SIGGRAPH 2016: Computer Graphics Show Round-Up

This year SIGGRAPH 2016, the 43rd International Conference and Exhibition, was held in Anaheim, California; with the heart of Disneyland, one block away, frequented by families from all over the world and cherished for the power of joy, imagination and narrative and the visual arts, SIGGRAPH 2016’s location reflected the power of creativity and technical artistry. This year geeks descended on Anaheim with their Pokemon GO app and their desire to network, connect, and learn the tricks of the trade.

SIGGRAPH Attendees

SIG GRAPH 2016 had a smaller footprint with a lower number of attendees. What you have to remember is that the market in computer graphics and interactive technology has gone global so people are no longer centrally located in one place. SIGGRAPH this year was primarily focused on virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR) and the gaming market.

Just one look at the success of Pokemon Go answers the question why. As an architect, there are more opportunities then ever for jobs in other vocations outside of traditional roles, something the readers of this publication may want want to bear in mind.

The layout of SIGGRAPH 2016 was different than in years past, with the Exhibition Hall on a smaller footprint, but this did not mean that you got less. Vendors had opted to rent rooms on the second floor, that was not officially a part of SIGGRAPH, but offered training, talks, and demonstrations.

Hotel Rooms Offer Competition to Show Floor

Side Effects Software, the developer’s of Houdini, did training on the second floor of the convention center all day on Tuesday, using two Mac laptops to do the training. It sort of gives you the understanding that despite a smaller Exhibit floor, the vendors found another way to reach their audience. The rooms added a level of privacy from distractions that were unavailable on the Exhibits floor.

It gave a wider variety of attendees access to these sessions as it did not require a full conference pass; Autodesk, Houdini, Walt Disney, Blue Sky, Dreamworks, The Foundry, Chaos Group and a few other companies had sessions on their schedule on the second floor.

Courses, Tech Papers and Birds of a Feather

This year the Courses section of SIGGRAPH was mostly focused on VR, AR, and real-time rendering. Technical Papers didn’t really have anything new to say. Birds of a Feather gatherings were numerous and a great way to network and talk about common subjects. Production Sessions were my favorite part of SIGGRAPH as I learned a lot about how the film production technology is changing.

MORE: Autodesk intros new LIVE visualization environment—viewer for iOS platform

Readers who are architects may be wondering how this relates to you. A lot of the movies that came out this summer had full CG (computer graphics) environments—including airports, cities, and fantasy worlds. Architects now have an option for work that many may not have thought about. Work in motion pictures, games, or in virtual reality is growing for those with design and technical skills.

Mac Pro and Looking for Apple’s Role Elsewhere

Even though I didn’t find a single Apple Mac Pro on the show floor, it does not mean Apple is out of the game in the broad computer graphics industry. It just means that you have to look at their hardware a lot differently. I saw Shotgun using a fleet of iMacs running Shotgun without a hiccup, because it was accelerated to run on Mac hardware so that it wasn’t necessary to use a Mac Pro.

One of Apple’s key technologies is still QuickTime, and no matter what anyone tells you, QuickTime is still the best way to view, create, or show a movie. Most of the presentations on the show floor were done on Mac laptops and the same can be said of the Production sessions. Take a look at my photo from the Pixar USD announcement (see, Architosh, “SIG: Pixar Animation Studios Open Sources Universal Scene Description,” 27 July 2016) and you will get the picture!

I must of easily counted over 50 Mac laptops. These people didn’t need a Mac Pro to get what they needed done. On a funny side note, SIGGRAPH was a hub for hundreds of Pokemon for Pokemon Go fans. My friend Dean must of caught 100 of these critters in 3 days, something you never thought you would mention about SIGGRAPH. Yes, change is inevitable. So now let me break down some of the news from SIGGRAPH 2016 and my experience at this year’s show.

