This year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences expanded the Best Visual Effects category to five nominated films, for the upcoming Oscars. Studios involved in visual effects for all five nominations utilized Nvidia Quadro professional graphics solutions.

Studios involved included Double Negative (DNeg), ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), Scanline VFX, and Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI). A common thread among the work of most of these studios is the customization of proprietary software around Nvidia CUDA architecture for parallel computing. Stephen Trojansky, president of Scanline VFX LA said: “We are investing heavily into implementing various forms of GPU acceleration into our pipeline, and are starting to see speed improvements of more than 10 times as we integrate more of these components into our workflow.”

This year’s nominated films for visual effects are: Inception, Iron Man 2, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Alice and Wonderland and Hereafter.

Dosch 3D has new product called Freight Ships

Dosch Design has a new product featuring freight ships. The completely textured 3D models of various freight ships are compatible with nearly all 3D software programs because they ship in multiple file formats such as 3DS, 3dsmax, Lightwave, OBJ, Maya, VRML, Softimage and Cinema 4D.

01 - Dosch 3D Freigth Ships.

You can use these models in programs as diverse as Artlantis Studio to formZ to Vectorworks. The list of compatible programs is quite extensive and can found here on the product detail sheet. The CD-ROM is 149.USD and is Mac and Windows compatible.

John Gage to Keynote COFES 2011

Former Sun Microsystems chief researcher and creator of the phrase “The Network is the Computer” is to address the future of network-aided design at the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software (COFES) event, being held in Scottsdale, Arizona from 14-17 April, 2011.

John Gage was the many behind many of Sun’s most successful product developments. He left the company in 2008 to join Kleiner Perkins as a partner working on green technologies to help combat global warming. Among his current projects is a global initiative to enable all schools to connect to power and communication networks in the most energy-efficient manner, making use of innovative advanced control systems for lighting.

COFES is a leading annual event for BIM/CAD/CAE/PLM and related software technology industries. The invite-only event brings leading thinkers and practitioners from the community of users and vendors of software for design and engineering together so they can interact in intellectually vigorous conversations, without their sales and marketing hats on. To learn more visit: http://cofes.com

An interesting note from a conference call question was that Oracle President Safra Catz said that Oracle believes it can run Sun at substantially higher margins. It is not clear exactly how Oracle could do that without cutting costs associated with Sun projects. 

Java is a critical middleware software for Oracle’s database software projects and now Oracle will own and control a major industry standard that effects all platforms, including Apple’s. And Ellison was quoted a saying Sun’s Solaris operating system is “by far the best Unix technology on the market.”

In years past Sun and Apple talked of mergers and when Apple was at its low point in the late 90’s Ellison may have played a role in encouraging the idea of the two hooking up. Larry Ellison is a best friend to Steve Jobs and the two share a common enemy in the tech industry up in Redmond. 

The idea that Sun and Apple could make strong bed mates (today) went something like this:

• Sun has great tech but bad marketing. Apple has great marketing and would be able to help solve this problem. 
• Sun has a strong enterprise sales and support team that can help Apple in the enterprise market.
• Mac OS X and Solaris could share some common tech benefitting both tremendously, especially some of Solaris in OS X. 
• Apple could push and utilize Sun’s storage in its media and video markets where Apple dominates.
• The brilliant sparc chip engineers could join up with the brilliant PA Semi chip team at Apple, and engineer even more wonderful micro-processors. This indeed is very compelling!!

But here are some other ideas that could be interesting for Sun. Earlier I wrote about Sun’s Virtualbox virtualization tool and the possibility of reviving its engineering workstation legacy vis-a-vis the use of Apple’s Mac Pro workstations. In this scenario Sun could work closely with Apple to leverage its new Grand Central and OpenCL technologies in the upcoming Snow Leopard OS, concentrating efforts on performance of OpenGL, OpenCL and native graphics support in the virtualization space. 

Additionally, Sun could foster an interest in running Solaris in its own Virtualbox as an industry Unix workstation platform, giving Mac Pro customers even more options. Sun could sell Virtualbox in the future preconfigured for a guest Solaris install and highly tuned and configured for engineering and science on the Mac Pro. 

