gmask
04-10-2003, 06:37 PM
I made a quick trip to Las Vegas this year for NAB. I drove through the desert between LA and Las Vegas which was worth the trip on it's own due to the incredible desert and mountain terrain. I stayed at Circus Circus which was conviently close to the convention center. Circus Circus is I guess on e fo the older casinos and has the design of keeping you in.. very disorienting. It is the casino that has the carosel bar that was in the movie Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.
Word on the strip was that attendence was low this year at the conference. Personally I could not tell the first day of exhibits seemed somewhat crowded especially in the graphic hall. The other halls did seem to be less filled and the second day there did seem to be fewer attendees than one might expect.
Apple and Avid seemed to be the two big contenders this year and were prominently installed at the front entrance of the exhibit hall. Over the Apple section was a banner that said something like the ultimate platform for desktop blah blah.. They are definately going for the throat. The focus of their exhibit was Shake and their various hardware packages. Seems like HD will be coming to a desktop near you soon. I guess they have also acquired Logic and are trying to make it their total audio design package as well.
I didn't spend very much time at the Avid booth.. There is a new version of XSI 3.5 which is mainly a list of changes/improvements that were requested by ILM.
The discreet booth also seemed to be relatively amped up.. I didn't notice anything eye poping but supposedly Combustion was making many sales at the show.
The Newtek booth was very small.
I stopped by my old friends at Media100 and they are still kicking it with their 844 product.
HP had a relatively large booth and had pods for both XSI and Maya.. AVID and Maya demo artists were sort of roaming around going between various booths. Microsoft had pods as well.. I didn't pay any attention to what they had to show.
SGI was at the very back in a much smaller booth that other years I had went but this is no surprise. I was there for the maya 5 demo.
I can't say that I got a really in depth view of what's been done but from my POV that are improving support for MR that adds all of the highend rendering features that users have been asking for and the use of OpenGL rendering adds a super fast way for single system users to produce 3d based motion graphics and even visual effects without a render farm. Adding vector output should appeal to a large number of users as well as it gives two features that mid range users ahve been clamoring for.. output to flash and a toon look that actually creates contours.
It feels to me that they have been listening a litte and are trying to address user needs as fast as they can. The demo artist spoke with said that they are trying to reduce the release cycles and they are paying attention to the feature request page on the aw site and the one at digimation.
Mental Ray now supports Sub-d's and software particles! How many people complained about that? Many.
The previous Ik/FK switch was a joke but now that it can blend it makes alot of sense and you won't need to make duplicate skeletons anymore. The other contraints that have been added also make what were tedious animation effects much easier.
90% speed improvement on dynamics.. that's cool .. I allways like it when things are speed up %90. Just think what that could do for a dynamic muscle system.
Why is it really cool that PaintFX can now be turned into Geometry? For one it will allow Complete users to use PFX for hair and such without having to render in seperate passes and actually generate shadows and use them with raytracing without jumping through hoops. I allways thought PFX was pretty cool but because it was a post process only feature it's usability was limited I think it became overlooked but maybe now it will hold more interest. Pfx is a great way to detail an environment and now that you can convert it into geometry it should be really impressive.
I will also say that even though some attention has been paid to the whole rendering pipeline that there still could be improvements to the render layers.. such as being able to instance geometry and assign and render it in seperate render layers.
Even though there has been some work done on the polygon editting tool set there are probably several tools missing still.
So overall they have made improvements to many of the more recent features and still introduced a few new features all together. I will say though that I think there are several areas that are part of the core program that really need improvement that I'd rather see in the next version before any new features.. from my end of things it would be better render layers. Non-destructive grouping of objects and shaders in render layers, more orgranizational aspects of the hypershader like folders for your shaders and lights.. whatever. The grapheditor is starting to feel really old.
I think Maya 5 is great for single and small shop users.. it probably does not add as much for large shops who have development teams of their own although there have been improments to the API. This version would probably not warrant a changeover mid production. The improvement of hardware rendering for supported video cards is definately a boone to broadcast users who have very demanding schedules and daily tasks. Some compositing programs are also headed in this direction. There has been much talk about GPU's being the wave of the future and AW seems to be trying to ride that wave.
I checked out pretty much all the exhibit halls and the only other thing I heard abotu that I wante dto see was this new bluescreen systemt hat uses a reflective bead cloth and a blue LED ring that fits around your camera lesn to get super bluescreen action indoors or outdoors. While trying to find their booth I was attacked byt he Maxell booth's pet robot who kept asking me what brand of media I used and was trying to get frisky with me.
Unfortunately when I finally found the location of the booth it was gone.. I don't know if it was moved or if they cancelled.
The last night I was there myself and a friend went over to the Luxor where I managed to win about $100 out of slot machine after putting $30 into it. I then went over and almost won $200 playing black jack and then lost $200 again in about 20 minutes.. I managed to walk away without having lost any of the money I started out with.
