SIGGRAPH 2016: Computer Graphics Show Round-Up

Continued from page 2

ERSI CITY ENGINE

Are you looking for a way to model your city in 3D? You can create a 3D city in CityEngine used for City Planning, modeling of 3D phenomena, and 3D evironments for game engines, all you need is DEM, street data, and building footprints.

ERSI, the world’s leading GIS software company, showed off CityEngine, their world building application at SIGGRAPH and it’s use for building entire cities on the movie Independence Day: Resurgence. You can learn about CityEngine here.

UNITY

Unity is becoming more than a “game engine”—as we wrote about when it formed the basis for Perfect Parallel’s golf course design software tool set—and many feature productions are using Unity for Pre-visualization. So Unity is being tapped for multiple industries beyond just gaming.

MORE: In-Depth: How Developer ‘Perfect Parallel is Changing the Game of Golf

The flexibility of Unity’s use makes it ideal for VR design for artists. Unity also held a pre-registered session on how to do better lighting in Unity.

The FOUNDRY

The Foundry’s research team gave a sneak peak at two new cloud rendering technologies that were under development. CARA VR is out now, providing new tool sets to Nuke’s existing native support for the compositing of multi-camera live-action footage and enables artists to create seamless immersive experiences with 360° video content. while the MODO 10 Series launch, initiated back in March continues through its three major roll-outs with new features in each roll-out. MODO is available for Mac and Windows and continues to gain traction and respect amongst its biggest rival products in the industry.

The big news with Katana is there is a new Windows version released. The application brings professional look development to more platforms and users now with support for plugins for RenderMan, V-Ray, Arnold and 3Delight. Katana was originally supported on just Linux, where it continues to have support.

CHAOS Group

Chaos Group announced a partnership with Nozon that will let artists and architects make volumetric VR with a game engine, this is the simplest way to add 6-degree movement and full parallax. This is an exciting development to watch.

07 – Chaos Group VRay training on the second floor of the convention center. Image Photo by Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.

V-Ray rendering training and training were also on the second floor of the Anaheim Convention Center.

PLURALSIGHT and HOUDINI

Pluralsight and Houdini partner on a space on the second floor for Houdini training on Tuesday giving training to attendees with any badge to receive training including a 30 day Plurasight pass and 60 day license of Houdini.

08 – Houdini Training with Pluralsight on the second floor of Convention Center all day Tuesday. Image by Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.

Pluralsight acquired Train Simple making them one of the leading training sites online, they are also launching Creative Paths.

MASSIVE, PIPELINE FX, ALLEGORITHMIC

Massive annouced Massive for 3DS Max and a brand new Parts Library, which some are saying is the most significant feature for users since the product’s initial launch. For those who have forgotten or never knew, Massive Software develops tool specifically for creating massive crowds or massive anything in 3D software programs like Maya. You have seen Massive at work in numerous feature films.

PipelineFX announced metered licensing for Qube!—per minute, with no pre-pay so studios and users only have to pay for what they use. This is an exciting development and lowers the bar for those interested in learning what it is like to tap the power of render farms.

MORE: PipelineFX is now Cloud-Ready on Google Cloud Platform

Allegorithmic launched Substance Painter 2.2 and announced free licenses for Substance products for students. Back in May the company announced they had integrated Allegorithmic Substance Engine into Houdini 15.

Substance Painter 2.2 is the flagship product and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. This is 3D painting software at its best and competes in a crowed field of excellent contenders; it features integrated bakers, cloners, 400+ alphas and game engine support among many other features. Substance Designer is material authoring software. And the company makes plugins for leading 3D tools such as Cinema 4D and others. You can learn more here.

PIXAR RENDERMAN — CINEMA 4D JOINS FAMILY

I attended the Pixar Renderman Arts & Science Fair. Pixar entertained the crowds with workstations set up running Renderman with a variety of software packages. New to the Renderman family was Cinema 4D. You can now use Renderman with Cinema 4D.

Presto is their proprietary software not available to the public and the famed animation studio was illustrating the power of their software development for animation.

09 – Pixar Renderman being used with Katana. Image Photo by Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.

After attendees did a bit of networking, Pixar opened up the curtains to a theater to do their presentation which included a screening of their short film “Piper”. After the presentation, Pixar announced and showed demonstrations of the new Renderman 21 which has a lot of cool updates.

For the first time, Pixar included in this version of Renderman that it now ships with Pixar Lights & Production Shaders. The new library of physically based materials makes it easy to dial in any type of material. Materials can now be browsed, created and shared with a new Preset Browser.

Renderman 21 has a better Denoiser, a feature developed by Disney for Big Hero 6. Now the Denoiser gets upgraded with new features. Disney made advances on the Denoiser to handle the quantity of fur in the movie Zootopia, while at Pixar the Denoiser got GPU acceleration.

Finding Dory is the first feature that Pixar used Renderman’s new RIS framework. RIS delivered a level of complexity that before this was considered impossible. RIS provides better global illumination especially in ray tracing scenes with heavy geometry, hair, volumes, and irradiance with efficiency in a single pass. Renderman 21 is VR ready.

next page: Amazon Lumberyard, Google VR and more….