SIGGRAPH 2017 Los Angeles, ran through July 30, 2017, to August 3, 2017; the SIGGRAPH conference has been evolving at a rapid pace in the last few years.
This year, Unreal Technologies hosted the first ever user group at SIGGRAPH 2017; the Emerging Technologies exhibit was filled with VR technologies. Architectural visualization has moved from 3D software to game engines. Graphics cards with powerful GPU’s are giving us real time rendering and visualization. Medical companies including doctors are embracing VR to teach medical students.
AMD opened up the show at an event in the evening on July 30th with announcements about their Vega, Ryzen, SSG card and other products. AMD has done a brilliant job of becoming a tough competitor for NVIDIA with these new announcements including the new Vega card line up prove AMD is in the game. AMD graphics technology will be in the New iMac Pro.
01 – Maxon CEO Paul Babb speaking at SIGGRAPH 2017. The company released the next major version of Cinema 4D but Babb was also on stage at AMD’s event to talk about the incredible performance of their latest hardware technologies. (Image: Copyright Akiko Ashley for Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Paul Babb, CEO & President of Maxon, talking about using AMD Pro Render and how fast it is at the AMD event. Maxon supports Pro Render because it is cross platform & supported on the Mac. He showed off a demonstration of a watch rendering twice as fast in AMD Pro Render.
02 – Nvidia also hosted events and one big note item at SIGGRAPH 2017 was the announcement of the eGPU, a Thunderbolt 3 connected external GPU enclosure type product. (image: copyright Akiko Ashley for Architosh. All rights reserved.)
NVIDIA is always ahead of the curve with their announcements. The eGPU is a new product that connects to the back of your computer or laptop through Thunderbolt 3 connection. It was met with huge applause. This technology gives users access to a Titan or Quadro card just by plugging it into the back of their machines. If Apple will support this technology with a driver, we can finally use NVIDIA high-end graphics solutions like the Quadro Card on the Mac. (Photo by Akiko Ashley, all rights reserved 2017)
03 – Allegorithmic’s booth was popular and the company made new announcements at SIGGRAPH regarding its latest Substance Painter. (image: copyright, Akiko Ashley for Architosh. All rights reserved.)
Allegorithmic made announcements at SIGGRAPH about Substance including a new version upgrade of Substance Painter with performance boosts, anchor points and new filters. A Live Link from Substance painter to Unity, allowing artists to see results of their texturing process in real time in game. Users of Unity and the Unreal Game Engine 4 will have access to Substance Source, allowing you use your Substance Source library inside the game engines. (Photo by Akiko Ashley.)
Stay tuned for a full report in the next couple days…