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   A New Spin on Shaders “Design is becoming a more critical factor in consumer buying decisions in industries ranging from apparel and consumer goods, to automotive, aerospace and high tech. DS CATIA V5 Real-Time Rendering solutions, complemented by NVIDIA’s FX Composer 2.0 and mental mill shader technology from mental images, moves rendering a step ahead in realism and ease of use, “said Philippe Laufer of Dassault Systemes. The next-generation shader functionality in CATIA, which is compliant with NVIDIA CgFX shader technology and OpenGL, provides high-quality rendering to a broad new community of users—from CAD designers to technical artists working with digital content creation—allowing them to create more realistic renderings during conceptual design. Modifying designs early in the process, changes can be made more efficiently and economically.   Game Development Gets Streamlined FX Composer 2, the first of two new tools for improved game design, is an integrated development environment for shader authoring for the fast creation of real-time visual effects. FX Composer can be used to create shaders for HLSL, COLLADA™ FX Cg, and CgFX in DirectX and OpenGL. Also included in FX Composer 2 is the bundle of mental mill™ Artist Edition from mental images, which allows users to create shaders visually by connecting nodes. Shaders can then be exported from mental mill Artist Edition to FX Composer where they can be applied to real-world geometry. “FX Composer 2 facilitates and simplifies ‘look development’ for my team as we explore next-generation rendering techniques,” said George Borshukov, a CG supervisor at Electronic Arts who received an Academy Scientific and Technical Achievement Award for the image-based rendering technology used in The Matrix. “FX Composer 2 allows us to prototype complex rendering techniques with stunning results. Nothing else out there provides the capability, scriptability, and ease of use that FX Composer gives us.” The second improved application is NVIDIA PerfKit 5, a complete performance toolkit for the creation of real-time games and applications supporting Microsoft Windows Vista and DirectX 10. The core of PerfKit 5 is NVIDIA PerfHUD™ 5, which provides real-time interactive debugging and profiling capabilities, allowing developers to monitor GPU signals, debug frames and analyze frame automatically to find performance bottlenecks. “We used PerfHUD 5 extensively for optimizing Unreal Tournament 3,” said Daniel Wright, engine programmer at Epic Games. “The frame debugger quickly finds rendering issues and the frame profiler is an excellent tool for rapidly identifying performance problems. PerfHUD 5’s ability to interact with our game engine in real time allows us to have short iteration times, which are crucial.” The complete suite of NVIDIA developer tools can be downloaded directly from the NVIDIA Developer Web site at http://developer.nvidia.com.  “Grinding it Out” at SIGGRAPH Grindhouse , a downtown movie theater in disrepair since its glory days as a movie palace known for “grinding out” non-stop double-bill programs of B-movies, is comprised of two individual films Planet Terror and Death Proof. The visual effects team at Rodriquez’s Troublemaker Studios in Austin, TX relied on NVIDIA Quadro® and AMD Opteron powered workstations to deliver the CG visual effects that are crucial to the Planet Terror zombie outbreak storyline. “Creating genre-defining visuals, like the ones Robert Rodriquez produced for Grindhouse, requires an investment in the most powerful graphics and processing power available,” said Jeff Brown, general manager, Professional Solutions, NVIDIA. “By adding professional workstations with NVIDIA Quadro graphics and AMD Opteron CPUs to the production pipeline, artists can focus on being creative, knowing their workstations are operating at peak performance.” The workstations in the NVIDIA booth at SIGGRAPH are being powered entirely by AMD Opteron processors and AMD is showcasing the NVIDIA Quadro Plex visual computing system (VCS) to playback the Grindhouse footage. Sneak Peek of modo 301 Powered by NVIDIA Quadro® According to Bob Bennett at Luxology, modo 301 is a significant milestone in the company’s quest to develop, from the ground up, a new class of modern 3D application. “modo has always had very flexible and realistic OpenGL viewports and a highly threaded architecture. modo runs on both Macs and PCs. Now the model/paint/render toolset of modo has been further expanded into the areas of sculpting, animation and network rendering,” says Bennett. “We believe this is the first major 3D application to include sculpting right alongside traditional modeling tools.” At their SIGGRAPH user event, Luxology spotlighted games and postproduction companies, along with notable design companies like Nokia and BMW DesignworksUSA highlighting modo's artist-friendly toolset. The company also announced upcoming support for Rhinocerous .3dm files and Google SketchUp files (coming in the same timeframe as modo 301). Tripling the original modo 101 feature set, modo 301 is slated to ship later this summer and is best powered by NVIDIA Quadro professional graphics. Visit the Luxology Web site at www.luxology.com. |
