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MillimeterFuture Media & Technology
Jul 1, 2002 12:00 PM, by S. D. Katz
 A still from "Odyssey," a Levi's commercial directed by Jonathan Glazer. The film will show in the Electronic Theater. |
The crystal ball is often murky when it comes to technology, but it's still useful to know about new trends and initiatives before they hit the shelves. Here are two new initiatives that will be available soon and may change the way we work. Over the next couple of months we'll look at four other technologies, including two that are entirely new and up to a year away from reaching the production industry.
MotionBuilder 4.0
Over the past several years, Montreal-based Kaydara has developed Filmbox, the leading (and essentially only) dedicated motion-capture editing software. But as the software progressed, the product added capabilities for previewing complex effects rigs, lighting, particle systems, etc., all built on what was essentially a full animation system. Even though Filmbox was originally intended as a cleanup tool for data destined for use in Softimage, Maya, LightWave, Houdini, and 3ds, it was becoming obvious that Filmbox has a full-blown animation system on its hands.
Enter MotionBuilder 4.0, a new animation system based on Filmbox technology. The new product has a completely redesigned interface, workflow, and feature set. What makes the product unique is its realtime performance. Two years ago, in a demo of Filmbox to a half-dozen of New York's best Maya and 3ds users, we were all impressed with the speed with which Filmbox displayed particles, shadows, shaded characters, and multiple lights, while manipulating a fully rigged IK. Scrubbing character motion at full frame rates was possible despite the considerable overhead — that's the architecture on which MotionBuilder is based. Fast as the original product was, MB has improved on Filmbox's impressive speed with a new animation engine.
MotionBuilder is part of Kaydara's larger vision for its technology that includes the growing acceptance of its FBX file format. According to Kaydara, FBX is a 3D wrapper for any 3D data. It allows motion-capture data, geometry, and camera data to be moved between supporting animation applications such as Alias/Maya, Discreet, NewTek, Electric Image, Motek, and others. FBX was a necessary step in making Filmbox compatible with other animation products, but now it serves as the basis for Kaydara's long-term plan to make libraries of motion and animation data easier to use and reuse in MotionBuilder.
 AKaydara, shose Filmbox application was used to record motion capture in 3D Bob's CG movie The GodMan, will release MotionBuilder 4.0 this fall, a new animation system based on Filmbox technology. |
Kaydara is trying to bring to the high-end professional market the kind of data sharing that has made Poser a phenomenon for the graphics prosumer. Part of this strategy is to make MotionBuilder extremely intuitive and user-friendly while maintaining the full range of professional features found in Filmbox. Because the focus of the product is entirely character animation, the workflow and GUI have been optimized to provide tools according to an object/property-centric approach as opposed to a tool-based approach. In addition, all aspects of the user interface are based on floating windows for maximum customization of available screen space. Drag-and-drop capability and extensive copy-and-paste functions within the Timeline and Dope sheet allow artists to quickly build character performances for pre-viz and series projects where recurring actions are common.
MotionBuilder will be available in the fall supporting Windows 2000, Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Red Hat Linux 7.1 and above. Fans of Filmbox will also like the price of MotionBuilder, which is expected to be less than half of Filmbox's.
3Dlabs, OpenGL and DirectX
3Dlabs cards have pretty much set the standard in the high-end graphic accelerator market for the past two years. Its top-of-the-line Wildcat cards are pricey ($2,500 and higher), but for that you get the fastest OpenGL acceleration available for select Wintel graphics workstations.
Enter a new graphics architecture from 3Dlabs based on the visual processing unit (VPU). The virtue of the new chip, the P10, is that the VPUs are programmable, allowing application developers to write graphic routines such as shaders and pixel-level routines directly to the chip. Programmable chips are not new, and competitors Nvidia GeForce and ATI's Radeon have some level of programmability. 3Dlabs, with the P10, has raised the bar with the most programmable single-chip design currently manufactured.
The P10 is populated with more than 200 32-bit floating point and integer, general-purpose processors with full addressing and subroutine capabilities. The P10 is also capable of multithreading to take advantage of future versions of Windows, such as Longhorn/Blackcomb and the further developments expected from DirectX. In the current version of the chip, DirectX textures (DST1-5) and YUV422 textures are supported directly.
Which brings us to another development key to the future of graphics processing — the competition between Microsoft's DirectX and OpenGL 2.0, the next version of the industry-standard open-source graphics language. In the mid-'90s when Microsoft made its blitzkrieg entry into SGI and Mac graphic territory, Microsoft made it clear that it would be developing its own graphics API, but it was also going to support OpenGL.
The project to share information between a Windows graphic API and OpenGL was called “Project Fahrenheit” and created a great deal of excitement in the development community. Ultimately, the effort between SGI and Microsoft fell apart, and over the last several years, further development of OpenGL has become highly fragmented and bogged down in the standards committees' inability to coordinate a comprehensive upgrade.
Conversely, Microsoft has focused a dedicated graphics team on the DirectX initiative with considerable success. If Microsoft had been searching for an example of the benefits of licensing and intellectual property as opposed to open-source development, it needed to look no further than DirectX — at least from its point of view. As it turns out, hardware manufacturers do not want to be limited to Windows or a single hardware platform, which is why most of the hardware manufacturers develop for both OpenGL and DirectX.
After several years, when incompatible extensions for OpenGL advanced the goals of hardware players but not the general graphics community, order and stability may be returning to OpenGL 2.0 development. At the 2001 Siggraph, 3Dlabs took the lead in development of the new OpenGL spec and was met with approval from the major factions, namely the OpenGL committee and competitors Radeon and Nvidia. Hardware programmability was at the core of the new spec. You can read the white paper at www.3dlabs.com/support/developer/ogl2/index.htm.
