Computer Graphics World articles from January 2002

Computer Graphics World archives from January 2002

Turning twenty-five. (editor's note).(Editorial)
January 1, 2002... To celebrate Computer Graphics World's 25th anniversary, the editors originally planned to construct a standard timeline, maybe four to six pages in length, highlighting what we believed were the major milestones in the history of computer...

A long look at Linux. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... I read the article "Linux Invades Hollywood" (September 2001, pg. 38) with interest. I only wish you had said something about how difficult it is for the average user (let alone artist) to get anything done on Linux. When I can pick up the...

Fictional account. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
January 1, 2002... An article on pg. 29 of your November 2001 issue references another piece called "Interactive Fiction" that was supposed to have appeared on pg. 34 of the April 2001 issue. I can't place my hands on that issue, and I can't seem to find it, or...

Finger not on the pulse. (letters).(Brief Article)(Evaluation)
January 1, 2002... In your recent review of the 3D Web authoring package Pulse 3D from Pulse Entertainment, I was surprised to read: "For instance, although Producer exports 3ds max models and behaviors as Pulse content, Pulse doesn't support raytracing,...

ART's pure rendering board. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Advanced Rendering Technology, developer of the RenderDrive rendering appliance, has now made its hardware-based raytracing technology available on a PCI (peripheral component interface) card for workstations. The Pure board is based on eight...

CEI updates EnSight, EnSight gold. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Version 7.4 of CEI's Ensight software for scientific and engineering analysis and visualization features extended parallel processing capabilities and increased support for immersive VR and collaboration. Parallel processing is now available...

Autodesk Viz 4 goes global. (product spotlight).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Autodesk's 3D design visualization, exploration, and presentation software, formerly known as 3D Studio Viz, now goes by Autodesk Viz 4. Although the program can be used for myriad design tasks, it is especially and overwhelmingly popular among...

New color, texture support for paraform 3.0. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Version 3.0 of Paraform, which the manufacturer describes as "digital form development software" offers enhancements designed for users in both the engineering and entertainment fields. Paraform is able to translate various types of physical...

Enhanced 3D for Shockwave Studio. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio is a well-established authoring tool for Web, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM content. Of late, Macromedia has been pursuing Web 3D content creation with a vengeance, basing Director's 3D authoring and importing...

Pepper's Ghost Production (London, UK) and Cambridge Animation Studios (Cambridge, UK) have agreed that Cambridge will be the exclusive worldwide distributor for PGP's production. management software tool, PG Studio.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Pepper's Ghost Productions (London, U K) and Cambridge Animation Studios (Cambridge, UK) have agreed that Cambridge will be the exclusive worldwide distributor for PGP's production management software tool, PG Studio. Cambridge Animation...

Interactive media vendor Pulse (San Francisco) and text-to-speech developer Rhetorical Systems (Edinburgh, Scotland).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Interactive media vendor Pulse (San Francisco) and text-to-speech developer Rhetorical Systems (Edinburgh, Scotland) have announced an agreement whereby Pulse becomes the exclusive North American reseller of Rhetorical Systems' technology for...

Kodak (Rochester, NY) has agreed to acquire.(EnCAD)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Kodak (Rochester, NY) has agreed to acquire wide-format ink-jet printer manufacturer EnCAD (San Diego, CA) for approximately $25 million.

LipSinc (Morrisville, NC), a provider of facial animation products, and Mindmaker (San Jose, CA), a speech and artificial intelligence technology developer.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... LipSinc (Morrisville, NC), a provider of facial animation products, and Mindmaker (San Jose, CA), a speech and artificial intelligence technology developer, have agreed to combine their technologies to create artificial intelligence agents that...

ProCDRS results. (benchmark).(Nvidia Quadro2 Pro graphics card)
January 1, 2002... The Nvidia Quadro2 Pro graphics card recently achieved the best price/performance score for the Pro/Designer ProCDRS-03 subset of the SPECviewperf 6.1.2 benchmark. The ProCDRS benchmark is based on PTC's CDRS industrial design software and...

Single view modeling: a new technique creates realistic 3D free-form surfaces from photographs and paintings. (techwatch).
January 1, 2002... The human visual system is incredible not only because it allows us to see, but also because it allows us to perceive more in what we see than is actually there. When we look at a photograph or a painting, for example, not only do we see the 2D...

Model mammals: procedural textures help animals move in sync with their coats. (techwatch).(Unisinos' Marcelo Walter)
January 1, 2002... Where the tiger goes, so go its stripes. Unfortunately, this simple law of nature has no equally simple counterpart in computer graphics. In the digital realm, the tiger and its stripes (as with the giraffe and its patches and the leopard and...

25 years retrospective: from humble beginnings, computer art transcends traditional media: part 1 digital art.
January 1, 2002... January 1982 Ken Knowlton produced these "symbolic presentations" by applying random displacements to geometric and organic shapes created on a computer. He used the experimental technique to explore the notion of communicating with symbols...

A twisted tale: artists use digital effects to give a modern-day slant to a classic fairy tale.
January 1, 2002... if you think you know the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, well, you don't know Jack. That's because Jim Henson Television has created a contemporary follow-up to the classic fairy tale, whereby a modern-day Jack follows in his...

