The CAD Insider

Lumiscaphe--It's Unreal

VANCOUVER, BC (SIGGRAPH 2014) - The longer you look at a Lumiscaphe (pronounced lumis-scape) rendering, the more you have to remind yourself that it is not a photograph. At this years SIGGRAPH, I saw some of the best renderings of autos - inside and out- that I have ever seen.

 

Ok, maybe Real Time Technology (RTT) renderings are just as good. Automotive rendering industry leader RTT was acquired by Dassault towards the end of 2013 and has been relabeled 3DXcite.

You can almost feel the fabric in this Lumiscaphe rendering of an automotive interior

Speed may well be Lumiscaphe's forte. I am seeing 4.1 million triangles rendered per second, which James Brown, who is kind enough to demo for me, is faster than anything else out there. It's fast enough to render video in real time!

While Lumiscaphe may seem expensive e at $30k, it is a bargain compared to RTT, which can cost over $76k, says James.

 

For more information, go to http://www.lumiscaphe.com/

Post Your SketchUp Model -- Or Your Wedding -- to the Web with Kubity

VANCOUVER, BC (SIGGRAPH 2014) -  Kubity will work inside SketchUp to add textures, colors to your interior, then create a model that can be displayed on a browser. You can even add sound.

Although architects are the serious market Kubity, it seems to have accidentally found a home with wedding planners, according to Rebeca Moreno, Kubity's head of marketing. I imagine wedding planners savvy enough to show the lovely couple taking their vows in Westminster Abby (even if they can only be able to do Vegas) could add a bit of fantasy to their portfolio.

For more information, see www.kubity.com

Use edddison Light Table to Enter Mixed Reality

VANCOUVER, BC (SIGGRAPH 2014) - edddison (that's a small "e" and 3 d's) allows you to move a matchbox-sized car on a light table and have it move a 3D model of a car in a SketchUp model. Or move the human figurine and walk through a Revit model.

How does the edddison table (being called LightRig at SIGGRAPH) do this particular type of mixed reality? The underside of the light table is ringed with sensors that pick up the position and motion of the he objects on top.

The effect is remarkably natural, quite a bit more than even the most popular 3D input device, the 3D Connexion mice. In the spectrum of 3D virtual and mixed reality, the LightRig is by far more attainable that other devices we have looked at, examples ranging from million dollar CAVEs to zSpace. And it's hardly as goofy looking as head mounted displays.

In fact, the LightRig may be the least expensive way to get into virtual reality. It's folding table (which can easily be taken to a client's site) costs only $1600. 

eddison's owner, Austrian Thomans Keinzl, chose SIGGRAPH 2014 to launch the LightRig to the US market. 

For more information, see edddison's website, http://edddison.com/

Acute3D Turns Photos Into 3D Models

VANCOUVER, BC (SIGGRAPH 2014) - Acute3D was on hand to show that it, too, could make 3D models from photographs with their Smart3DCapture software.

 

Readers of The CAD Insider have learned about Autodesk's ability to create models from photos and may have thought Autodesk was the only game in town. As it turns out, an area in the south of France where Autodesk acquired this technology, was also the birthplace for Acute3D -- and may indeed have been a hotbed for the entire photogrammetry industry. 

 

 

Smart3DCapture, by Acute3D, operates similarly to Autodesk's 123D Catch and ReCap Photo. You take multiple photos of an object, varying the point of view as much as you can, and the software stitches the photos together, creating a 3D model.

 

It may be the same technology under the hood. The difference between the products and companies is still not clear. However, one basic difference Acute3D makes is that it does the transformation locally (on your own computer) whereas Autodesk's ReCap is cloud based and does it over the Internet. 

 

Acute3D is free to use for up to 250 photos at 20MB resolution each for a total of 5 gigapixels of data. Pascal Martinez, biz dev for Acute3D, say that should be enough to not just get you started but able to put together a fairly large model. 

 

"Like the model of San Francisco's financial district I saw by Autodesk?" and I realize too late I may be goading Pascal. 

 

"We made that model for Autodesk," says Pascal. "That was our people who did that."

