The CAD Insider

Keeping it Real - Christie HoloStation

by Ralph Grabowski

ANAHEIM, CA (SIGGRAPH 2013) July 23, 2013 - Christie is not a familiar name to CAD insiders. Wall sized displays, super high resolutions, usually 3D ones. CAD users just don't see much of that.

Christie's Larry Paul, Senior Director of Technology and Visualization, was able to broaden our horizons  -- starting with the world's largest touch screen and ending with the world's smallest CAVE (computer-aided visualization environment).

The company added a frame to an 84" panel that can show four times full HD, and at twice the frame rate of consumer UHD TV sets. It uses infrared technology to sense up to six fingers at once. Whiteboard software lets us place and size images, and then draw over with finger-paint like motions. Mr Paul showed us how he could make the sketched lines fatter and thinner by using wider and thinner parts of his thumb. Standing a yard (meter) away from the giant screen felt like the screen was the wall.

Next door was the wall, against which an enormous projector (the size of a shopping cart) was displaying a huge image. It even had its own smoke stack for releasing heat. That's our second-largest model, says Larry. It was hooked up to four specialized workstations that were rendering automotive models in realtime 3D. The resolution of the Christie projector is the new 4K standard (4096x2160), because, you know, hi-def (1920x1080) just isn't high enough anymore. Anyhow, the full spec is 4K resolution at 120Hz (60Hz for each eye). Wear active shutter glasses and the car can move by in subtle 3D, depending on how the content is formatted.

 Christie's projector displays 4K-resolution images in 3D

The final star in the booth tour was the HoloStation, designed as a turnkey installation, and available for purchase - as long as you are in North America. Christie is reluctant to give price information, but will say "typical configuration can cost between high $200K to low $300K." It uses four Christie LCD projectors to display a 3D image onto five orthogonal surfaces. When we stand close, wearing polarizing glasses and holding the remote control, we can walk through a CAD-designed apartment, pick up and move chairs. HoloStation reads 3D models from CAD programs, converted into OBJ format. the entire setup is designed to fit into an office elevator.

Christie's HoloStation makes 3D displays immersive.

www.christiedigital.com

Autodesk's Fix for Slumping Special Effects Industry

by Ralph Grabowski

ANAHEIM, CA (SIGGRAPH 2013) July 23, 2013 - The revenues of Autodesk's M&E (media and entertainment) division have been declining for several years. On the first morning of SIGGRAPH 2013, Autodesk threw a breakfast for the media across the road at Disneyland.

In the opening speech, Autodesk admitted the industry is facing a lot of challenge and turmoil. The film industry is growing 5% year-over-year, but the same time none of Autodesk's customers are turning much of a profit. This is because the complexity of special effects continues to increase, so the cost of visual effects is outpacing growth in revenues. He gave the example of a controversial Canadian company that went out of business after doing the effects for the movie 'Journey to The Center of Earth', despite receiving tax subsidies.

"So, what can we do to help our customers?," Autodesk asks. The answers were "standardize" and "open": - standardize production cycle (customers keep reinventing ways of doing production) - standardize ways to exchange data, such as creating OpenData to access the dataset of their Maya software - scalability - support of open workflows

New M&E Products

Most releases of new M&E software will not occur until Q3, and so "we are short on news for the SIGGRAPH show, and which is why we are not at the show." They did, however, make two announcements:

• Autodesk FBX Review is a lightweight standalone 3D viewer of FBX files (usable by AutoCAD users) for Windows 7 and 8 and uses DX11 but not required. It performs dynamic tesselation (see more wireframe as you zoom in further), view from lights and cameras, and see animation. Also handles 3ds max, obj, dxf, mcd, and other formats. For instance, the demo showed an interactive view of a Revit model, which I presume was exported in DXF. Available from Windows 8 Store or Autodesk Exchange store. Other platforms are being looked at, such as Android, iOS, and OS X.
• Creative Commons has been applied to all M&E support and learning material for 2014: 20,000 documents, 70 video, 140 3D assets; can be modified and remixed. See the Autodesk Maya Learning Channel online. This will apply to all Autodesk support material, actually.

Autodesk will anounce additional products and upgrades in August.

Leap Motion

A canned demo was given of the Leap Motion controller ($80), which is about the size of a deck of cards. It tracks fingers at 200 steps per second, in a 2x2x2-ft box. Use your hands and fingers to edit -- "it lowers the barrier between humans and screens." It works with Maya through a free plug-in at Autodesk Exchange -- and 75 other apps. 

www.leapmotion.com/

NVIDIA Launches the Quadro K6000 for High End Graphics

by Ralph Grabowski and Roopinder Tara

NVIDIA likes to try to own SIGGRAPH. Attendees wear NVIDIA badgeholders around theri neck. They throw parties in the evening. Their booth is enormous, complete with a Tesla electric car, for the car uses a pair of NVIDIA GPUs to power the two dashboard screens.

The Tesla is the only successful electric car, and it uses NVIDIA GPUs to power its dashboard displays.

The new K6000 is the top-of-the-line graphics board from NVIDIA, and with 12GB RAM on-board it probably holds more RAM than your computer. (It is Kepler-based, replacing the former Fermi-based 6000.) It is not meant for CAD users; indeed, NVIDIA suggests that top-end CAD users consider the K2000 or K4000 at most, leaving alone even the K5000.

In the booth, we got to see what the K6000 can do: animators can preview near final-frame quality in near realtime. At one station, we saw how car makers can render models with 50-70 million polygons. (A polygon is the smallest smooth area in a 3D model.) This means that designers spend less time cutting out fewer unseen parts of car interiors (like the engine) to squeeze the entire model into memory. At another station, a graphics designer was mapping a 1GB 360-degree photograph onto a LIDAR point cloud scan to create an interior that could be used for games or movies, along with motion-captured actors.

Taking a quick look at the physical stats, the K6000 will be roughly in the $2,500 price range, shipping probably in September, takes up two slots in desktop computers, and uses 225W of power.

http://www.nvidia.com