SIGGRAPH 2017 — Detailed Show Reports on Computer Graphics Conference and Expo

Akiko Ashley

7 years ago

SIGGRAPH 2017 in Los Angeles with the backdrop of the city, with a skyline that is rapidly changing, was a perfect place to see a boost in attendance this year. The Exhibits floor may appear smaller but it does not mean the vendors have lost interest. They opted to rent rooms at the Convention Center and the JW Marriott. In fact, it felt like a bigger show as I walked a lot of miles to get back and forth between vendors and to see things at the show. I went to a luncheon with JPR and they showed a graph for attendance with a focus to find out how to keep people coming to SIGGRAPH and to learn what brought them to the show.

MORE: SIGGRAPH 2017—The Year of the Game Engine & Low-Level Graphics API

I wanted to showcase some of the highlights of the show running through a majority of the major vendors who made key announcements. If you have not yet read my first report (see, Architosh, “SIGGRAPH 2017—The Year of the Game Engine & Low-Level Graphics API,” 14 Aug 2017), make sure you do as it encapsulates key themes and, importantly for the architectural reader here at Architosh, discusses how the game engines are making a mark in the architectural visualization industry.

Make no bones about it; these are important shifts within the 3D industry landscape that those in charge of IT directions companies and firms need to know about. Let’s begin this multi-page report by wrapping up what happened at SIGGRAPH with the GPU folks.

AMD

July 30th evening, I attended the AMD Capsaicin Event with the press. AMD’s CEO Lisa T. Su made the first announcement about how AMD was focusing on better computing through collaboration between CPU and GPU. Here are some of the highlights…

AMD showed off their new Radeon Vega card line-up. The new iMac Pro will feature a Vega card GPU, it really is some cool new technology that will help those doing visualization and VR work.
AMD also introduced the Radeon Pro SSG card. This is M.2 solid state graphics storage, adding up to 2 TB of NAND flash massively increasing the available frame buffer for high-end rendering work.
AMD introduced the Radeon Pro WX 9100 card (the highest performing Radeon Pro solution based on the Vega architecture.).
And AMD showed off specs for their Ryzen Threadripper processor (CPU), a 16-core chip, fastest processor on the market made for consumers.
AMD Studios were also announced, this is a link between AMD and Hollywood Production. Hollywood pushes technology beyond its capabilities so this relationship will help bring better and more efficient products to market at a great price point.

At AMD’s 30th July event Tom Sweeney, founder of Epic Games, Paul Babb, CEO & President of Maxon Computer, USA, and Jarrod Land, President of Red Digital Cinema Camera Company, all came on stage in support of AMD’s latest efforts.

Jarred Land from RED said he just met with AMD recently; when he first met them he asked them if they could do 8K resolution and AMD showed him a demo that blew him away. AMD Studios will be working with a select group of projects in Hollywood to show what AMD technology can do. In conclusion, AMD’s new efforts are reigniting old relationships and new ones alike in Hollywood as they deliver market-leading high-performance products directly aimed at the type of pro markets that Architosh covers: film and VFX, visualization across multiple industries, and 3D graphics and animation.

A Note About Apple

Finally, Mac Users you should be excited as Vega graphics cards are showing great benchmarks. The collaboration with AMD and Apple on future Mac Pro products to implement some of these new products by AMD can only mean good things not just for the new iMac Pro but for the future “modular Mac Pro,” which means there is a good possibility of a kick ass Mac Pro coming in the future. Let’s hope that relationship expands.

MORE: Apple Does the Unexpected—Announces New Modular Mac Pro Design Underway

But on this note, I did hear positive feedback about the iMac Pro specs at SIGGRAPH, which should be coming this December.

NVIDIA

NVIDIA made announcements about their AI technology. The NVIDIA GPU artificial intelligence technology is driving robot development, self-driving car development, and computer technology. NVIDIA credited their research team for the development in the AI space and showed features of AI in graphics.

NVIDIA also had some exciting announcements around their GPU solutions for rendering markets and even some announcements for the Mac space.