 

Smart3D employs about a 11 of those people in Paris and in Valbonne Sophia Antipoilis, in the French Riviera, in close proximity to REALVIZ, the company Autodesk bought in 2008, and purportedly the technology hub of France.

 

 

 

City modeling is far from free, however. The highest addition of Smart3DCapture, Smart3DCapture Ultimate, starts at $27,300

 

For more info:

 

Aug 12, 2014 - Acute3D Launches Free, Basic Editions of Smart3DCapture at SIGGRAPH 2014

 

http://www.acute3d.com/

NVIDIA Shows Project Tango App at SIGGRAPH

VANVOUVER, BC (SIGGRAPH 2014) - NVIDIA was showing some "bleeding edge" technology at SIGGRAPH, including a Android-based tablet with Project Tango, Google's 3D scanning technology, with real time remote rendering, allowing a CAD model to be shown in all its rendered glory in the environment of the user. The tablet provides the orientation of the object since it able to detect position and movement.  With this technology (yet unnamed and still in development), an architecht may be able to show a client how an additon might look on an existing home. Or an engineer could show how a resigned part might look in an existing assembly.

NVIDIA demos Project Tango application with their real-time remote rendering at SIGGRAPH 2014

Thinkbox Sequoia May be Fastest Processor of Big Point Clouds

by Ralph Grabowski, Sr Editor, TenLinks 

reprinted from WorldCAD Access

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (SIGGRAPH) -- I had a preview of Thinkbox's point cloud processing software last year at SIGGRAPH; this year it is announced, and next year it ships. Thinkbox wants to be the biggest, fastest processor of point cloud data for the CAD industry, and they spent a whole year talking to people who work with such data, before starting to program. Which means the software has some pretty nice functions

The Sequoia engine is based on their particle physics code that generates artificial water, clouds, sand, and other effects for movies and games. Nevertheless, they claim that Sequoia is capable of the following:

• Processes up to 180 million points; the demo I saw used 174 million
• Asynchronous processing, so that the first million points are displayed while the other 173 million are still being loaded in the background
• Fully multi-threaded to smoothly pan-zoom-rotate, even while points are loading
• Display only sufficient points to fill the current view
• Through multi-document support, loads other point cloud files in additional, independent windows
• Takes dead-easy snapshots to create a list of saved viewpoints
• Uses the snapshots as key frames to generate animations effortlessly
• Caches all previous states for super fast displaying, including in other windows

The points can be meshed; colors are captured, if recorded; 360-degree photos can be applied as textures. ThinkBox is working on mesh editing so that 3D printing is more reliable (like thickening walls, closing holes).

While they had a computer the size of large suitcase powering the demo, they claim the software runs on portable devices, like Microsoft's Surface Pro tablet. The number of points that can be handled is greatly reduced, of course, like down to 50 million, and processing is slower.

For more information

www.thinkboxsoftware.com/news/2014/8/11/thinkbox-software-reveals-sequoia-at-siggraph-2014.html

Pufferfish Spherical Display

by Ralph Grabowski, Sr Editor, TenLinks 

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (SIGGRAPH) - Pufferfish is an interactive 3D viewer that looks like a fortune teller's crystal ball. It consists of a sphere about 1.5 feet in diameter that sits on a mammoth computer case. Its surface is touch sensitive; projectors inside the sphere project 3D images; infra-red sensors (made by Viecon) are mounted high on walls and sense motion; and you wear Viecon's 3D glasses with small white balls that the sensors track.

You put on the polarizing glasses to see the model in 3D; nothing new there. As you touch the surface, however, you manipulate the 3D model (rotating and zooming it). As you walk around the sphere, the model rotates with you. A larger version is available as an inflatable ball. The multi-user version dispenses with the touch interface; users wear the goggles and walk around the sphere. The system needed two computers (or was it three?) to generate the imagery and control the cameras.

www.pufferfishdisplays.co.uk/products

Lenovo P900 - Beautiful on the Inside

VANCOUVER, British Columbia  - Lenovo was letting the press peek under the covers off their top of the line P900 workstation at SIGGRAPH. Recently introduced as part of the new ThinkStation P Series (see press release), it won't be ready to ship until October.

But I already want one.