Software & Hardware News

MAXON

Maxon demonstrated their new upgrade to Cinema 4D R18 with booth demoes and with presentations front and center on the Exhibits floor. Always a popular exhibitor at SIGGRAPH, Maxon’s latest has many exciting new features. Key new items in this release include:

• Voronoi Fracturing – allowing users more control over how to break apart objects to create interesting particle effects.
• Interactive Knife Tools – gives users an interactive display real time to see where they make their cuts then lock in the edges and make the cut.
• Object Motion Tracking – Giving the user ability to track something in the real world while integrating 3D objects into the scene.

The latest release also includes Substance Engine integration from Allegorithmic. Cinema 4D is a popular visualization tool in certain industries, particularly the architectural industry in Europe in particular.

To this point, the new features related to Shaders and Surface Effects offer advanced rendering possibilities for creating iridescent surfaces such as bubbles and oil slicks, for capturing shadows for more efficient compositing, parallax mapping for enhanced bump effects, and creating masks for worn edges using inverse ambient occlusion.

AMD

Radeon has rebranded their graphics (GPU) card line, and what a welcome change it was. AMD introduced the new Radeon Pro WX series of professional graphics cards. This was once known as the FirePro line. It is the FirePro line that powers the custom AMD GPUs in the new Mac Pro which Architosh has recently published critical and questioning pieces on. (see, Architosh, “If Jobs Failed Twice, Why Would Ive & Team Succeed? RIP new Mac Pro,” 17 June 2016)

MORE: The chip the new Mac Pro may have been waiting for is out and ready!

AMD showed a commitment to the high-end graphics professional by announcing they opened an office in Los Angeles to work with visual effects studios, production studios, and other clients to create graphics cards that can do what the company calls “Art of the Impossible”. The new Radeon WX series represent a revolutionary approach with a commitment to open, non-proprietary software with power-rich features. It is good to have competition in the graphics card space as it provides innovation and can keep prices more competitive. Among their new product line offerings are:

• Radeon Pro WX 7100 GPU — is capable of handling demanding work flows of the most challenging tasks that include the entertainment industries animation and VFX pipeline as well as demanding engineering workflows.
• Radeon Pro WX 5100 GPU — is the ideal for real-time content engines and immersive real-time design and manufacturing, including CAD and CAM.
• Radeon Pro WX 4100 GPU — gives users great performance in half the height design for mid range applications and demanded by CAD professionals to small form factor workstations.

One wonders if the long over-due update to the Mac Pro has been waiting for these new workstation-class Radeon™Pros. It is interesting to note that like Apple, what AMD has done here is simply take the consumer brand or gamer brand (i.e.: Radeon) and add the word “Pro” to it; with Apple the MacBook has the MacBook Pro, with the iPad we now have the iPad Pro.

The new Radeon Pro family utilizes the latest advances in AMD’s fourth generation Graphics Core Next (GCN) architecture.

next page: Nvidia, Intel and Lightworks and more…

NVIDIA

NVIDIA introduced and demonstrated their new Pascal GPU technology. The Quadro Pascal platform for artists, designer, visual effects artists and animators gives them the power to work faster with greater creativity. The main focus though in their booth was VR tech with several real time demos taking place at SIGGRAPH.

The Quadro P6000 can power the most advanced workstations ever built. It has 3840 cores with an amazing 12 TFlops of computer power. Users can manipulate complex projects twice as fast as before.
VR Works ‘360 Video SDK gives VR developers the ability to create application to ingest, stitch, and stream 4K video feeds from multi-camera rigs, enabling 360 degree real time surround video experiences.

The addition of GPU acceleration for mental ray, one of the world’s most popular film-quality renderers was another announcement.

NVIDIA Optix 4, the latest version of their raytracing engine on NVIDIA’s DGX-1 supercomputer, which allows production artists to achieve the fastest interactive rendering possible for film sizes up to 64GB. Pixar Content was running on the new DGX-1, fully ray traced with NVIDIA OptiX at interactive speeds.

NVIDIA also partnered with Adobe on the world’s first real time 3D Oil Painting Simulator called Project Wet Brush.