The next day I made a few more rounds at the convention center and then got a flat tire pulling out of the convention center.. so much for my slot machine profits. I managed to get back on the road about an hour later, then took a nap in my car near Death Valley and almost made it back to LA before I started to have a little car trouble. In the end I made it back safe and sound without having spent too much on the whole trip.. all in all a good adventure.
http://www.gmask.com/MB/deathvalleyMB.jpg
Word on the strip was that attendence was low this year at the conference. Personally I could not tell the first day of exhibits seemed somewhat crowded especially in the graphic hall. The other halls did seem to be less filled and the second day there did seem to be fewer attendees than one might expect.
Apple and Avid seemed to be the two big contenders this year and were prominently installed at the front entrance of the exhibit hall. Over the Apple section was a banner that said something like the ultimate platform for desktop blah blah.. They are definately going for the throat. The focus of their exhibit was Shake and their various hardware packages. Seems like HD will be coming to a desktop near you soon. I guess they have also acquired Logic and are trying to make it their total audio design package as well.
I didn't spend very much time at the Avid booth.. There is a new version of XSI 3.5 which is mainly a list of changes/improvements that were requested by ILM.
The discreet booth also seemed to be relatively amped up.. I didn't notice anything eye poping but supposedly Combustion was making many sales at the show.
The Newtek booth was very small.
I stopped by my old friends at Media100 and they are still kicking it with their 844 product.
HP had a relatively large booth and had pods for both XSI and Maya.. AVID and Maya demo artists were sort of roaming around going between various booths. Microsoft had pods as well.. I didn't pay any attention to what they had to show.
SGI was at the very back in a much smaller booth that other years I had went but this is no surprise. I was there for the maya 5 demo.
I can't say that I got a really in depth view of what's been done but from my POV that are improving support for MR that adds all of the highend rendering features that users have been asking for and the use of OpenGL rendering adds a super fast way for single system users to produce 3d based motion graphics and even visual effects without a render farm. Adding vector output should appeal to a large number of users as well as it gives two features that mid range users ahve been clamoring for.. output to flash and a toon look that actually creates contours.
It feels to me that they have been listening a litte and are trying to address user needs as fast as they can. The demo artist spoke with said that they are trying to reduce the release cycles and they are paying attention to the feature request page on the aw site and the one at digimation.
Mental Ray now supports Sub-d's and software particles! How many people complained about that? Many.
The previous Ik/FK switch was a joke but now that it can blend it makes alot of sense and you won't need to make duplicate skeletons anymore. The other contraints that have been added also make what were tedious animation effects much easier.
90% speed improvement on dynamics.. that's cool .. I allways like it when things are speed up %90. Just think what that could do for a dynamic muscle system.
Why is it really cool that PaintFX can now be turned into Geometry? For one it will allow Complete users to use PFX for hair and such without having to render in seperate passes and actually generate shadows and use them with raytracing without jumping through hoops. I allways thought PFX was pretty cool but because it was a post process only feature it's usability was limited I think it became overlooked but maybe now it will hold more interest. Pfx is a great way to detail an environment and now that you can convert it into geometry it should be really impressive.
I will also say that even though some attention has been paid to the whole rendering pipeline that there still could be improvements to the render layers.. such as being able to instance geometry and assign and render it in seperate render layers.
Even though there has been some work done on the polygon editting tool set there are probably several tools missing still.
So overall they have made improvements to many of the more recent features and still introduced a few new features all together. I will say though that I think there are several areas that are part of the core program that really need improvement that I'd rather see in the next version before any new features.. from my end of things it would be better render layers. Non-destructive grouping of objects and shaders in render layers, more orgranizational aspects of the hypershader like folders for your shaders and lights.. whatever. The grapheditor is starting to feel really old.
I think Maya 5 is great for single and small shop users.. it probably does not add as much for large shops who have development teams of their own although there have been improments to the API. This version would probably not warrant a changeover mid production. The improvement of hardware rendering for supported video cards is definately a boone to broadcast users who have very demanding schedules and daily tasks. Some compositing programs are also headed in this direction. There has been much talk about GPU's being the wave of the future and AW seems to be trying to ride that wave.
I checked out pretty much all the exhibit halls and the only other thing I heard abotu that I wante dto see was this new bluescreen systemt hat uses a reflective bead cloth and a blue LED ring that fits around your camera lesn to get super bluescreen action indoors or outdoors. While trying to find their booth I was attacked byt he Maxell booth's pet robot who kept asking me what brand of media I used and was trying to get frisky with me.
Unfortunately when I finally found the location of the booth it was gone.. I don't know if it was moved or if they cancelled.
The last night I was there myself and a friend went over to the Luxor where I managed to win about $100 out of slot machine after putting $30 into it. I then went over and almost won $200 playing black jack and then lost $200 again in about 20 minutes.. I managed to walk away without having lost any of the money I started out with.
The next day I made a few more rounds at the convention center and then got a flat tire pulling out of the convention center.. so much for my slot machine profits. I managed to get back on the road about an hour later, then took a nap in my car near Death Valley and almost made it back to LA before I started to have a little car trouble. In the end I made it back safe and sound without having spent too much on the whole trip.. all in all a good adventure.
http://www.gmask.com/MB/deathvalleyMB.jpg