Computer Graphics World articles from February 2002

Computer Graphics World archives from February 2002

A time to grin? (editor's note).(Editorial)
February 1, 2002... While most professionals contribute to society, some make a bigger impact than others. Take computer graphics users, whose job titles range from research scientist and engineer to film artist and animator. It's clear that the researchers among...

Trademark spelunking. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2002... In the article "Immersed in Art" on pg. 24 of the November 2001 issue, you discuss caves as a generic technology when in fact they are not. As you correctly state early in the article, the CAVE[R] was developed by Dan Sandin and Tom DeFanti at...

Corrections. (letters).
February 1, 2002... On pg. 28 of the December 2001 issue, the listing for Ascension Technology Corp. in the "Computer Graphics World's 2001 Innovation Awards" feature contained an incorrect Web address. The correct URL is www.ascension-tech.com. The caption...

Character reference. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2002... I noticed an oversight in the Poser 4 review that appeared on pg. 47 of the December 2001 issue. The writer refers to a "minor interface problem" in which the mesh of a character disappears when the user is navigating or moving a body part,...

Revit extends its parametric reach. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... In a move that echoes the "supply chain strategies" of mechanical CAD vendors, Revit Technology Corp. has updated its parametric building modeler so that the software can be used by all members of a building team--architects, engineers, and...

New graphics for SGI Octane2. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... Silicon Graphics has announced several new graphics display configurations that offer viewing flexibility for users of its Octane2 line of workstations. The Dual Head option enables an Octane2 to support two graphics cards (SGI's V10 or...

More 3D for Adobe AE. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... Version 5.0 of Adobe Systems' After Effects software, which shipped last spring, marked "our first foray into 3D compositing," says Adobe's senior product manager Steve Kilisky. The latest iteration of the popular motion graphics and visual...

Scripting powers up ZBrush. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... Version 1.23b of Zbrush, the painting, texturing, and sculpting tool from Pixologic (a company that is clearly careful with its version numbers) offers a good deal of new functionality. One of the most notable features is Zscript technology,...

Procedural workflow for Houdini. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... The biggest change for Houdini, Side Effects Software's modeling and animation software, is a redesigned interface and workflow system. The new workflow will offer users of Version 5 the opportunity to combine the interactivity of traditional...

Digital Anarchy (San Francisco), a developer of broadcast and visual effects software, has acquired Psunami 1.0 for after effects from Atomic Power (Encinitas, CA).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Digital Anarchy (San Francisco), a developer of broadcast and visual effects software, has acquired Psunami 1.0 for After Effects from Atomic Power (Encinitas, CA). Psunami is a tool for creating photorealistic raytraced water simulations and...

EDS.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... EDS (Piano, TX) has launched PLM Solutions, a new division that combines the former Unigraphics Solutions (UGS) and Structural Dynamics Research Corp. (SDRC). EDS announced last spring that it would acquire and merge CAD software vendors UGS...

Ansys.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Ansys (Canonsburg, PA), a developer of simulation software, has entered into an agreement to buy CAD/CAE vendor Cadoe S.A. (Lyon, France).

Halliburton (Dallas), a provider of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries, has completed the acquisition of Magic Earth (Houston), a 3D visualization and interpretation technology company.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... Halliburton (Dallas), a provider of products and services to the petroleum and energy industries, has completed the acquisition of Magic Earth (Houston), a 3D visualization and interpretation technology company. The Halliburton company expects...

AWadvs results. (benchmark).
February 1, 2002... The following nine workstation and graphics card combinations received the highest scores in the AWadvs-04 (Alias/Wavefront Advanced Visualizer) subset of the SPECviewperf 6.1.2 OpenGL benchmark. The AWadvs-04 benchmark consists of 10...

Animation Oscar. (view point).(Column)
February 1, 2002... Before the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences would consider offering a Best Animated Feature category, eight submitted films had to qualify. In 2001, nine did. Next month, the Academy will award the first competitive Oscar to an...

Life lines: animation takes a new shape for the feature film Waking Life.
February 1, 2002... This month, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences announces the first three nominees for its new Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. The nominees, selected from a list of nine eligible films, will vie for the first competitive...

25 year retrospective part 2 CAD/CAM/CAE: our anniversary celebration continues with highlights of computer-aided design, manufacturing, and engineering from issues past.
February 1, 2002... * March 1982 Solid modeling, considered a toy by some users of computer-aided design software but an industry panacea by others, has proliferated to CAD systems from 17 vendors, including Computervision (used to create this model), as well as...

Housing project: a historic military base becomes a home for university students and Olympic athletes.
February 1, 2002... When Architectural Design West was charged with transforming a historic army facility into living space for students at the University of Utah, the project wasn't as simple as designing a campus housing complex. Rather, it entailed creating a...

Graphic equalizers: mergers, Direct X, and other factors are creating more similarities than differences in graphics chip technology.
February 1, 2002... People who create 3D imagery for a living used to have a wide choice of graphics accelerators for their workstations. Now, with companies such as Diamond and 3dfx either absorbed, ceasing to make graphics cards, or ceasing to do business...