AI and Denoising — The AI trained the neural network to find a way to correct the Denoising in an image.
eGPU Titan X and Quadro cards — You can connect these high-end graphics cards to your laptop or computer through a Thunderbolt 3 connection. This could be exciting for Mac users who have had limited opportunity to use the power of NVIDIA’s Quadro cards. Today Mac users will have to explore eGPU setups with NVIDIA’s long-awaited Pascal beta drivers for Mac.
NVIDIA announced Optix 5.0 SDK Ray Tracing Engine. This is a new framework for optimal ray tracing performance on GPUm used by commercial rendering apps and internal apps such as Pixar’s RenderMan, with GPU accelerated

Mac users now have the option (beta that is) of running these Pro eGPU solutions not just on a Mac but also a Mac laptop giving you the workstation power of a Titan X or Quadro Card by just plugging it into Thunderbolt 3. This would level the playing field for both PC and Mac, plus it drives innovation the Mac to have some serious competition. Recall too that at Apple WWDC 2017, the company officially announced support for external GPUs in the Metal 2 Developer Kit. That was back in early June.

Architects, you must read about the Gensler design for NVIDIA’s headquarters by Hao Ko who designed this impressive building using Virtual Reality on a Quadro card, so this is indeed something you want in your arsenal of tools.

next page: Autodesk, The Foundry, and Maxon

Autodesk at SIGGRAPH 2017

Autodesk was one of the companies that rented rooms to do demos to introduce their “Vision Series”. The vision series are renown speakers in the VFX, Games and VR community sharing their production highlights and how-tos.

Autodesk also made a few announcements.

Maya 2018 will have new and better animation tools and rendering functionality. Maya will have “motion graphics” tools including dynamics and instancing tools. Version 2018 will have the latest version of the Arnold renderer, now owned by Autodesk, and better performance with new features and better integration.
3ds max gets new VR authoring tools to make visualization easier for artists. 3ds max Interactive is a VR engine that simplifies the creation of immersive and architectural visualizations.
Shotgun 7.3 has new improvements for security for administrators to make it easier to manage and run Shotgun. New improvements include Data Site Retention for better site performance and community enhancements that include improved action menu items.
Arnold 5.01, the renderer, has new functionality like AOV shaders that are a film standard for surface shading with many new updates that optimize its power.

“The continued growth of AR and VR and the steady flow of new productions from Netflix, Amazon, and others, mean animation and VFX houses are in more demand than ever,” said Chris Bradshaw, Senior Vice President, Media & Entertainment, Autodesk. “We are focused on helping our customers create, connect, and compute faster and more efficiently so they can balance their increasing project loads with tighter schedules and budgets. Everything we are showcasing at SIGGRAPH streamlines production and equips artists with the tools to handle nearly any creative scenario.”

A Note About Mac

Autodesk is busy working on acceleration for the GPU with implementing Apple’s Metal 2 graphics API, so shortly it could mean that perhaps Autodesk may consider expanding other software packages to the Mac. As previously mentioned in the above, Apple released Metal 2 Developer Kit back in June.

The Metal 2 Developer Kit didn’t just provide support for eGPUs but also for VR hardware units like HTC’s Vive. We believe Autodesk has increasing demand to support the macOS platform going forward.

The Foundry

The Foundry hosted an All Star Event on July 30th. The event featured guests from Industrial, Light and Magic (ILM), WETA, and Marvel Studios showing how they used the Foundry products in their production pipeline. The Foundry had already announced key updates to their product lines but these are two new products.

The Foundry introduced the new cloud-based platform Elara, giving an edge to small to medium-sized studios. Elara went into beta at the event. Elara is a cloud-based platform for post-production. Learn more here.
Bunsen is a new product focusing on the AEC (architecture, engineering, construction) space provides a foundation for building unified and scalable solutions for enterprise visualization. Bunsen can reduce the headache of scaling up the quantity and fidelity of VR/AR and pre-rendered 3D content produced in CAD pipelines. We will be writing about Bunsen in a separate report. You can see a video here, however.

