SIGGRAPH 2019 is behind us but not without leaving artists, creators, technology enthusiasts without a lot to think about. Every type of hardware was at SIGGRAPH from Dell workstations to iMac Pros and laptops. It was a diverse group with a strong focus on the future of Open Source.
Open Source is Thriving
Open Source was the featured topic. Open Source is thriving in development in all aspects of the pipeline in 3D software industries.
JPR Luncheon session had industry leaders talking about the revolutionary effect of open source in the pipeline.
The JPR Luncheon featured “The revolutionary effect of open source software for creative applications”. This was an interesting topic with great experts on the subject including Hank Driskill from Blue Sky Studios, Daniella Costa VP of Visual Effects of Marvel Studios, John Wadelton, CTO of the Foundry and Guy Martin, Director of Open Source Strategy for Autodesk.
A shot of the Blender booth prior during a quiet moment on the expo floor Ton Roosendaal received a special award for his software Blender during the luncheon.
The discussion was focused on the future of open source in the pipeline and how it would benefit creatives and give them more flexibility. USD was mentioned due to being implemented in so many pipelines now and the huge benefits. Ton Roosendaal received a special award at the luncheon for his wonderful software Blender.
Universal Scene Description — A New Emerging Standard
USD stands for Universal Scene Description and it was created by Pixar. In 2015 Pixar announced that they would make their Universal Scene Description Open Source. USD was first presented at SIGGRAPH 2013. USD provides a standard for exchanging complex Animation and VFX scene data.
USD (universal scene description) language running on Apple Metal.
There is also an embeddable visualization to the Hydra renderer. USD goes further than Alembic by describing the structure of the entire scene not just individual assets. It supports layering, file referencing, geometry and sharing variants for each asset in the scene and inheritance. Each of the cooperating applications in the pipeline including modeling, shading, animation, lighting and FX can now be assembled into another applications in a nondestructive form with a single consistent API. This means less baking down of your data. This gives the industry a standard to ease the headache of importing, translation, and exporting. It allows creatives in different areas of the pipeline to collaborate on the same scenes without having to wait for one person to finish.
Autodesk announced support of USD at this year’s SIGGRAPH. NVIDIA is using USD for the foundation of Omniverse, a live collaboration platform that connects a wide variety of content creations tools to each other and to the real time RTX engine; The Foundry, Unity, Epic Games (Unreal Engine), Pixar, Animal Logic are already developing uses for USD in their applications.
Neil Trevett, President of The Khronos Group and Vice President at NVIDIA.
Open XR, is another cool open source technology from the Khronos Group that is setting a new standard for Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality application developers to help streamline their pipelines from going from one SDK to another. Open XR allows games and other applications to work easily across a variety of platforms without dealing with proprietary SDK’s. AMD, NVIDIA, Valve, Microsoft, Epic Games Unity, LG, Samsung, Sony, Varjo, Nokia, and Google are among industry supporters. Open XR Application Interface is available now and Open XR Device Plug in interface is coming soon.
This gives the industry a standard to ease the headache of importing, translation, and exporting. It allows creatives in different areas of the pipeline to collaborate on the same scenes without having to wait for one person to finish.
NVIDIA RTX is a graphics rendering development platform enabling real time ray tracing. It is now a popular platform for developers of games, 3D applications, and VR/AR. In the past ray tracing was only found in non-real time applications. Video games had to rely on rasterization for their rendering. RTX made it development easier by generating interactive images that react to lighting, shadows and reflections. RTX runs on the NVIDIA Volta and Turing based GPU’s. specifically utilizing the Tensor Cores (new RT cores on Turing) on the architecture for ray tracing acceleration. NVIDIA announced in March 2019 that selected GTX -10 series (Pascal) and GTX 16 series (Turing) cards would receive subset of RTX Technology in upcoming drivers though ray tracing would be affected by lack of dedicated hardware cores.
next page: The future of Max, OTOY, game engines, RenderMan and more…
The Future of 3ds Max
Autodesk’s Nicolas Fonta talked to me in depth about 3DS Max and its future. There is a BETA of BiFrost that will be coming soon. (see video below) In the last year development has been intensifying. Remember the days when there was one major release a year, that has changed because there is a slow release strategy throughout the year to help create a more staple reliable experience and give you a chance to test the features at your pace. Autodesk is listening to you and asks for your feedback on 3DS Max, if there are features you need, problems that you need solved you should join Autodesk Area and look up 3D Max Ideas and submit your ideas.
