. Creating the environment and characters tasked the entire Digital Domain Commercials renderfarm on the project—more than 1,000 proces- sors in total. The complete tool kit Digital Domain used included Chaos Group's V-Ray for modeling, animation, and rendering. The team also used Luxology's Modo for 3D texture paint- ing, as well as Adobe's Photoshop and After Effects. Compositing was done in The Foundry's Nuke, and fi nal color correction and conform were done with Autodesk's Flame. Unity Technologies Begins Open Beta for Unity 3.5 U nity Technologies, provider of the Unity develop- ment platform for game, app, simulation, and interactive 3D for the Web, iOS, Android, consoles, and beyond, has begun the Unity 3.5 open beta, including a developer preview for the anticipated Adobe Flash Player deployment add-on for pushing interactive 3D content to the Web. With Version 3.5, artists and programmers have complete control over how particles look and behave with Shuriken, a new curve- and gradient-driven particle system. The release also contains built-in pathfi nding, a new occlusion-culling system, a linear space lighting and HDR rendering capability, and support for NaCl publishing so that the Unity Web Player plays automatically in Google Chrome without requiring an install. Khronos Releases OpenCL 1.2 Specifi cation The Khronos Group has released the OpenCL 1.2 specifi cation, the latest update to the open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors. Released 18 months after OpenCL 1.1, this new version provides enhanced performance and functionality for parallel programming in a backward- compatible specifi cation that is the result of cooperation by more than 30 industry-leading companies. OpenCL 1.2 enables signifi cantly enhanced parallel programming fl exibility, functionality, and performance through updates and additions, including: device parti- tioning, separate compilation and linking of objects, and enhanced image support, DX9 media surface sharing, DX11 surface sharing, and more. A detailed list can be found at www.khronos.org/opencl/. April/May 2012 11 Eyeon's Next Dimension E yeon Software is now offering the shipping release of Dimension, priced at $995. Dimension's stereoscopic technology is, at its core, an advanced optical- fl ow-based science that offers two series of tools: the disparity tool set and the optical-fl ow tool set. For ultimate controls over stereo sequences, Dimension can precisely construct disparity mapping for accurate per-pixel manipulation of the left and right eyes in true 3D space. Image sequences also can be processed to achieve numerous results far beyond stereoscopic requirements. Dimension is designed to solve a number of common problems in stereoscopic fi lm and broad- cast production that would normally require a large amount of manual rotoscoping and paint work to solve.