The Foundry will also be supporting Apple’s Metal 2 graphics API in their products but nothing was shown on the show floor yet.

MAXON

Paul Babb, CEO & President of Maxon says it is a constant battle between quality versus speed. Cinema 4D is a package that is the solution for that balance, he says.

04 – The MAXON booth at SIGGRAPH 2017. Maxon is always a very popular booth at SIGGRAPH due to its award-winning Cinema 4D and Body Paint software. (Photo by Akiko Ashley for Architosh. All rights reserved.)

Maxon announced their upgrade to Cinema 4D, Release 19, covered here in this Architosh report, with some of the highlighted new features and improvements:

A number of new re-engineered foundational technologies that Maxon will continue to work on over several new releases.
Viewport performance enhancements.
A new Sound Effector
Additional features for Voronal Fracturing have been added to the Mo Graph toolset.
Integration of AMD’s Pro Render technology to give cross platform support with a scalable solution big or small.

Maxon has been really good to Mac customers. The new enhancements make Cinema 4D a better and stronger package. Pro Render from AMD support means cross platform compatibility for this enhanced rendering technology, so users on both Windows and Mac platforms benefit. Rewriting the software from the core means better performance and reliability, though Cinema 4D is very highly regarded for its stability. I didn’t hear any Metal news but considering they decided to support Pro Render, I imagine Metal 2 support will be coming.

next page: Side Effects Software, Chaos Group, and Allegorithmic

Side Effects Software (SideFX)

Houdini was back at SIGGRAPH but in a whole new format called “Houdini Hive.” Houdini Hive is where you could watch a presentation from key speakers in the industry, and meet other Houdini artists and grab a T-Shirt. The focus was to educate artists on Houdini workflows—as there is a huge job market for Houdini artists in film and television production.

Houdini is developed for the Mac at the same time as it is for other platforms so the release is the same for all artists. So you can use Houdini on any platform and get the same result. You almost wonder if SideFX adds Metal (Apple’s low-level graphics API) support if this will add to the performance on the Mac.

Chaos Group

Who doesn’t want to hear V-Ray news? The Academy Award winning software V-Ray was definitely popular at the show. V-Ray is the most esteemed high-end renderer in the architectural visualization market in the AEC industry today, but V-Ray is also used extensively in many other 3D industries, such as film, broadcast television, and industrial design visualization markets.

Chaos Group announced V-Ray for Unreal Engine at SIGGRAPH, which is an announcement that further signifies how important the game engines are becoming with respect to professionals tools outside of the game industry. The company also introduced the new V-Ray Benchmark app, only for Windows at the moment but, hopefully, that will change. Anyway, Chaos Group made a series of announcements, including:

You can bring V-Ray content in from other DCC into the real-time engine editor.
Render real time directly into the game editor.
Export from the real-time editor for use in another DCC.
Introduced GPU+CPU Hybrid Rendering in V-Ray 3.6 for 3ds max on 26 July 2017. (see Architosh report here).

At SIGGRAPH 2017 Marc Petit, of Epic Games said, “we are committed to simplifying the integration of the Unreal Engine into content creation workflows across animation production, AR/VR and visualization.”

Allegorithmic

Allegorithmic makes very cool software packages that include; Substance Painter, Substance Designer Substance B2M, Substance Player, and Substance Automation Toolkit.

Substance Designer will support AxF X-Rite Appearance Exchange Format. X-Rite Incorporated, a leader in color science and technology and its subsidiary Pantone LLC announced that Allegorithmic’s Substance Designer will support the Appearance Exchange Format in September. It is a vendor-neutral format of a physical material appearance in a single editable file to improve design visualization.

Will Allegorithmic software support Web3D API and or Vulkan and Metal API’s for 3D graphics as well as Open GL? That was the question asked a company rep at the booth. “Yes, if are there notable speed differences.”

“It’s not planned in the foreseeable future, as it wouldn’t improve that much speed on the Substance Engine side of things. However, it would definitely have an overall impact on the performance of the software on Mac, so we hope to support it at some point.”

