Diamonds in the Big Dig; Day 1 at SIGGRAPH

Let me say first how much I generally enjoy these smaller, focused conventions than NAB, and Siggraph is my favorite, if for nothing else than the eye candy: stunningly beautiful animation everywhere you turn. It’s swarming, making you involuntarily turn and gawk and bump into people at every turn. It’s the condition of the cinephilly addicted.

But let’s not continue these sophomoric allusions and get to the nuts and bolts of what impressed this editor on the first day after battling Boston drivers to arrive at the oddly located convention center in the sweltering heat.

There are two words or phrases that are most overused in PR in this industry. The first is describing a company as “the leader in.” By my count there are over 100 “leaders” in every facet of the content production pipeline and no followers. Hey, the world needs ditch-diggers too. The second is “revolutionary.” That being the case I hesitate to bestow that supreme status but seeing the Mova Contour system in practice all I can say is that this will likely revolutionize motion capture as we know it. Press release here.

This markerless system using makeup and rapidly flashing lights, both invisible to the naked eye, is capable of recording movements as subtle as flaring nostrils and from multiple angles simultaneously. Suffice it to say, the level of detail this system will capture is an enormous leap forward in mo-cap technology. And after reading Bryant Frazer’s article on the effort made to capture motion data on set on Pirates of the Caribbean, it would seem that capturing crisp, detailed motion data on set will not be too far off. At Siggraph, we videotaped a demo (coming next week online) of the product simply by setting the video camera to 96.3 Hz with no flicker. So it would seem that there would be little problem of doing this on set where ‘characters’ can interact with ‘actors.’

While Mova attracted huge crowds of curious cats, most animators marked down Autodesk as their primary visit to see the updates to Maya and 3ds Max and what Beth Marchant summarized here as the “three-year roadmap for the clearly separate yet increasingly collaborative development of the two 3D software packages.” This is the first step in that journey with Max adopting some of Maya’s best features and vice versa.

Darwin Dimensions employs a new take on humanoid character generation. Instead of creating a character from scratch, Darwin’s evolver software is based on selecting a variety of ancestor types. By selecting from a virtual gene pool, rough characters are instant created with a matter of a few clicks. Then facial and body type can be altered by dragging scroll bars. All the models are fully rigged and are exported as FBX files.
evolver is simple to learn and virtually limitless in its possibilities. The ease of creation promises that this new tool will be a hit with animators. Read more here

NVIDIA making a separate, dedicated graphics processor? Apparently so with the Quadro Plex, a 3U rackmount visual processing system capable of running multiple streams of 4K video. The system was developed with medical and industrial imaging purposes in mind but it’s hard to imagine
some of the elite in the post and d-cinema folks passing up on this toy.

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But Siggraph is more than just product release with excellent demos, training sessions and information. One such project that I thought was a brilliant commercial was "Billions" for the cologne Lynx created in part with Massive software by The Mill. Very well executed, funny and yes I am sold to the concept of women worldwide running, swimming, fighting, scratching and clawing all to get to one man. Sue me.