Intel

Thunderbolt 3 was being shown on the Exhibits show floor and what a difference it makes versus Thunderbolt 2. It is twice as fast as Thunderbolt 2. It was being demoed with Intel’s new Solid State Drive 750 series that is 4 times faster then SATA SSD.

First drive with NVMe (Non-Volatile Memory Express). This is welcome news for those dealing with heavy data loads, such as those in film and VFX markets and sciences. It will be interesting to see if Intel’s new Drive 750 series make their way into any new upcoming Macs. One thing we should assume for sure is that Thunderbolt 3 is headed to future Macs.

Thunderbolt 3 in particular would be amazing to see in an upgrade to the Mac Pro because it is truly fast enough to support external GPU enclosures like the Razer Core we wrote about recently. (see, “Could Apple Release One Of These—External GPU Enclosure Anybody?,” 29 June 2016)

LIGHTWORKS

Lightworks was showing off their Iray technology producing beautiful, photo realistic rendering demos. They showed how Iray can be used across applications, configurators and VR experiences to bring the best photorealistic, physically based materials to point of sale customer engagement projects and the design review process.

05 – Lightworks booth on show floor. Image Photo by Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.

Lightworks has partners with NVIDIA using CUDA acceleration. This is something Architosh has written about before and one of the sad aspects of the new Mac Pros with their non-NVIDIA GPUs and lack of CUDA acceleration options.

AUTODESK

Autodesk rented space on the second floor of the Anaheim Convention Center; you could go to see demos of their latest releases on their products but the focus was on their new software upgrades for VR capabilities and 3D animation tools for indie game developers including Maya LT 17 and 3D Game Engine and Real Time Rendering solution Stringray 1.4.

MORE: SIG: Autodesk upgrades VR and 3D animation tools at SIGGRAPH 2016

There were demos of other products including Shotgun, 3DS Max and the new purchase to the family of products—Arnold. Arnold will be replacing mental ray in Maya, news that somewhat contradicts statements the company made when it acquired Arnold, saying back then that Nvidia’s mental ray and Iray renderers would continue to ship with Maya.

06 – Autodesk sessions on the second floor of the convention center. Image Photo by Akiko Ashley. All rights reserved.

I saw a demo of Arnold and Cinema 4D. Great integration and yet another rendering option for Cinema 4D which is a competitor product. True to Autodesk’s words when they acquired Arnold, the company aims to put customers first even when they are using other rival products. (see, “NAB: Autodesk acquires the Arnold Renderer and its development team,” 21 April 2016).

Shotgun showed how it is leveraging itself to be the portal to organize and bring integration to all your work tools so you can have a central location for all your assets. Shotgun is highly optimized for Apple’s Mac operating system.

next page: City Engine, Unity, Chaos Group and more….

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.

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.

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.

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….

Amazon Lumberyard, Google VR

Amazon Lumberyard is a free game engine, and this year Amazon had a booth demonstrating their new game engine for both games and VR. The game engine is a “cross platform” 3D game engine that creates high-quality games. You can connect your games to the vast compute and storage cloud of the AWS and engage fans on Twitch. You can spend more time creating and managing your social audience and not have to worry about creating your own game engine or the server capacity to handle such a load.

Google VR announced how the company was going to combine Google Earth software with Virtual Reality giving users an interactive view of their surroundings. Google VR did demos with their headset on the Exhibit floor.

SIGGRAPH SHOW

Gender Diversity

The Academy Awards had a big controversy about the diversity issue among their members and voters. Violence in the news about diversity issues is everywhere in the news. The Democratic Party nominated a woman for the first time. Victoria Alonzo, Executive Vice President of Physical Production for Marvel Studios, said when she arrived at SIGGRAPH she saw there was a line at the Women’s Restroom, she was surprised and excited at the same time because it meant more women were at SIGGRAPH. I went to a networking event on Monday night sponsored by Industrial, Light, & Magic, Pixar, and Disney.

