Architosh Staff (info@architosh.com)

5 Aug 2005

 

SIG: Architosh Report on SIGGRAPH - Part 2

Alias Continued

While Maya 7 was certainly popular at the show, Alias was also there to showcase the new MotionBuilder 7. New in 7 includes better character extensions and visual feedback on rigs. This allows animators greater control over their character setups. Animators can now also pose or key characters simultaneously, including all attached extensions such as tails or wings.

With sophisticated tools, MotionBuilder offers improved productivity enhancements. A new save and load character animation feature lets animators rapidly transfer, repurpose and reuse animation clips with any character. There are new UI features and a new save reminder.

Alias MotionBuilder 7 supports Live Device Support for multi-streaming motion capture devices, data mapping and asset management integration.

@Last Software

The SketchUp folks were in attendance this year at SIGGRAPH too. Although the CG conference and exhibit has grown from its early roots in 70's UNIX 3D CAD/CAM and visualization into the more entertainment driven animation focused event it tends to be today, there were nonetheless many CAD/MCAD and AEC-based software companies at the show. In fact, AEC visualization is a major focus of the show, with CGarchitect.com hosting its annual awards ceremony and party this past Wednesday night.

Of course, SketchUp 5 has just been released and the company had a busy booth with attendees checking out the latest features -- all running on Mac OS X of course. Architosh has a chance to sit down with John Bacus, product designer for the company to discuss the show for them and what they saw as some trends going forward.

John said that SIGGRAPH is a great venue for them because the show is a popular conference with a wide variety of individuals across many disciplines, including AEC. The company's booth was busy showing off SketchUp 5 to folks interested in it for architecture, landscape architecture and game development, to name few.

When asked about the new organic modeling functionality in SketchUp 5 and if that was targeted at a wider variety of 3D professional, John said, "it is actually very popular with landscape architects who are finding SketchUp 5 a great tool for them because of strong terrain modeling features." He also added that game developers are using SketchUp more and more because fundamentally many games (first person shooters in particular) are "just architectural environments that you run around in."

John said that they have customers who are architects who have placed their SketchUp 5 models inside game engines like the Unreal engine. "Customers are winning clients instantly with this technology because it allow the client to run around inside their future project," he said.

Eovia

At the show we also met up with Eovia who was having an excellent turn out of folks interested in their new Hexagon modeling program, in addition to their older Carrara 4 and Amapi Pro 7.5.1 products. Hexagon was personally demonstrated and in that demonstration we learned several key things that folks interested in general modeling might want to know about.

First off, Hexagon is very easy to use with an excellent three dimensional reference system (x,y,z) coordinate system for active push/pull modeling. An information palette allows you to type in specific dimensional units -- more useful to final modeling or AEC modeling. In general users start with a cube and pull and stretch its surfaces, subdividing surfaces as need to generate various shapes. Within just five minutes a single form the shape of a butter cube was quickly manipulated into a basic car, complete with rounded (radiused) edges and smooth contours. Within about two minutes it looked like a vintage early 80's Volvo and when completed the beginning of something we have yet to see out of Ford's future.

Working in Hexagon is very much like being a digital sculptor. The product's fluidness is reminiscent of SketchUp in many respects. Like SketchUp it is very immediate and has an excellent navigation capability. The company remarked to us that the folks from Rhino were visiting them and congratulated them on their work on Hexagon. One of Hexagon's more remarkable features is its editable construction history with dynamic geometry. You can export to Carrara for animation or these file formats: .obj, .3ds, .dxf, .dwg and .stl in addition to Adobe Illustrator.

Continued with Part 3 >

reports | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |

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