Art forms. (portfolio).
February 1, 2002... Sculptor Zack Petroc is as comfortable crafting human figures using 3D software as he is using clay. The formally trained artist, who has a bachelor's degree in fine arts, also pursued figure sculpting and drawing in Italy. Additionally, he...

Game graphics: fox sets the tone for the Super Bowl with its animations. (digital video).
February 1, 2002... Millions and millions of viewers around the world tuned in to Super Bowl XXXVI, making it one of the biggest broadcast events of the year. But their eyes were not just glued to the gridiron action. Even the most seasoned armchair quarterbacks...

Space continuum: GVFX transports television viewers to a new phase in Babylon 5's history. (modeling/animation).
February 1, 2002... Following a three-year hiatus, the mysterious ranger group from the science-fiction television series Babylon 5 returned to active duty last month in a 90-minute television movie, Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers, which aired on the Sci Fi...

Viz 4: autodesk's architectural design program balances myriad features. (reviews).(Evaluation)
February 1, 2002... ARCHITECTURAL design demands a lot from graphics software. Construction drawings that communicate architects' intentions to building contractors form the basis of the contracts and municipal approvals needed to build a building. Whether these...

DTI 2015XLS: Dimension Technologies' 3D monitor. (reviews).(Evaluation)
February 1, 2002... SOFTWARE designers are always developing new rendering algorithms to make 3D models look more realistic. However, these models, be they the latest designs for a cell phone or animated creatures for a new movie, eventually end up on flat 2D...

UGS-to-SDRC link. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... EDS PLM Solutions has announced a product that enables interoperability between the Unigraphics software from the former Unigraphics Solutions and the I-DEAS software from the former SDRC. With the new product, a Unigraphics user can directly...

Faster FEA. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN Highlighting the list of new features in V8.1 of Noran Engineering's NE/Nastran finite element analysis software is a fast iterative solver for linear and nonlinear static solutions. According to the company, the new PCGLSS solver is 10-20...

Real-time performance tester. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN Lumeo Software's Lumeo Motion 2.0 enables CAD engineers in the heavy-equipment and automotive industries to utilize 3D CAD models to test product behavior early in the development process, reducing time and costs. According to the company,...

Mechanical drawing software. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN Designed for drafters, mechanical engineers, and manufacturing engineers, Cadkey GraphX Version 20 is built on what Cadkey calls a new "contemporary" architecture. This architecture reportedly enables users to create drawings from scratch,...

CFD software. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN UNIX Building on its meshing and solver technology, CFX's new CFX-5.5 features a range of new models, meshing tools, and a new post-processor. New models include a multiple frame-of-reference capability, new turbulence models, combustion...

Photoshop effects. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN UNIX Working as a stand-alone application or as a plug-in for image-editing programs such as Adobe Photoshop, DreamSuite Series One from Auto FX Software is a visual enhancement program designed to work with images, type, and graphics. The...

New AE filters. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN MAC Digital Anarchy's second plug-in package for Adobe After Effects, Geomancy uses a particle system coupled to a grid system to create geometric shapes and lines. The particle system, called GridSquares, generates the shapes, while the...

Production management solution. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN MAC LINUX Targeted at interactive entertainment, animation, and new-media industries, NxN Software's alienbrain 5.0 boasts advanced project tracking and asset management tools, 35 additional productivity features, scalability to 100+ users,...

Events.
February 1, 2002... february 4-8 Milia 2001, held in Cannes, France. Contact: Reed Midem; www.milia.com 17-20 SolidWorks World Conference, held in Las Vegas. Contact: SolidWorks; www.solidworks.com/swworld 25-27 Daratech Summit 2002, held in New York...

TrueSpace plug-ins. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN Caligari Corp.'s aniPak is a collection of 11 third-party animation plug-ins and libraries for trueSpace5 users. The three new plug-ins in the collection are DreaMotion PoseMixer, which enables users to combine individual poses of...

Optimized object models. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN With MultiGen-Paradigm's MultiGen Creator 2.5, users can generate optimized object models, high-fidelity terrain, and synthetic environments for use in real-time visual simulation applications. Highlighting the new features in MultiGen...

Animo 4.0 for Mac OS X. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... MAC Cambridge Animation Systems' Animo 4.0 cartoon animation system is now available to artists running Mac OS X machines. With this version, users can output to files, movies, digital disk recorders, or Macromedia Flash (.swf), and can output...

3D CAD models optimized. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN With Internet Model Optimizer (IMO) V1.5 from ParallelGraphics, users can optimize complex 3D models created with CAD/CAM/CAE and other design systems for use on the Internet. Using proprietary algorithms, IMO removes the polygons that...

Strata rich media edition. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
February 1, 2002... WIN MAC Strata is now shipping version 3.6 of its Strata 3Dpro software. This Rich Media Edition version of the company's 3D design application enables users to render 3D images and animations and export them as Macromedia Flash files and in...

Insight.(Brief Article)
February 1, 2002... STREAMLINE VISUALIZATION: Electromagnetic trackers, used by motion and virtual reality applications, are notorious for their sensitivity to magnetic field distortions, typically caused by metal objects or electronic equipment in the surrounding...