NWoolridge
07-29-2003, 11:34 PM
[I apologize for this cross post from postforum, but thought some of you might be interested]
An initial report from Siggraph...
Bodypaint 2 looks good. The workflow enhancements are good, and the projection painting and relax UVs features are very well-appreciated. This should make texturing even more fun... In my dreams, it would have supported live displacement (it does, but only on the relief object...). Even better would have been reyes-style micropoly displacement, but a technology that significant needs to be rolled out in the C4D core first, I guess.
As an added bonus, the C4D update (8.2?) to support the new BP will include some goodies like texture groups and more customizable command keys and mouse buttons, so Maya users will finally be able to set up their camera navigation to match Maya...
Remarkably, Apple is not showing a G5 at their booth. Why they decided not to take advantage of the buzz about the G5 with one of its prime target markets is anyone's guess. I heard many grumbles from people milling around the booth. Their booth consists of a classroom where you can be introduced to their Pro production apps (Shake, Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro). Bizarrely, there is a G5 on display, but at Pixar's booth, and it was a popular draw. They had benchmarks for a production scene frame render from Finding Nemo, which went something like this (if I have recalled the times wrong please correct me; I am assuming that these were similarly configured machines, but the Pixar guys didn't say):
Processor....................Compiler.......Time
Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz......icc................4:04 min
Dual G5 2.0 Ghz.........gcc...............3:36 min
Of note: icc is intel's optimized compiler, which produces a speedup (for Pixar) of 40% over gcc on intel. The gcc and Renderman code on the G5 has not yet been optimized, and the Pixar techs think they can wring out more performance yet.
By badgering an Apple rep I was able to get invited to a hotel suite to see a G5 and a Shake demo. Shake is very impressive technology, which speed and flexibility to burn (doing a huge range (100 pixel) gaussian blur on a 3k frame from Xmen 2 took about 2 seconds). There is support all over for 16-bit and floating point (HDR) graphics, which will be more and more a part of the future (see below for some amazing HDR display tech). The G5 is very impressive in person: astonishingly quiet (which you couldn't appreciate on the show floor at Pixar's booth), beautifully finished (the handles won't hurt your hands), and snappy (tm).
In other 64-bit news, Boxx technolgies were showing off their their very impressive Opteron machines.
There are some very cool technologies on display here. Display being the operative word: Viewsonic was showing their new 22 inch flat panel. It is 204 dpi, at a resolution of 3840 x 2400. The images are absolutely stunning; type looks anmazingly crisp, and photos have that lean-in-to-resolve-all-the-detail quality. Of course, only a few graphics cards can support that resolution, and I'm sure OpenGL acceleration would be crippled at that res, but its a welcome sign of the future.
Even more interesting, and more in the future probably, were prototype HDR displays from BC Canada-based Sunnybrook Technolgies in the Emerging Technolgies pavilion. This will be a revolution, folks. These guys have removed the backlight from standard LCD displays and replaced it with an active white LED panel. This allows an increase in contrast ratio from the LCD standard of 200:1 to 400:1 to an astonishing 60,000:1. The amazing thing looking at the displays was suddenly seeing all the range that is normally missing on even a good display. On their displays, dark was truly dark (they can turn _off_ the backlight behind dark areas, unlike a standard LCD where the backlight is always on, and black is really gray) and bright was really bright (they were showing an HDR version of Paul Debevec's Fiat Lux, where the glows really emitted light...). The computational cost is minimal for a GPU to display this stuff (small driver tweaks), and they showed realtime interactions with an HDR environment that were amazing. The sense of depth that this dynamic range produced was remarkable, and shows that part of what our depth perception is about involves real-world bright and dark levels.
I'll never look at a normal monitor the same way again.
Hope to have more soon...
Nick
An initial report from Siggraph...
Bodypaint 2 looks good. The workflow enhancements are good, and the projection painting and relax UVs features are very well-appreciated. This should make texturing even more fun... In my dreams, it would have supported live displacement (it does, but only on the relief object...). Even better would have been reyes-style micropoly displacement, but a technology that significant needs to be rolled out in the C4D core first, I guess.
As an added bonus, the C4D update (8.2?) to support the new BP will include some goodies like texture groups and more customizable command keys and mouse buttons, so Maya users will finally be able to set up their camera navigation to match Maya...
Remarkably, Apple is not showing a G5 at their booth. Why they decided not to take advantage of the buzz about the G5 with one of its prime target markets is anyone's guess. I heard many grumbles from people milling around the booth. Their booth consists of a classroom where you can be introduced to their Pro production apps (Shake, Final Cut, DVD Studio Pro). Bizarrely, there is a G5 on display, but at Pixar's booth, and it was a popular draw. They had benchmarks for a production scene frame render from Finding Nemo, which went something like this (if I have recalled the times wrong please correct me; I am assuming that these were similarly configured machines, but the Pixar guys didn't say):
Processor....................Compiler.......Time
Dual Xeon 2.8 Ghz......icc................4:04 min
Dual G5 2.0 Ghz.........gcc...............3:36 min
Of note: icc is intel's optimized compiler, which produces a speedup (for Pixar) of 40% over gcc on intel. The gcc and Renderman code on the G5 has not yet been optimized, and the Pixar techs think they can wring out more performance yet.
By badgering an Apple rep I was able to get invited to a hotel suite to see a G5 and a Shake demo. Shake is very impressive technology, which speed and flexibility to burn (doing a huge range (100 pixel) gaussian blur on a 3k frame from Xmen 2 took about 2 seconds). There is support all over for 16-bit and floating point (HDR) graphics, which will be more and more a part of the future (see below for some amazing HDR display tech). The G5 is very impressive in person: astonishingly quiet (which you couldn't appreciate on the show floor at Pixar's booth), beautifully finished (the handles won't hurt your hands), and snappy (tm).
In other 64-bit news, Boxx technolgies were showing off their their very impressive Opteron machines.
There are some very cool technologies on display here. Display being the operative word: Viewsonic was showing their new 22 inch flat panel. It is 204 dpi, at a resolution of 3840 x 2400. The images are absolutely stunning; type looks anmazingly crisp, and photos have that lean-in-to-resolve-all-the-detail quality. Of course, only a few graphics cards can support that resolution, and I'm sure OpenGL acceleration would be crippled at that res, but its a welcome sign of the future.
Even more interesting, and more in the future probably, were prototype HDR displays from BC Canada-based Sunnybrook Technolgies in the Emerging Technolgies pavilion. This will be a revolution, folks. These guys have removed the backlight from standard LCD displays and replaced it with an active white LED panel. This allows an increase in contrast ratio from the LCD standard of 200:1 to 400:1 to an astonishing 60,000:1. The amazing thing looking at the displays was suddenly seeing all the range that is normally missing on even a good display. On their displays, dark was truly dark (they can turn _off_ the backlight behind dark areas, unlike a standard LCD where the backlight is always on, and black is really gray) and bright was really bright (they were showing an HDR version of Paul Debevec's Fiat Lux, where the glows really emitted light...). The computational cost is minimal for a GPU to display this stuff (small driver tweaks), and they showed realtime interactions with an HDR environment that were amazing. The sense of depth that this dynamic range produced was remarkable, and shows that part of what our depth perception is about involves real-world bright and dark levels.
I'll never look at a normal monitor the same way again.
Hope to have more soon...
Nick