SIG: A Highlight Overview of SIGGRAPH 2013 with Perspectives on Mac

SIGGRAPH 2013 was held in Anaheim, California July 21st to July 25th.  Anaheim is a location made famous by a cartoon mouse with a theme park castle. This is a really good location for SIGGRAPH. Hotels surround the Convention Center plus plenty of tasty restaurants.  You can walk everywhere without a car. I started my day off at a “networking breakfast” sponsored by Ontario, Canada. It was a good networking event that explored opportunities in Ontario.

SIGGRAPH was noticeably smaller then previous years, a trend that seems to be true year after year.  Is the size of SIGGRAPH really about the economy, changes in the industry, or the tradeshow business model?  This is a question attendees chatted about as they walked the Exhibitor floor.

Autodesk announced their company would not have a booth at SIGGRAPH this year or in the future as the Autodesk strategy has changed. The Autodesk User Group still happened on schedule, Tuesday night at 6pm. It wasn’t just Autodesk…ILM, Rhythm & Hues, Blue Sky, Apple and Adobe did not have booths at the show either. SIGGRAPH did not go without controversy as badge holders walked by the Massive booth, to see the only item in the booth–an old television with a snowy screen. If you went to website a partial explanation with the word “Change the Future”.  The Job Fair was a quarter of the size (compared to the past) with only a handful of studios recruiting.  Pixologic, NVIDIA, and NewTek still had a huge presence with packed booths. AMD was showing off their FirePro card with OpenCL acceleration.

The message from vendors this year was about collaboration. For example Houdini introduced Houdini Engine, which allows deep integration of their technology into other DCC packages like Maya, Lightwave, and 3DS Max. NewTek introduced Chronoscope, a stand alone 3D interactive sculpting package that has a flexible interface that supports all 3D professional programs including 3DS Max, Maya, and CINEMA 4D. The Foundry and Pixar announced collaboration between Katana and Renderman. LightWorks announced their collaboration with NVIDIA on IRay+.

I walked around SIGGRAPH Exhibit floor to talk to a few vendors about their product announcements in the world of visualization.

Maxon announced the new version of CINEMA 4D R15 with new improvements such as all new beveling modeling efficiency, interactive kerning for advanced 3D typography, and Team Render the ability to conveniently render across networks using the CINEMA 4D interface. When I was on the show floor, I tried to see Team Render at work at the Maxon Booth but it was not on display. It certainly does sound like Maxon is listening to their user base.

LightWorks, one of the top leading suppliers of rendering solutions announced an exclusive reseller agreement with NVIDIA to release their new rendering solution Iray+. Iray+ from LightWorks builds upon NVIDIA’s iray rendering technology giving users an intuitive way to access rendering capabilities for highly accurate visualization to the masses. Iray+ is accelerated using CUDA. LightWorks’ layer in Iray+ enables the intense power of NVIDIA’s physically-based, interactive, photorealistic rendering within an intuitive pipeline. The results blew me away. A tech explained how you could enter IES data for your lights to get a sense of how the lights will look in the environment you are designing…with real time feedback you can make changes on the fly. Iray+ comes stocked with an extensive material library with fast track interfaces, which allows for visualization accuracy and quality.  The combination of the NVIDIA and LightWorks collaborating on Iray+ will not be ignored in the CAD industry…as it brings high quality visualization to the masses. These advantages will be exclusive to the NVIDIA GPU cards in the market. Sadly and curiously, I wonder how this will affect Apple’s new upcoming Mac Pro?

next page: Next Limit, AMD Fire Pro and more…

Next Limit was showing off a new version of their photo realistic rendering software Maxwell used by many companies & individuals for visualizations. Maxwell has plugin support for many software packages that run on both the PC and Mac. FormZ, SketchUp, ArchiCAD, are just a few. Maxwell delivers beautiful renders quickly, at a cost efficient price tag for unforgiving deadlines. If you use SketchUp, you can actually render using the SketchUp Interface. Next Limit announced that Version 3 of Maxwell would be released soon with lots of improvements including faster rendering of high quality renderings for designers working with demanding clients.

I went to the AMD booth curious after the announcement of the new Mac Pro equipped with two FirePro cards. AMD was showing off the capabilities of the new FirePro card on the PC as Apple hasn’t released any demo models of the Mac Pro yet.  The FirePro card is definitely powerful for doing complex visualizations (though Iray will not run on this card). When I entered the AMD booth Adobe was showing off Adobe Premiere and Adobe After Effects on a big screen demonstrating OpenCL acceleration. Adobe was quick to illustrate complex tasks in Premiere with real time rendering in real time while making changes with After Effects concurrently, it didn’t stutter. OpenCL acceleration on the FirePro card is truly impressive. Imagine what two of these cards will be like on the Mac Pro.

NVIDIA announced at SIGGRAPH the Quadro K6000, demonstrating real time visualization on the fly with highly complex urban environment models. 12 Gigabyte of memory with 2880 cores makes this a workhorse graphics solution. Though this card is not available on the Mac it is worth noting. VFX Artist Scott Metzger was doing demonstrations at the NVIDA booth, he did a 3D laser scan of the interior of a building plus the exterior of an entire street and imported the high scale geometry model into Maya while making dynamic changes interactively on screen. It was insane!

NVIDIA also was demoing their NVIDIA Grid VCA (Visual Computing Appliance). It is a turnkey network device that allows eight users to seamlessly access graphics intensive applications from a Mac, Windows, or Linux Computer. The GRID VCA allows users to work as if you had a top of the line workstation solution in front of you. Users are easily added or deleted depending on the needs of your pipeline. Mac users! this might be your solution if Apple doesn’t have a Mac Pro with an NVIDIA Quadro card or support for CUDA,  and you want to use Iray+ for huge projects. You could use this GRID VCA as a solution for using software like Iray+. I would recommend this solution for bigger firms since this is a high cost product. The GRID VCA runs about $24,999 plus $24,000 a year for the software. Firms with clients who want instant gratification will find it with this solution.

After the show I attended Pixar’s Renderman User Group by invitation, and The Shotgun Party. Pixar celebrated 25 years of Renderman with members of the original Renderman team. Pixar handed out their 25th Anniversary hats and teapots. Pixar teapots are a collectible in limited numbers, exclusive editions are handed out at the Renderman User Group. Pixar talked about Renderman Technology, and  the roadmap for Renderman. The Shotgun Party had the Big Lebowski themed bowling party at 300 Anaheim with pool tables, video games, and of course you guessed it… bowling. Open bar with beer and wine, and of course White Russians (Big Lebowski theme). I met several people from the CAD industry and the visual effects industry having a great time. It is a great way to end the day.

I hope to elaborate one some of the products in future reviews…next years SIGGRAPH is in Vancouver, Canada…hope to be there to bring you more news.

[Editor’s Note: A special thanks to longtime Architosh friend and contributor, Akiko Ashley for this wonderful overview of this year’s SIGGRAPH. We will continue detailed reports on many of the items mentioned here in the next two weeks. Look for show floor pictures coming up soon!]