Los Angeles. SIGGRAPH 2019 is now here in Los Angeles with a huge array of attendees from all walks of life taking on a comprehensive program of Courses, Technical Papers, Production Sessions, Birds of a Feather and so much more.
This year the Exhibits Floor may look petite, but it doesn’t mean vendors aren’t around. Companies like Side FX, Autodesk, Chaos Group, Unity have opted to rent rooms at the convention center. Vendors can do presentations, panels and courses for three days in a much more intimate environment. You can focus on what you are trying to learn or adapt into your workflow without the distraction of other booths.
Keynote time at SIGGRAPH 2019. The event last week had many new key announcements which Architosh is covering below and in other reports.
Victoria Alonzo from Marvel Studios did the keynote presentation. She is a strong advocate for more women behind the screen in production roles in technology and other key roles.
Key Product and Company Announcements
Autodesk made the highly anticipated announcement about Bifrost for Maya. Bifrost is a new visual programming environment for Maya to do your own custom effects, publish and share with other artists across different shots, scenes and even shows. It comes with a ton of pre-built graphs to help you get started. Autodesk also announced the latest versions of Shotgun, Arnold, Flame and 3DS Max. Maya will provide Open Source support by integrating the USD Plug In.
Autodesk announced several new items at SIGGRAPH, including its support for Pixar’s new USD format. This year much of the action was in vendor suites in other rooms.
Maxon Cinema 4D announced Cinema 4D R21 Release. Maxon creates, “3D for the real world.”
Maxon’s booth shot between sessions on the show floor.
The new R21 release has tons of new features and enhancements. Redshift joins the Maxon family of products for their first SIGGRAPH together after Maxon announced acquiring Redshift at NAB. Maxon introduced a better way to manage your Maxon product license through “My Maxon” and makes it easier for you to use a license at work and later use it at home if you decide to finish a project on your own computer. People cheered when Maxon revealed their new pricing strategy. $60 (49 Euros) a month for a 12- month license or $95 (85 Euros) a month single license. You can still get the Perpetual License for $3495. There is also a combo package of Cinema 4D with Redshift for an additional $20.
Paul Babb of Maxon, head of worldwide marketing. The company announced a new monthly pricing strategy.
KHRONOS released Open XR 1.0. Open XR will ship the API first and the Device Plugin Interface in the future. Open XR is a royalty free, open standard that provides high performance Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, the X in XR is the combination of the A in Augmented Reality and the V in Virtual. Developers frustrated with have to port their code to different headsets will find Open XR gives them a lot more freedom to create cross platform XR experiences. A third-party developer will bring Vulkan to the Mac OS. (see: Architosh, “SIG: Khronos Releases OpenXR 1.0 Spec—Establishes Foundation for AR/VR Ecosystem,” 29 July 2019).
next page: News on Houdini, Chaos Group, NVIDIA, Apple and more…
Chaos Group released V-Ray for Houdini. It gives artists better control when using V-Ray with Houdini. When I spoke to the Chaos Group two years ago about the Lavina Engine, it was in its earliest development. Today, I saw an impressive demonstration of the future of Real Time Photo Realistic Ray Tracing. When working with game engines, you sometimes don’t get the full benefit of raytracing in your scene but with Lavina, it is the whole thing all the time. Chaos Group also hosted, “Total Chaos” for a lineup of presentation, the latest developments, and speakers from VFX Production. The two-day event held at the show in room 409A.
Some of the guys from the Chaos Group at SIGGRAPH 2019.
NVIDIA reach across top applications to bring Ray Tracing, and AI to creatives. 35 Plus Professional Creative Applications now support NVIDIA RTX to bring raytracing and AI to millions of artists. Adobe Substance Designer (recently acquired by Adobe), Autodesk Flame, Blender Cycles, Daz 3D Studios, Foundry Modo, Dimension 5 D5 Fusion, and Luxion Keyshot support RTX. NVIDIA is showcasing workstations and mobile power laptops coming from major OEM’s. Over the Moon: NVIDIA RTX Powered Interactive Demo to celebrate the moon landing of Apollo 11 is featured at NVIDIA’s booth at SIGGRAPH. Amateur sketch artists and Pros are discovering a popular research demo GauGAN. The AI painting app turns rough sketches into stunning photo real scenes.
NVIDIA RTX is all the rage in the CGI and VFX world with most top-shelf software packages optimized around it now or very soon.
The Foundry announced Nuke has joined the Netflix Post Technology Alliance. Nuke is an award-winning node-based compositor used in VFX. The Netflix Post Technology Alliance program helps companies who build and market their products used in production on Netflix Original productions. It is specifically designed for technology partners for both hardware and software developers. The program evaluates and certifies products meet the Netflix technical workflow requirements and they are providing the highest level of support, innovation, and customer service.
The Foundry had multiple exhibitor sessions around their many popular products.
Unreal dudes from Epic! Happy with the success of their products.
A shot of the Unreal booth at SIGGRAPH, taken just prior to show floor opening.
Epic Games showed off the moon landing of Apollo 11 in the HoloLens 2 made by Microsoft. The HoloLens is an augmented reality headset that is targeting enterprises that use huge data sets.Epic Games used Unreal Engine 4 to do the demo to show off what HoloLens can do. Polygon counts for architecture designs can be in the millions. Libreri recruited John Knoll from ILM and Andrew Chalkin space historian, author of Man on the Moon, they built a demo of the Apollo 11 mission just as it looked in 1969. The quality is photorealistic view of the rocket and you are able to interact with the rocket in the demo and tell it what to do in the next stage. Epic has confirmed support for HoloLens2 by the end of May.
Apple was one of the vendors at SIGGRAPH that did presentations outside of the Exhibits Floor including Apple Inc. Presents: Modern Mobile Graphics on Metal and Introduction to Reality Kit.
Substance Painter showed their first demo of painting across UV tiles during their keynote. Substance Source is expanding its material library with more 400 new procedural materials for architecture. Substance Designer Summer 2019 release will give you Dot Node to organize your graphs to suit the way you work. The viewport is getting an upgrade as well as Anisotropy and Clearcoat support in OpenGL view. The Node drop down menu has improvements, the library goes faster, and Material X Support. Project Substance Alchemist is now available for free trial.
The Substance booth. The Substance family of products are now apart of Adobe.
Unity announced that Unity 2019.2 is released, and that thousand developers dedicated to extending and improving Unity’s development. ProBuilder 4.) ships as verified. It is Unity’s unique hybrid of 3D modeling and level design. PolyBrush is now available via Package Manager as a Preview Package. DSPGrpahs is a new audio rendering and mixing system. Improved UI Elements and new subgraphs to Visual Effect Graph. Shader Graph you can now use Color Modes to highlight nodes on your graph.
My second half of my SIGGRAPH report is coming next on Architosh. Be to sure look for it tomorrow. (Now published!)