The viewport is getting faster and more flexible per feedback from users. The viewport can spawn multiple viewports so you can customize for your workflow. There are some things in BETA including a new texture tool with baking revamped. Autodesk is exploring procedural environments in BiFrost. The product team is experimenting with live retargeting and Human IK. 3DS Max is more scalable from 3 artists to even larger sizes and making it easy to do this. 3DS Max announced a partnership with Unity that will make working between 3DS Max easier with data and improve material transport. 3DS Max will support USD and open Material X standard making it easier to work with other applications. This is all good news for those of us doing visualization to know that tools are improving, becoming more universal in Open Source and partnerships mean better stability.
OTOY and Epic Games announced OctaneRender for Unreal Engine 4. It will bring cinematic GPU path-tracing to millions of Unreal Engine artists. This will give architectural visualization a new tool for ray tracing beautiful renders. Artists can now import, export and mix and match ORBX interchange assets from over 2 dozen DCC integrations. Octane Render is fully integrated into Unreal Engine’s 4 node editor—fast auto conversion of Unreal Engine 4 scenes and materials into Octane. A full procedural node based Volumetric Geometry and Lighting for infinite detail. Using OTOY’s ORBX format supports Cinema 4D, Autodesk Maya and 3ds Max and 20+ others.
Unreal at SIGGRAPH 2019. Octane Render for Unreal Engine 4 was announced at SIGGRAPH.
Blender had a great SIGGRAPH, it has been 20 years since they first were on the show floor. Blender announced RTX support in Blender. This patch was created by Patrick Mours from NVIDIA in close collaboration with Blender Institute. You can now get the insane power of RTX technology inside Blender.
The AMD booth at SIGGRAPH 2019.
AMD was there to talk about their recent release of Radeon ProRender. ProRender is AMD’s fast, easy and incredible physically based rendering engine that is democratizing rendering. It is available to everyone by leveraging open standards. It is supported by several software packages including Cinema 4D which announced a major update that includes a host of Radeon ProRender features. There is also the first production version of the ProRender for plugin for Blender. Developers have a whole suite of tools available for them with a preview of ProRender’s capabilities.
The Pixar Renderman Art & Science Fair was where we got a sneak peek at what is coming up in Renderman in the near future.
I went to Pixar’s Renderman Art & Science Fair where I got to see a sneak peek at what is coming next for Renderman. Do you remember the scene of the carnival in Toy Story 4, this scene took 17,000 lightbulbs and was rendered using Renderman. This powerful rendering engine is available not just for animation but also VFX and architectural visualization.
Overflow area for Key Notes at SIG’19.
Thrive was the theme name for SIG’19.
USD makes handling huge files with multiple objects and large scenes easier. Hydra delegate is part of Renderman now. Hydra is the imaging framework that ships as part of USD distribution. It connects two or more front ends and backends. Its first and primary back end is a highly scalable OpenGL renderer with multi-pass and OpenSubDiv for mesh renderings. It provides fast preview and animation streaming from USD files. I saw a demo pod featured an iMac Pro running Renderman using USD…it was fast and incredible to see 1200 unique objects on one screen. Can you imagine how useful this will be for complex city design work or even environment visualization?
More images from the show floor at SIG’19.
Cloud power! Amazon’s AWS at SIG’19.
The VR Theater at SIG’19.
SIGGRAPH is a big show with the power to overwhelm, but the idea is to find the core key components being discussed like USD, Open XR and RTX and educate yourself more about how these technologies will filter into your life. These technologies are bringing Open Source to the forefront, and changing the industry of visualization, computer animation, and visual effects.
Another scene from SIG’19.
This image is of the Geek Bar at SIG’19.
A view of the exhibitor floor at SIG’19.
Architecture clients are asking for more Unreal Engine & Unity visualization and the open source solutions can make implementing this easier. I’m hoping that very soon GRAPHISOFT ARCHICAD and Autodesk Revit will also support USD. There is already a Sketchup USD plugin created by Pixar. Pixar makes beautiful movies and now it is becoming a leader in getting open source technology into pipelines to make work easier and these groundbreaking technologies are becoming more universal.