SIGGRAPH 2021 — Year of the Metaverse, and Virtual and Global Production (Part 2)

We continue our SIGGRAPH 2021 special report with Part 2 (link to Part 1)

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Autodesk

Autodesk hosted the SIGGRAPH 2021 Vision Series, discussing how productions are pushing the boundaries to create new options for film and television for artists. Programs like “Reimaging VFX Production in the Cloud” and “Marvel Studios: Adapting to Our New (Virtual) Normal” address cloud remote working with artists. Plus, the pipelines they use enable artists to work inside their pipelines via the cloud. Weta Digital CEO Prem Akkaraju spoke about the collaboration between Autodesk and WetaM using cloud production to give artists access to tools created by Weta via the cloud for a monthly price.

Autodesk held discussions about the new release of Maya 2022, 3DS Max 2022, Flame 2022, Bi Frost, Arnold, ShoGrid (formerly Shotgun). Maya 2022 and 3DS MAX 2022 now seamlessly integrate USD enabling you to load and edit large data sets at lightning speed and work directly with data using native tools. Both Maya and 3DS MAX have significant updates to their toolsets and the Arnold rendering tools.

UNITY

Unity did the sessions “The Journey to Real-Time Filmmaking” and “Digital Creation in the Physical World.” The panels talked about the use of Unity for real-time virtual production—how designers can use real-world technologies to merge their work with reality. Unity is used in virtual production on “The Umbrella Academy” for previsualization. Artists were able to use Unity to do real-time modifications to fit the needs of the show.

SIDE EFFECTS HOUDINI

Side Effects hosted Houdini Hive with several exhibitor presentations, including “Firehawk PDG Tools: Orchestrating VFX assets at scale.”

Firehawk PDG Tools is a Houdini package for production. Orchestrating many versioned assets across shots with minimal resources, reproducing output: immutability and idempotence, integration with assets databases, and multiple schedulers. It allows an artist to use fewer resources to get the job done. Artists can get ten times more work done with Firehawk PDG tools.

Next, the presentation “Building an Artist Friendly CFX Pipeline” describes the journey of developing a CFX pipeline from scratch leveraging Vellum, PDG, and USD in Houdini. (see image above and below) The focus of this presentation was to cover core concepts and their implementation for the experienced and newcomers.

CFX pipeline creates a unified pipeline where artists don’t have to learn new tools and can use the same tools from package to package. CFX pipelines have reusability for setups and solvers. CFX pipelines must be rigid and flexible. Next, the session “Why Do I Keep Coming Back to Houdini?” was humorous and interesting. Alex Veaux from Tendril showed off a host of fractal-type visual effects in “Sneaky.” Alex uses Houdini to create his projects because of the flexibility and ease of delivering complex results for his animation characters.

The presentation “Worldbuilding with USD at Ingenuity Studios” is a case study on various levels in using USD. They discuss how their pipeline must work for all projects, work quickly, stay organized, and work simultaneously across departments. USD helps achieve this with support for Alembic with materials referencing, supports, rigs, volumes, supercharged instancing, and super-fast, super light. Why USD?

USD delivers an instant asset system, one format for everything, across applications. It supports assets of all sizes and promotes the reuse of assets.

Adobe Substance 3D

Adobe announced at SIGGRAPH that Adobe joins NVIDIA in the Omniverse with the Substance Designer Suite of tools. Adobe Substance recently changed its subscription for Allegorithmic customers. It is almost twice the price point of the previous version from Allegorithmic. Still, they are adding features to make it easier to use Substance 3D across all applications and integrating USD into their applications.

Adobe Substance 3D Designer creates seamless materials and patterns, image filters, environment lights, or 3D models. Each asset can output infinite variations, and software is an industry-standard for material authoring.

