Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/714180
SIGGRAPH NEWS www.postmagazine.com 39 POST AUGUST 2016 VICON SHOWS NEW MOCAP CAMERAS OXFORD, UK — Motion control company Vicon (www.vicon.com) showcased two new cameras — Vero and Vue — at this year's SIGGRAPH show. The cameras join Vicon's flagship Vantage camera to form a new product family. Vero is a high-resolution optical camera series, offering a new level of performance, flexibility and value in the motion-capture market. Vero is designed to be an economical system suited for virtually any application. The Vero range includes a custom-made 6-12mm variable focus lens that delivers an optimized field of view, as well as a 2.2 megapixel camera at 330Hz. This balance of resolution, speed and value makes it well suited for capturing fast sport movements and multiple actors, drones or robots with very low latency. Vue is a new, dedicated, high-definition synchronized video camera that provides clear and precise realtime video footage and 3D overlay in the mo- cap volume. With HD resolution and variable focal lengths, Vue incorporates sharp video images into the motion capture volume. It also enables seamless calibration between optical and video volumes, ensur- ing the optical and video views are aligned to capture the finest of details. MAXON RELEASES CINEMA 4D R18 FRIEDRICHSDORF, GERMANY — At SIGGRAPH, Maxon (www.maxon.net) announced Cinema 4D Release 18 (R18), the next generation of its 3D an- imation, graphics, VFX, visualization and rendering software application. R18 has new, powerful and easily-accessible tools that are tailored to the needs of creative professionals to help master the challenges of digital production for TV, film, games, architecture, advertising and design. Feature highlights include: Voronoi Fracture Object — a native fea- ture in the MoGraph toolset in Cinema 4D that works seamlessly with Dynamics, allows users to tear down walls and create artistic procedural geometry using spline or polygon objects to define the fractured shape. Interactive Knife Tools — enable users to draw lines across a model and tweak the cut with an interactive preview, then lock in new edges or split based on the cut; knife tools are available as separate commands for easy access to the desired mode via shortcut or Commander. Object Motion Tracking — the next evolution in Maxon's effort to give artists accessibility to dynamic VFX and visualization workflows with expanded tools for inte- grating Cinema 4D creations into real-world footage. Shaders and Surface Effects — offer advanced rendering possibilities for creating iridescent surfaces such as bubbles and oil slicks, for capturing shadows for more efficient compositing, parallax mapping for enhanced bump effects, and creating masks for worn edges using inverse ambient occlusion. "Maxon continues to build upon its 30-year legacy of empowering our existing and new customers with unprecedented performance and ac- cessibility for streamlining and simplifying design workflows," says Harald Egel, CEO/managing partner at Maxon Computer GmbH. "Release 18 builds upon that foundation with powerful new tools and refinements so that creative professionals can successfully handle the demands required in today's motion graphics, VFX and visualization environments." Cinema 4D Release 18 is scheduled to ship September 2016 and will be available for Mac OS X and Windows, with Linux nodes for rendering. QARNOT TAKES NEW APPROACH TO RENDERING PARIS — During SIGGRAPH, the French startup Qarnot (qarnot.com) pre- sented a new render farm that is around 4x cheaper than comparable solu- tions and produced 75 percent less carbon footprint. When the Norwegian studio Fabelfjord looked for rendering options for their movie Dunder, an original story based on a popular book universe, they had budget and time constraints. Qarnot attracted their attention. Based in the south of Paris, Qarnot offers a cloud-based online rendering service running on a distributed render farm. With a price of $0.25 per CPU per hour, Qarnot fit their budget and allowed them to meet their deadlines. For Endre Lund Eriksen, author of the book, scriptwriter and associate producer, the highlight was Qarnot's disruptive and green innovation. Qarnot is re-thinking data centers by breaking up the collection of servers previously centralized in energy-hungry facilities, and installs them into buildings in the form of Q.rad digital heaters. By avoiding data center costs related to infrastructure, maintenance and cooling, Qarnot produces 75 percent less of a carbon footprint. The service is based on two innovations: the Q.ware software distribution platform and the Q.rad digital heater. The Q.rad is the first connected digital heater using embedded computing processors as a heat source. Completely silent, it gets its computing instructions through the Internet. Processing workloads provides free and efficient heating for all types of premises. The Q.ware distributes computing workloads securely and efficiently on the Q.rad digital heater farm, according to the host's needs for heat and computing workload constraints. GPL & NVIDIA DEBUT DEEP LEARNING SUPER-COMPUTER LOS ANGELES — At SIGGRAPH, GPL Technologies (www.gpltech. com) partnered with Nvidia to showcase the latest new solutions for virtualization and deep learning. The two companies conducted a joint demonstration of a VDI workstation designed by GPL engi- neers and employing Nvidia's GRID technology. The demo featured a remote workstation running Mechdyne's TGX desktop software. "Nvidia's GRID technology has made it practical to run graph- ics-intensive applications such as Maya and Nuke on virtual desk- tops," says GPL Technologies' CEO Brian Terrell. "Visual effects producers can now enjoy the benefits of VDI, including security of assets, centralized workstations and the efficient utilization of HW resources in a pooled environment, just as they do with VM servers." A separate demonstration featured a workstation remotely logged into an Nvidia Quadro VCA and running an Iray GPU render- ing plug-in. The demo showed how Iray facilitates the creation of photorealistic imagery by delivering immediate visual feedback. GPL and Nvidia also provided an introduction to Nvidia's new- ly-developed DGX-1 — a deep learning super-computer. "Deep learning is one of the most significant new developments for visual effects producers," says Terrell. "By enabling machines to recognize images, deep learning has the potential to automate many routine tasks. Machines can now perform certain creative tasks."