What this does today is allow Oracle’s Sun to take a step backwards on the Sun workstation front and put the hardware part squarely in the hands of a good friend (Steve Jobs & Co.). At the same time, Apple could update both Boot Camp and work together with Oracle’s Sun to focus Virtualbox on becoming the strongest performing virtualization tool for engineering and CAD, thereby enabling thousands of engineers and scientists with deep history in Solaris-based workflows to continue along in this direction but with the added benefit and flexibility of Mac OS X behind them. This helps Solaris stay meaningful in the high-end science and engineering world.

Virtualbox + Solaris for Mac Pro would be one hot product if given the proper attention in this, albeit, dreamy scenario!!

Commentary: Do you like this idea? Shout back below, we’d love to hear from you on this.

Unlike the overall 3D market, the CAD market is still–regretfully–intensely Windows-based. Mac users have been crying out for numerous applications for years, such as SolidWorks, AutoCAD, ProE, Revit, and the list goes on. To the benefit of having a Windows CAD inside your Mac is strong–even if it must live inside Windows itself. 

VirtualBox 2.1.4

Sun’s latest VirtualBox 2.1.4 now supports Intel’s VT-x hardware virtualization. This means it taps the specific hardware on the latest Intel x86 microprocessors which allows these chips to do virtualization of operating systems. 

Sun's VirtualBox is a free virtualization software for Mac OS X (intel machines).

The new version of VirtualBox 2.1.4 also gains two features useful to running PC-based CAD apps on your Mac. The first of these is support for OpenGL. Currently this support is in a type of beta mode and is therefore installs in “off mode” but is easy to turn back on. The second feature is 64-bit support. This is less important for those running CAD apps on the Mac in virtualized environments. 

Sun’s VirtualBox may be lagging its main competitors Parallels and VMware’s Fusion but it has one powerful feature in its arsenal: it’s free! This likely means that development will continue to lag unless Sun deems the development of VirtualBox very important. 

Sun’s website for VirtualBox list companion projects in which Sun participates and these include notable items such as: OpenSolaris, OpenOffice.org, MySQL, NetBeans and GlassFish.

Virtualization in Support of Highend UNIX CAD

It would be neat if there were three high-quality virtualization products for the Mac OS X platform. It would be even neater if Sun concentrated its Virtualbox virtualization software suite on reviving its engineering workstation legacy vis-a-vis the use of Apple’s Mac Pro workstations. Think of it as Sun building a virtualization environment centered around helping former Sun and SGI workstation customers build out a killer workstation platform on the Mac Pro lineup. Sun could work extra closely with Apple to leverage its new Grand Central and OpenCL technologies in the upcoming Snow Leopard operating system helping it out-perform its competition in OpenGL speed and multi-processing. 

A best-in-breed virtualization platform for CAD and engineering would seek to tailor the software to optimize OpenGL acceleration beyond what Parallels and VMware have done. It would also seek to leverage engineering CAD’s UNIX past by allowing the easiest installation and optimal setup of guest UNIX operating systems like Sun’s Solaris. Sun could sell Virtualbox in the future preconfigured for a guest Solaris install and highly configured for engineering and science on the Mac Pros. 

In contrast to the commentary published earlier today on an online petition effort to revive Sun’s Sparc workstation line, those seeking former UNIX CAD glory should possibly embrace the strategy outlined above. In doing so they could push Sun into a unique position wherein UNIX guest support for engineering, CAD and science becomes a major product differentiator in the virtualization market wars.

Personally, I think the petition is a lost cause. Former SUN and SGI CAD engineers should not only keep using the UNIX-based Mac Pros but adopt them in greater number. Apple is on the bleeding edge of hardware and software development, with its new OpenCL industry standard sure to take off quickly as most of the key industry players are behind it. OpenCL will increase OpenGL adoption as well in the gaming sector and buttress the cross-platform graphics API standard further in engineering, visualization and CAD. And with tools like the quality virtualization products by VMware and Parallels Mac Pros can be fully setup as Solaris-based UNIX stations as well. 

Nevertheless, some former SGI and Sun workstation buffs may wish to sign on the dotted line. But before you do, perhaps you should take a gander again at the Mac Pro.