Allegorithmic software will run on the new iMac Pro as they say the specs are pretty impressive.

next page: Pixar Renderman at SIGGRAPH, Session Notes, and Closing Comments

Pixar’s Renderman Art & Science Fair

This will be Pixar’s third year having the Art & Science Fair. This year Pixar cut the list into a smaller audience to focus better on the clients and users. Pixar gave a peek at what is coming for Renderman 22 and new enhancements for version 21.5.

Here are some of the announcements:

Interactive capabilities in RenderMan 22. You can actually open up a real time window in Maya, which is pretty impressive.
Pixar Renderman is working on XPU, which is CPU+GPU cores actually working together.
They are creating breakthrough technologies for rendering characters including better skin through Path Traced Subsurface Scattering, and hair with new artistic control for hair including changing its color on the fly.
New faster rendering of over a thousand lights in a scene.
The updated Denoiser enables compositing workflows and is substantially faster due to advanced code optimization.

Renderman does run on the Mac and with new GPU acceleration with new iMac Pro options, I am expecting Renderman on the Mac to be blazing fast…

ILM, Pixar, and Disney host “Women In Tech”

ILM, Pixar, and Disney decided to host “Women in Tech” for the second year at SIGGRAPH as the previous year was successful in getting women to network and consider jobs in tech. I was surprised to meet women from Tennessee, Texas, and Vancouver, Canada.

Wonder Woman Inspires

The success of the movie “Wonder Woman” showed us that women are strong and can attempt the impossible. There is so much controversy about women in production and in tech that I attended this event in solidarity, for myself, and for the magazine. The event was held at Rosa Mexicano at LA Live near the JW Marriott. Recruiters from ILM, Disney, and Pixar attended with other industry veterans. Margaritas with lots of appetizers kept the party moving while recruiters looked for possible candidates for their companies.

Notes on Sessions and Other Stuff at SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH offers courses, art papers, art gallery, Birds of a Feather, panels, production sessions and much more. Courses fill up fast every year so if you go next year, go early.

Birds of a Feather brings like minded individuals together to network and chat. Emerging Technologies featured a ton of new and upcoming VR companies. The VR Theater was showing a few films created using VR tech. Films shown in the VR Theater include “Fantasynth,” “Song of Jaguar,” “Antarctica,” “Zero Days,” “Chocolate,” “Sonaria,” “Dear Angelica,” “Arden’s Wake,” “We Wait,” and “Rainbow Crow.”

“Son of Jaguar” and “Sonaria” were Google Spotlight stories. The Computer Animation Theater is a venue that is the prize of SIGGRAPH and a venue for the Oscar race. I am sad to say I didn’t make it this year.

I will say that the Production Sessions with VFX talent from ILM and other studios doing presentations of their work on “Rogue One,” “Spider-Man Homecoming,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” “Valerian, and the City of a Thousand Planets,” and the “Game of Thrones” session “Building and Destroying Mereen” gave you an inside look at how these VFX Houses deal with building an urban city, the technique, and tools they use.

If you watch the TV show “Game of Thrones”, the session showed you how they built Mereen and then destroyed it…though this may not be relatable to architects now, there are quite a few architects in visual effects. Visualization techniques for big projects are very similar. The lines are blurring in virtual reality so this is something you may want to start watching on your extra time, to learn things that help you think outside the box.

Closing Comments and Apple’s Mac in 3D Industry

As the industry changes and evolves, it is very important to put SIGGRAPH in perspective and to understand that as technology changes, the conference must change too.

It never started out as a conference about the “exhibits hall.” It was meant to educate and empower professionals through learning and networking. It helps students take their education to the next level. Even though you may not see Architecture represented as it was before, if you really look, it is everywhere. Apple is still in the game. Apple is introducing one product in the future to begin the ball rolling again.

I believe the iMac Pro is just the entry-level machine for professionals. Once it is released we will understand better Apple’s roadmap for Pros. Vendors show continual support for all things Apple, Mac, and iOS. I am looking forward to the SIGGRAPH after the iMac Pro is released; this should give us more news about development for the Mac Pro systems and the Metal 2 API.

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