Engineers, those lucky enough to get a P900, will appreciate the engineering that has gone into the internals workings. While Lenovo offers multiple drive bays, up to 3  high-end NVIDIA graphics cards, support for 3 monitors, Intel Xeon processors and DDR4 memory, even 8 USB 3.0 ports...and a host of other advantages over ordinary PCs, what really sets the P900 apart from other workstations is its innovative air flow management. Whereas ordinary computers may rely on one fan to suck air from the front, with the heat dissipation off the hot zones a hit of miss affair, the P9000 has a "big ass" fan on one side and 2 smaller fans on the other, an effective push-pull arrangement. In between, there is a carefully designed plenum with channels airflow from and over hot spots.

 

Robert Herman, whose business card declares him a "distinguished designer," is so proud of the plenum that he chose to commemorate the opening launch party with an ice sculpture of its shape and a "P900" punch that cooled itself as it flowed through it. I expect the working model will have no such feature.

Rob Herman of Lenovo demonstrates the cooling effect of the ThinkStation P900 baffle

"Won't that fan be noisy?" I say pointing to what has just been referred to as a "big ass" fan. A large fan will actually run quieter, says Rob without so much as a I-thought-you-were-an-engineer look lets me know that a larger fan can draw the same amount of air at a lower speed. That means less noise.

Also proudly shown was the extent Lenovo has gone tool-less. Red markings and indents over components show where to press and and obliging drives, fans, boards, power supplies -- even the motherboard -- pop right out. 

For more information, see Lenovo's product page: https://www.thinkworkstations.com/

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Dell Whispers of the Biggest Monitor and the Highest Resolution for Laptop

by Ralph Grabowski

ANAHEIM, CA (SIGGRAPH 2013) July 24, 2013 - Dell called it their Whisper Suite, a hotel room in which new and secret products were being shown to the media. Their product manager began the brief event by asking, "What are we doing here [at SIGGRAPH]?"

Well, it turns out that for Dell's workstation division, M&E [media and entertainment] and CAD are the two most important markets. A few years ago, they decided to take CAD seriously by showing up at events like Autodesk University; now they are taking M&E seriously by showing up at SIGGRAPH.

Here in this hotel room, they are giving us sneak peeks at their new 32" 4K monitor and a number of new workstations -- all of which will be introduced in September or later, and some of which we can talk about today.

Dell's very cool M3800 mobile workstation's 15.6" touchscreen has a whopping 3200x1800 resolution.

Sitting on the coffee table in front of us is a fat red laptop, the type that Dell became famous for, too heavy to be portable and with a power supply the size of a brick. The product manager lifts its lid, and it proves to be a fake, much to our amusement. Nestled inside is the new M3800, which Dell calls the world's lightest workstation. It has a carbon fiber bottom, and its 15.6" touchscreen boasts a remarkable 3200x1800 resolution.

"We're spanking our competition, especially one named after a fruit."

Really, Dell considers Apple a competitor?

"Not in CAD, but in M&E, yes"

It is a workstation because of the iCore 7 quad-core CPU, and NVIDIA Quadro graphics with 2GB video RAM. It ships later this year, and so no other specs are available, nor is the price. And it lt looks better in real life than in pictures. "What about the power supply, is it still a brick?" we ask. The product manager reaches under the table and pulls out a reasonably-sized power supply.

32" Monitor

Last week we had installed Lenovo's new 30" workstation monitor, and so we found ourselves very interested in how Dell planned to up the competition. Their new one is named UP-32, is bigger at 32", and has more pixels at 3840x2860 -- popularly referred to as 4K resolution. "It's like four 1080p monitors in one," the product manager boasts.

"What kind of graphics board can work with such a high resolution," we wonder. The answer: Graphics boards with DisplayLink ports. The monitor also has ports for HMDI, DVI, mini-DisplayPort, and a USB hub.

The stand is aluminum. To keep the size of the size of the stand smaller, this monitor does not pivot to portrait orientation.  The monitor will not ship until Q4, and the price is unknown, although 30" models go for $1500 today.

And that's all we can tell you, because reporting on the remaining hardware shown to us is embargoed until September.