SIGGRAPH 2012 wrapped on Thursday of last week. With extensive reporting from the show floor, fxguide discusses news from Side Effects, the RenderMan user group, NVIDIA, Massive, Open Source, DreamWorks and more.
Side Effects made several key announcements including a rebranding of its flagship product, Houdini Master, as Houdini FX; a new pricing structure ($4,495 for Houdini FX and $1,1994 for Houdini — formerly known as Houdini Escape); elimination of the $800 fee for the Annual Upgrade Plan; and a new asset marketplace called Orbolt, designed to help artists create and sell 3D assets.
The article notes that the new Houdini FX “includes all Houdini features with a focus on particles, fluids, Pyro FX, cloth, wire and rigid body dynamics.”
The Pixar RenderMan User group had an impressive turnout when it met Wednesday night. “RenderMan had a huge release with version 16,” explains the article. “The next release builds on this and improves performance. Gold mastering on the new RMS 4 and RPS 17 is very soon with a ‘wide’ beta starting the week after SIGGRAPH, and the final gold mastering planned for the end of September. Interestingly, with the new rolling release schedule, 17.1 b1 release will follow not long after around the 1st of November.”
NVIDIA unveiled its Maximus second generation workstation platform and the latest versions of its Quadro and Tesla cards.
“Maximus certified workstations (from HP, Dell, etc.) contain two NVIDIA cards — a matched Quadro GPU as well as a Tesla GPU,” explains the article. “This divides the tasks normally done with a single card; the Quadro drives the display and the Tesla card is used for computationally intensive tasks, such as fluid dynamics simulation, GPU rendering, and real-time color correction.”
The new Quadro K5000 will ship in October at $2,249 and the Tesla K20 is slated for December availability at $3,199.
Massive 5.0 was unveiled, the company’s first major release since February 2010. “The new 5.0 aims to address long-term user requests, new features and some interesting extensions,” notes the article.
“What is of even more interest is not just what Massive is releasing but how teams are using it. DreamWorks in particular presented a brilliant paper at DigiPro 2012 (SIGGRAPH co-located event) on accessing the Massive sim output data directly and using it to improve the characters that the agents drive by having a high quality render time deformation engine (RTD), where high quality character geometry is generated on the fly,” explains fxguide.
“This technique required significant changes to DreamWorks’ animation rigs. Character TDs created Multidimensional Rigs, where a character can run in a ‘service mode,’ interfacing with the RTD server to deliver any model in a crowd for any pose as requested by the renderer.”
Stephen Regelous, founder of Massive software, demonstrated the company’s latest work in crowd simulation, the details of which are provided in the article (including related videos).
This fxguide article features tech specs, video demos and performance evaluations for these products and others. An earlier fxguide write-up includes highlights of session reviews, tech papers and notable new software releases.
SIGGRAPH 2012 wrapped on Thursday of last week. With extensive reporting from the show floor, fxguide discusses news from Side Effects, the RenderMan user group, NVIDIA, Massive, Open Source, DreamWorks and more.
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