Meeting of the minds: visualization researchers and game developers are discovering a common ground in new graphics technologies.
January 1, 2002... It doesn't take a rocket scientist to build a computer game, but rocket scientists, along with biologists, chemists, physicists, and every other professional who develops and applies visualization technology for scientific inquiry and...

Neu kid on the block: a grass-roots studio creates a space-age cartoon, Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius, off the-shelf software.
January 1, 2002... Like Lana Turner's discovery at a soda fountain in The Top Hat Cafe, it was being in the right place at the right time that launched Jimmy Neutron's rise to fame. "I was looking through an obscure 3D animation magazine centered on the program...

Layer by layer: the once-separate worlds of 3D animation and compositing are beginning to overlap.
January 1, 2002... As audiences' appetites for 3D imagery in films and television continue to grow, production deadlines continue to shrink, while at the same time, the cost of creating digital effects remains expensive. Having access to 3D tools from within 2D...

Artistic poses. (portfolio).(Curious Labs' Poser software)(Evaluation)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... Most digital artists agree that creating compelling human character models presents a challenge. Curious Labs' Poser software can ease the difficulty of that task by providing ready-to-use 3D characters that can be inserted into illustrations....

Tunnel vision: Dasani goes underground for a first-of-its-kind animation. (modeling/animation).
January 1, 2002... Phactory Productions of New York made quite a splash with its recent 20-second "animated" advertisement for the Coca-Cola Company's Dasani water product, which features saturated color images of cascading water splashing inside an invisible...

Depth perception: an entertainment store uses 3D music videos and film trailers to attract customers. (digital video).
January 1, 2002... To draw the attention of holiday shoppers, retailer Wherehouse Music used Dynamic Digital Depth's (DDD) 3D television system to showcase a selection of music videos and movie trailers in three-dimensional format. "Watching content in 3D is...

Shake 2.4: a new interface for Kaydara's compositing program. (reviews).(Evaluation)
January 1, 2002... PRODUCTIONS that use special effects usually run footage through a compositing software suite. These suites have traditionally been expensive, so a market definitely exists for lower-priced compositing tools that can run on the desktop....

Electronic design review. (Design Engineering).(SolidWorks' eDrawings Professional)(Brief Article)(Evaluation)
January 1, 2002... WIN Using SolidWorks Corp.'s eDrawings Professional, engineers can communicate and review designs via email. But unlike with most CAD viewing and markup tools, which require that all users buy the software to mark up a design, anyone who...

A new inventor. (Design Engineering).(Autodesk's Inventor 5.0)(Evaluation)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... WIN Providing users with a seamless transition from 2D to 3D is the main focus of Inventor 5 from Autodesk. New features that facilitate this include an AutoCAD DWG import and export wizard that helps users read and write AutoCAD-compatible...

New 4D Revit. (Design Engineering).(Revit Technology's Revit 4.0)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... WIN The latest release of Revit Technology Corp.'s parametric building modeler, Revit 4.0, introduces the concept of time, or 4D, in that components in Revit 4.0 can now be associated with construction phases and be related to each other over...

Ansys simulation and analysis. (Design Engineering).(Ansys 6.0 suite)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... WIN The new Ansys 6.0 suite from Ansys features enhancements designed to provide engineers with tools for designing, testing, and verifying products under real-world conditions. For instance, a new Probabilistic Analysis Method Wizard...

Image-editing software. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... WIN Ulead Photolmpact 7, a new imageediting application from Ulead Systems, boasts tools for users in digital photography, image design, and Web graphics applications. Digital photography features include an Enhancer tool that automatically...

Character software enhanced. (Miscellaneous).(bioVirtual's 3DMeNow 1.5)(Product Announcement)(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... WIN bioVirtual's new 3DMeNow 1.5 adds to the creation and deployment of photorealistic human models the ability to author animation in real time and output the animation to the Web. New features in 3DMeNow 1.5 include integrated animation...

Automatic tracking. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... WIN Automatic tracking, calibration, track cleanup, and support for matte sequences for tracking specific objects highlight the list of features in RealViz's MatchMover 2 Professional 3D tracking software. With MatchMover 2 Professional, users...

Rino enhanced. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... WIN Features in Rhino 2.0, a conceptual design and modeling tool from Robert McNeel & Associates, include hundreds of new modeling and editing commands, options, and enhancements; new STEP and VDA import and export file formats; and VBScript...

2D animation upgrade. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... Toon Boom Technologies has announced the release of the LightTable module, which introduces to USAnimation V5 users the concept of the virtual animation studio, enabling 2D animators to work remotely and send their drawings electronically to...

Deep paint for LightWave. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
January 1, 2002... WIN LightWave users can now paint and texture on 3D objects, including over UV mapped surfaces, using a special LightWave 3D edition of Deep Paint 3D from Right Hemisphere. Some highlights of Deep Paint 3D LightWave Edition include complete...

Events. (products).(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... january 7-11 Macworld Conference and Exposition, held in San Francisco Contact: IBC World Expo; www.ma worldexpo.com 28-Feb 1 Daratech Plant2002, held in Houston. Contact Daratech; www.daratech.com february 4-8 Milia 2001,...

Insight.(Brief Article)
January 1, 2002... ASTR0N0MERS originally thought that the luminous material in the sky made up all of the mass in the universe. Research has proven, however, that there is more mass present than can be accounted for by known quantities of light-emitting matter....