studioGPU

Real-time lighting at Halloween

If you drop by the StudioGPU office in Hollywood this week, you will have encountered a great example of what 3D animators and engineers do in their spare time.  Not sure who actually carved this, but kudos!

StudioGPU Chief Scientist talks about light & materials as brushstrokes on the canvas of the camera

At Siggraph 2009,  John Peddie Research held their annual rendering panel discussion and StudioGPU’s Chief Scientist, Yoni Koenig talked about parallelism in the visualization workflow and his ambition for MachStudio Pro.  In the video capture below, he describes the need to make the creative process for 3D production more spontaneous, giving the computer graphics artists the same freedom of expression that artists in the real world have with their hands in the clay or their fingers wrapped around a pencil.

To quote from the video: “So the whole idea is that light and materials become brushstrokes on the canvas of the camera, as opposed to linear methods which is more like a series of punch cards, which you create and then pass to your piano to play.”

Rick Bergman, Sr. VP and GM at AMD, talks about MachStudio Pro to enhance Hollywood productions

At Siggraph 2009,  Rick Bergman, Senior VP and General Manager of AMD, discusses how GPU-based computer graphics can enhance Hollywood productions. In particular he showcases MachStudio Pro as a critical tool for real-time creative work.

Hardware tesselation brings the artist vision into alignment with the final product

SIGGRAPH 2009 was an exciting show for StudioGPU.  We showcased the upcoming version of MachStudio Pro V1.2 and announced that MachStudio Pro now ships with the FirePro V8750 2GB accelerator from AMD.

But the fun part of the show was watching peoples’ jaws drop when they saw MachStudio Pro in action.  Everyone understands the concept of a really fast final renderer.  But real-time workflow, working creatively at final render quality was what drove the “I don’t believe it” reactions.  The best way to show you what I mean is to let you watch a demo we captured on camera.

The demo runs through real-time ambient occlusion,  lighting, on-the-fly shader adjustments and finally shows sub-pixel displacement mapping using hardware tessellation. 

Tessellation involves breaking down polygon meshes into higher poly meshes. In the video below, taking a simple polygon mesh and breaking each polygon down into smaller units allows the surface of the object/model to become smoother with a greater sense of depth and detail, including self-occlusion, self-shadowing and silhouettes.

But more detailed characters, especially with complex animation, devour memory and up storage requirements. Software runs into bandwidth issues so load times increase and memory demands shoot up. But the new version of MachStudio Pro takes advantage of the FirePro V8750 GPU to generate the additional complexity using hardware tessellation.

Hardware tessellation means there is no penalty hit for the virtually unlimited fineness and detail created by the displacement maps.

Quick note:  Once you start the video, click on the HD button on the lower right, to watch the video at higher quality.