SIG: Apple’s Macs have good presence at SIGGRAPH 2015 show

The 2015 SIGGRAPH show in Los Angeles is running this week and Architosh associate editor, Akiko, Ashley, is there on the show floor meeting companies and checking out what is new in the world of computer graphics and professional 3D markets. Architosh has already released several news reports covering new items, special offers (be sure to check out LightWave 3D’s 90-free trial offer) and other news items. And we have more to come.

Show Floor Action

While Ms Ashley reported in she wished the show floor was a bit more crowded (there has been a decline in attendance in conferences and expos in general since the Great Recession) —for the sake of the vendors of course—from the looks of her pictures it seems SIGGRAPH 2015 has plenty to offer its participants. Below find a sampling of some of the expo action.

01 – LA Expo Center, SIGGRAPH’s most popular home it seems. (image: Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.)

The Foundry is at SIGGRAPH 2015 in LA as well, expected of course, showing off their growing arsenal of professional 3D and film-related software solutions used in the world’s most demanding production pipelines across studios worldwide.

The Foundry now owns the popular and growing MODO 3D application package so those wondering if Luxology is there that’s where they are now. A bit of good news about the Mac at The Foundry—the word given to Akiko Ashley is that the company is very much behind the Mac in professional 3D and recommends it to their customers. This isn’t to say they recommend the Mac over Windows to their customers, but that they strongly recommend the Mac for running their software solutions. The Foundry’s Mari was showcased in an Apple WWDC a few years back in reference to what is possible with OpenCL and OpenGL development optionality for targeting the GPU for performance acceleration. (image 02)

02 – The Foundry is at the show with its growing 3D and film production line up. Their software solutions range from Nuke to modo and Mari and the company is, based on conversations with Architosh, very much behind the Apple Mac in pro 3D. (image: Akiko Ashley, All rights reserved.)

Autodesk is at the show, naturally, and showing off its very large suite of 3D and film related production tools used in the largest studios in the world behind Hollywood.

The company was showing its Autodesk Shotgun, a production pipeline management system that is secure and scalable through the cloud, on a pair of counter-facing Apple iMacs. You can see bits of the Nvidia booth behind the picture below. (image 03)

03 – Autodesk is demonstrating Shotgun on a pair of iMacs at SIGGRAPH. (image: Akiko Ashley, All rights reserved.)

So there is this skull made up of constructed screen technology that changes throughout the day at SIGGRAPH 2015. As you can see the skull is quite large (notice the man at the bottom right of the image below–04).

Ms Ashley sent in several images of the skull and we will show more later. Hopefully we can learn a bit more about this artistic construct as well.

04 – There is this incredible skull constructed of screen technology that is constantly changing at the show. This is one picture…we have more to share on this later. (image: Akiko Ashley, All rights reserved.)

Below is another utilization of Apple’s new Mac Pro at the show. This seems to be from the AMD booth but we will need to confirm from Ms Ashley a bit later (she’s been busy meeting vendors getting product release details and a whole lot more!)

05 – Another use of the Apple new Mac Pro at SIGGRAPH. (image: Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.)

Despite the controversy surrounding Apple’s new Mac Pro, the unit is quite popular in many circles within the world of 3D. Where it is not, is when the production pipeline involves Nvidia’s CUDA architecture, since the new Mac Pro doesn’t have an option for a CUDA capable GPU setup. The twin AMD professional workstation class GPU powered Mac is, however, the most powerful desktop Mac Apple has ever produced…and quite possibly its most beautiful.

More to come…!