Adobe Substance adds a new software application in Adobe Substance 3D Modeler in Beta. Substance 3D Modeler interprets spatial input from the physical world, allowing you to sculpt your model as you would in the actual world. You can use the natural, fluid gestures of the creative workflow; you can switch between desktop and VR. Modeler adapts to whatever you are doing. Adobe Substance 3D Modeler is a great software that can work at every stage of your project, conceptualizing, sketching, prototyping, blocking out game levels, and crafting complex characters or props. You can sculpt an entire scene. Adobe claims it frees you from technical constraints because it “works as an artist does.”

UNIGINE

UNIGINE Sim uses a 64-bit precision of coordinates enabling the simulation of 2^32 (4,294,967, 296 more) larger scenes, allowing for work on the planet-scale (up to the size of the Solar system).

Moreover, UNIGINE Sim incorporates a set of features that are important for city visualization in 3D: GIS data formats, geocoordinate support, a set of tools to work with both georeferenced and geotypical content, performance-optimized object cluster systems, and more.

UNIGINE Sim 2.14 features:

• Realistic Graphics
• Multi-Channel Image Generation
• Broad Spectrum of Hardware
• 64-bit precision of coordinates
• Visual scene editor, support for geo-coordinates
• Support for CIGI/HLA/DIS Protocols
• Embedded into C++/ C# apps (unlike many game engines)

UNIGINE is primarily used in simulation and training, and AI learning. Industries that use UNIGINE are Aerospace, Maritime, Ground Vehicle sims, Defense, Mining, Oil & Gas, and Urban Planning.

For those who recall Architosh GPU performance testing, UNIGINE is also the developer of the Valley and Heaven graphics performance benchmark tools. We hope these tools get updated soon for the M1 (ARM architecture) chips that are being deployed throughout Apple’s Mac range but also numerous PC makers.

Intel

Intel showed off their High-Fidelity Visualization applications that can quickly render massive amounts of raw data. “Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit” enables developers and content creators to build high-performance, high fidelity, extensible, and cost-efficient visualization applications.

Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit is a set of advanced, open-sourced libraries that deliver high performance, scalable, interactive raytracing, and OpenGL image quality for data-intensive cases on CPU platform visualization. ”

See a range of applications for the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit in this short video presentation. 

Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit consists of:

• Intel Embree
• Intel OSPray
• Intel Open Image Denoise
• Intel Open Volume Kernel Library
• Intel OpenSWR

Readers can also learn a bit more about oneAPI Rendering Toolkit by watching this video presentation here or above

On the next page:  Dell, Qualcomm, Qualisys, and Hypertec, and AMD

Dell

Dell and NVIDIA hosted a Fireside Chat about NVIDIA Omniverse at SIGGRAPH with Kristen Soulvis, CEO from Like a Photon; Dan Stein, Director Design Technology from Lake|Flat Architects; Gary Radburn, Director of Emerging Technologies from Dell; Jeff Kember, Director of Developer Relations for Omniverse from NVIDIA, and moderated by Matt Allard from Dell.

This panel discussed how Omniverse is playing a significant role in companies in the creative space. As previously mentioned, the Omniverse saves time by enabling multiple people to work together using real-time rendering technologies. It also contributes to trust by seeing work in real-time by others, enhancing collaborative workflows.

Qualcomm

Qualcomm delivers Boundless XR over 5G. Boundless XR provides distribution through split rendering to give a totally immersive experience in XR. The Edge Cloud Server augments On-device rendering and processing for graphics rendering to 5G XR headsets. The solution enables optimization for multiple users, low-latency, high-throughput, and reliability, says the company.

Erickson G Node B provides 5mm-Wave over low latency high-speed connectivity. The Content Rendering Server executes the computation and rendering to provides photorealistic renderings.

Qualisys

Qualisys is a motion capture solutions company from Sweden that offers a wide variety of products for the MoCap industry. The company makes MoCap software in its Qualisys Track Manager (QTM), which can sync with a wide variety of input sources from drone swarms, force plates, EMG, eye trackers, and other devices.