It was a networking and recruiting event for women. Recruiters, senior level women from the studio talked and encouraged women to explore opportunities with their studios.

The following morning I went to a Walt Disney event that was a Women Empowerment event with speakers like: Pam Hogarth, on the Board of the Visual Effects Society; Junko Gotoh from Women in Animation; Alain Chesnais, former President of ACM SIGGRAPH; and Lisa Flom from WITI, who spoke about women in the field of technology. (see image 11 above).

Pam Hogarth said that 15% of the VES are women. Junko Gotoh said that 60 percent of students in computer graphics school were women, though only 20 percent of the computer graphics workforce are women. Alain Chesnais says that it is important to ask the right questions that help women get opportunities. Like, why not? Lisa Flom’s WITI provides women with mentorship and support. WITI membership is currently 150,000.

I met the Curator who is also an astronomer of the Griffith Observatory, Dr. Laura Danly, who said she is hiring and would like to hire more women. As technology and engineering are trying to diversify, you start to look at other professions and what is in place to help support the growth of women in these fields.

Emerging Technologies/Art Gallery

Emerging Technogies showed off tons of new toys for VR. Mech VR is an experimental immersive application that gives you an adventure type ride on this biped robot under your control. Aquarium Earth demonstrated the educational value of VR while attendees sit in a virtual reef watching its destruction through climate change and other factors while a narrator tells you why.

Cyber-archeology is an application of VR that allows you to discover archaeological sites in a non-destructive way. Immersive and Interactive Procedure for Power Line Maintenance is helping crews to refine their skills to prevent accidents and injuries using Oculus Rift technology.

Guidance Field, is a vector field for implicit guidance in Virtual Environments which helps guide users through environments (perhaps architectural.).

In the Art Gallery there was a drawing contest but my favorite item was the Paper Origami lamp folding that allowed attendees to use a sheet of paper to create these sustainable paper lamps that had this high end modern design quality. (see image 12 above).

Viktor Jan created this flower that when you whispered into a speaker it lit up. Dimitri Morozov created the Metaphase Sound Machine that capture attendees attention inspired by physicist Nick Herbert’s work.

Production Sessions

I attended several of the Production Sessions. Captain America Civil War revealed that the entire airport scene was created in CG. How they used a Lidar scan of Puerto Rico to the opening scene Lagos; Nigeria is using the scan for a full environment replacement. The Jungle Book showed how they recreated entire jungle environments rendered in Renderman, almost everything you see in the movie is CG.

Finding Dory and Zootopia panels discussed how the needs of their production lead to advancement in rendering software for both Renderman and Hyperion…and the complexity of the animation tools. Star Wars: The Force Awakens gave us a look at Industrial, Light, and Magic (ILM) legendary work on the newest film, building entire fantasy worlds, populating them with characters, and with faced-paced action.

Conclusion: SIGGRAPH is Evolving and Macs Take Newer Roles

On a whole SIGGRAPH is changing and evolving. It is not like the SIGGRAPH of ten years ago. The new attendees are younger students in greater numbers plus more women are attending then ever before.

The Mac is still in the production process but at this point has a different role, and never under estimate the power of their iMacs, Mac Book Pros and their new iPad Pro in production. If you went to NAB, you saw more Mac Pros being used for editing and a lot of Post Production use which is an important part of the production process.

Architecture skills are now expanding into other areas including virtual reality (VR), video games, interactive technology—and if you saw Independence Day, Resurgence, ERSI CityEngine helped build the cities. Captain America Civil War replaced an entire airport inside and out.

As the use for technology to build these environments advances, you will see a huge evolution of tools for architects, artists, designer, and those in feature production. Imagine what VR will do for interactive walk-throughs for clients, NVIDIA is already demonstrating that you can do real time rendering on the fly with huge data sets.

 

[Editor’s Note: If you have arrived here interested in SIGGRAPH 2016, Architosh has more detailed coverage in previous—and upcoming—reports.]