Autodesk Stitcher 2009 for Mac.

Rob Hoffmann, Senior Product Marketing for 3D in Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment division said new to Stitcher 2009 is an all new image processing engine that fully automates the production of partial or spherical panoramas in a just a few clicks. 

Autodesk Stitcher 2009. Create fully spherical virtual tours with just two pictures taken with a fisheye lens.

In addition to the ability to produce “two-shot” fully spherical virtual QuickTimeVR movies quickly (using two photos taken with a fisheye-lens, Rob said the software auto-aligns the horizon of each photo in a series of images, making necessary adjustments at the top and bottom of each photo to produce the interactive panorama movie. 

Autodesk Stitcher 2009 on the Mac. The program supports "Hotspots" in the production of Apple QuickTimeVR movies for the Web.

When asked about linking up multiple QuickTimeVR’s Rob said: “Absolutely, Autodesk Stitcher 2009 has full Hotspot support allowing the creation of fully interactive and linked up QuickTimeVRs to each other.” 

Autodesk Stitcher 2009 also has full interoperability with Adobe Photoshop and support for many industry-standard image, Web and video file formats. And a big new feature is the new GPU acceleration optimization in the software. Now users will experience quicker preview rendering in the main Viewport and the GPU is also used to accelerate final renders.

Autodesk Meeting: Autodesk Stitcher 2009 Mac. The software can make complex lighting adjustments across a range of photos.

During the private press meeting I was treated to the software’s ability to account for differences in lighting and make lighting adjustments across a range of images. 

The software has a new UI (user interface) and redesigned workflow. To find and learn more about Autodesk Stitcher 2009 for the Mac please visit this page here.

“We’re thrilled that Autodesk is expanding its Mac 2D and 3D software offerings for our creative professionals.” said Ron Okamoto, Apple’s vice president of Worldwide Developer Relations.

Available Mac Products

While some products were previously announced for the Mac today Autodesk is unveiling Mac OS X support for Autodesk Mudbox 2009, Autodesk Toxik 2009, and Autodesk ImageModeler 2009 for the first time. Additional Mac products coming from Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment software division include Autodesk Maya 2009 and Autodesk Stitcher 2009. 

Outside of the M&E division Autodesk makes a few other native Mac OS X products, most notably Autodesk SketchBook Pro (a product formerly belonging to Alias) and Autodesk MotionBuilder 2008 (edit. note: the 2008 version is one version behind but available for Mac users to purchase, future versions for the Mac are in the works). 

Autodesk makes a big splash at Macworld SF 2009 - Introduces Five New Native Mac OS X Applications

“Given the growing adoption of Mac OS X and the production requirements of the Mac community, we’re excited to offer these premiere creative tools to Mac artists,” said Stig Gruman, Digital Entertainment Group vice president of Autodesk Media & Entertainment. “Autodesk’s product offerings will empower artistic vision and provide Mac users with the tools to bring their creative ideas to life.” 

As noted in this story yesterday, Autodesk’s announcements for Mac OS X signal a surging trend in Mac adoption and demand for Mac products from the world’s largest software developer of design software. With this major announcement, Autodesk is clearly signaling that it intends to fully meet that demand from its growing customers who prefer to work on Apple’s UNIX-based Mac OS X operating system. And this is a very exciting thing.

While most of the details of the announcement are under embargo until tomorrow what I can share today is the general tenor of the meeting and about how Autodesk is seeing the 3D and CAD industries evolving. The key bottom line is that the Mac is growing at an accelerating rate — not just within the overall computer industry per se but within the markets Autodesk serves in particular. 

Rob Hoffmann, Senior Product Marketing Manager of Autodesk’s Media & Entertainment division, said that the Mac has now become a common tool within the complex production pipelines in the entertainment industry. “If you asked me four years ago about the Mac I would have said they were a rare sight within the production studios, but now they are a common sight,” says Rob Hoffmann. “The Mac is just like any other platform within entertainment sharing the same roles as Windows and Linux.”

Autodesk’s World View – Let the Artists Decide

Autodesk’s new world view regarding platforms is actually not so new. “Autodesk has always been about serving the user,” says Hoffmann. “What we are experiencing across the entire Autodesk software portfolio is strong demand for Mac support.” 

When pressed for which products in particular are being requested more than others Hoffmann only stated that “besides the biggies” that everyone knows about (eg: AutoCAD) the company’s strategy in terms of current porting, future porting and future Mac products is based on a mixture of factors driven by such things as demand, complexity of software development (ie: how hard it is to accomplish Mac support) and relationships to other products in the portfolio that are already on the Mac. 

The three products that Autodesk will formerly announce tomorrow all share a common thread in their relation to each other and Maya. But more importantly, the three products that Autodesk is announcing for the Mac tomorrow also just the beginning.

Autodesk recently acquired RealViz and its popular ImageModeler which was a fully Mac native application. Now with the new Autodesk ImageModeler 2009 the product has become Windows-only. It should be pointed out that RealViz was a cross-platform developer and that ImageModeler is fully QuickTime architecture driven and requires Apple QuickTime 7 to work. Interestingly, the 3D is OpenGL 1.2 driven and requires a professional graphics card at the level of a Quadro 6xx series or an ATI FireGL 2007 series or better. Why this app doesn’t run on a Mac now is a question worth mentioning to the folks at Autodesk.

Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 is also a new app from RealViz. This tool is a superb application for creating partial or full spherical panoramas. The new version has a fully automatic engine (eg: stitching, alignment and color correction can be automated) and there is support for a double shot technique using two shots from a fisheye lens. HDR (high dynamic range) is now supported and there is full interoperability with Adobe Photoshop. GPU acceleration, selectable render area support and a redesigned user interface round out the application. Autodesk Stitcher Unlimited 2009 should be available on both Mac and Windows in October 2008.

Autodesk MotionBuilder 2009 was also introduced at Siggraph 2008. This product, originally from Kaydara, is also now a Windows only application despite being a strong Mac application at one time. In fact, its original developer was strongly encouraging Apple’s Mac OS X platform as the 3D artists’ platform of the future prior to selling his company to Autodesk. MotionBuilder 2009 is said to be the most significant release of the software since its inception. MotionBuilder is used to do both keyframing and motion capture processing. MotionBuilder 2009 has a deeper integration with Maya and 3ds Max, new real-time rendering in the viewport with support for advanced hardware shaders.

Next Limit at Siggraph

The Spanish company exhibited the upcoming RealFlow Rendering Toolkit and well as the latest version of Maxwell Render with its new SSS and Physical Sky Features.

NewTek News

NewTek introduced LightWave 9.5 for Windows at Siggraph with the Mac version still in a beta stage. The new Lightwave 9.5 features FiberFX, a complete hair and fur solution, a new lighting system and many improvements to animation, rendering and workflow. FiberFX is a new proprietary polygonal fiber modeler. Other improvements include radiosity render disk-based caches for faster performance, a new API structure for its lighting system (now third-parties can write plugins for custom lights and controls) and new inverse kinematics (IK) z-axis capabilities.