Qualisys features are multi-person object tracking, real-time, extremely low latency, sub-millimeter precision, active and passive marker tracking, 6 degrees of freedom tracking, large volume coverage, free-roaming VR experience, high uptime, easy to install, and open-source game plugins for Unity and Unreal. Other plugins support Maya, MotionBuilder, PAF, and a Real-Time SDK.

There Analysis Module tools serve clinical environments for gait, rehab, and sports use-cases. Qualisys also makes a mocap suit (see above and below). The suite offers scientific accuracy and is comfortable for long sessions. You can see the suite in action in videos on the website here.

Qualisys also showed off cameras and trackers for use with their software. Arqus is designed for the higher-performing motion capture platform. Miqus fits everything you need for a smaller motion capture project. Qualisys for animation is a real-time solving solution for multiple characters streamed directly to the game engine or animation software. The Active Traqr is an active tracking device that is compact and lightweight, plated with four active markers, and providing positional and orientational data in real-time.

Hypertec and AMD

Hypertec, a Montreal, Canada-based company, announced new workstations and servers based on the AMD CPU architecture. Hypertec delivers custom hardware for enterprise and creative pipelines.

Hypertec introduced the Ciara Kronos 740A-G5 workstation hardware featuring AMD Ryzen 5000 series processors which offer very high single-threaded performance compared to Intel’s 10th generation and current Xeon processors and excellent multi-threaded performance and cores per dollar ratios. For detailed specs and more information including pricing, you should visit here.

Hypertec also discussed its Kronos 840 series workstations which utilize the AMD Ryzen Threadripper for maximum and industry-leading cores and performance. The Kronos 840A-G5 features AMD Ryzen Threadripper CPUs with 24 – 64 cores.

The company also showed its Ciara RS620Q 2U 4-nodes rack-mounted computer which will be powered by a single or dual AMD Epyc CPU. The high-performance system is also liquid-cooled, offers 3TB of DDR4 memory per node and features hot-swap HDD SATA/SAS drives (6 per node).

The Ciara Kronos workstations are a powerful addition to the AMD Ryzen family of workstations and servers. Epic Games uses AMD Threadrippers in its pipeline for development. The Ciara Kronos 740A-G5 is a great robust workstation for CAD and projects in Twinmotion, and if you are working in Unreal, you may consider Ciara Kronos 840 series workstations for even more power.

The Final Comments

This year due to the virtual nature of SIGGRAPH 2021, the show was primarily platform-agnostic, mainly focusing on the cloud and the Metaverse and virtual production.

It was good to see Apple, Pixar, and NVIDIA collaborating to bring advanced physics to USD. You may wonder if this could be a promising sign of NVIDIA RTX technology coming to the future for Apple hardware. Architosh has noted in the past that NVIDIA and Apple fell out years ago, and the relationship has been complicated for years. Look to Anthony’s writing on semiconductors and Apple to understand more about what is possible and likely or unlikely concerning real-time, hardware-accelerated ray tracing, and the like.

A nice thing about USD is that you can work as an artist in any software package without worrying about importing and exporting files and doing it seamlessly even with larger data sets.

Architectural firms like SHoP Architects are adopting Omniverse for their firm, and I imagine most larger architectural firms will explore it and begin to follow in SHoP Architect’s footsteps. Omniverse offers exciting possibilities for the AEC world. Still, Anthony’s writing has noted that at least one Nemetschek Group company thinks Omniverse will grow to complement existing and evolving collaborative workflows in AEC like IFC, BCF and others.

Regardless, pipelines were jolted by the global pandemic, and it has forced companies to work in new ways. You no longer need to work inside an office; you can work from home or anywhere and fit into various workflows and digital production pipelines.

The Metaverse, in all its elaborate evolution, is coming. Enterprises and companies are making themselves aware and prepared. There are exciting opportunities. On the pathway there, the cloud and Virtual Production will create exciting opportunities and digital tool revolutions across various platforms, from Macs and PCs to iOS and Android.

Next year, let’s hope we can see each other in person, or perhaps we shall have a SIGGRAPH in Omniverse!