Computer Graphics World articles from March 2001

Computer Graphics World archives from March 2001

A Little Help from Your Friends.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... When Frederick Brooks delivered his Turing Award lecture, "The Design of Design," at Siggraph last year, he highlighted a concern that has become central to the debate in the mechanical design world about when Web collaboration is appropriate...

LETTERS.(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2001... SnowWorld I read Mark Hodges' article "Cyber Therapy" in the January 2001 issue (pg. 28) with fascination and interest. The description of the ongoing pain control research at the HIT (Human Interface Technology) Lab at the University of...

Expert Q & A.(Questions and Answers)
March 1, 2001... Architectural CAD Q. I do residential design in AutoCAD, and I am looking for a program that will let me switch to 3D with ease. I've looked at several packages, but I don't like what I see with regard to sections: I can't see clear...

New High-Performance Card from 3Dlabs.(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2001... For nearly a year, 3Dlabs' Wildcat 4210 graphics accelerator was the acknowledged high-end 3D graphics performance king. In recent months, however, the formerly invincible 4210 has been dethroned in the SPECviewperf 6.1.2 benchmarks by the...

Fluent Offers Enhanced Engine Simulation.(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2001... Version 5.5 of Fluent, the computational fluid dynamics software from Fluent Inc., offers new features and enhancements in areas including solvers, physical model post processing, and file import/export. Fluent also now comes with an option of...

Greater Stability, Speed with LightWave 6.5.(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2001... According to NewTek, the latest version of its LightWave modeling and animation software was slated to be called Version 6.1. But the program eventually became so feature-laden that the company dubbed it Version 6.5 instead. Leading the...

Mac 3D Applications Multiply.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... The forthcoming Mac OS X operating system is widely expected to be the engine by which Apple will definitively enter the 3D market. Though the hype can be difficult to separate from the reality, a measure of proof, or at least of faith, can be...

Pixar Personnel Receive Oscar.(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... Ed Catmull, Rob Cook, and Loren Carpenter of Pixar Animation Studios have received an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The award was bestowed on the basis of the team's...

Top Design Review Performers.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... This month, we list the five workstation and graphics card combinations that most recently achieved the highest scores for the Design Review (DRV-07) subset of the SPECviewperf 6.1.2 benchmark. Design Review is a package tailored for reviewing...

Autodesk Inventor Chases AutoCAD Users.(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2001... The latest release of Autodesk's mechanical design software, Inventor, has been tailored to lure 2D CAD users--especially AutoCAD users--to 3D. According to the company, Version 4's ease-of-use improvements, coupled with the new ability to...

CAD Printing in 3D.(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2001... EnCAD's CADJet 3D is a wide-format thermal color inkjet printer tailored specifically for the CAD, GIS, and architectural markets. Users in these areas should benefit from the CADJet's ability to produce the very fine lines required for line...

Atomic Vision.(Company Business and Marketing)
March 1, 2001... A new volume rendering tool sheds light on molecular activity Atoms and molecules never looked so good, thanks to a novel visualization technique developed at NASA Ames Research Center. Called EVolVis, for electronic volume visualizer, the...

Implicit Modeling Picks Up Speed.
March 1, 2001... Subdivision techniques help make implicit surfaces a more timely option for interactive graphics applications A hybrid modeling technique being developed by researchers in Canada could help propel implicit surfaces into the computer...

The Play's the Thing.(Industry Trend or Event)
March 1, 2001... It's time for game developers to focus on graphics that support game play In the computer game industry today, we hear much about "convergence," or the notion of combining film-quality imagery with the interactivity of games. But the...

3D Drivers.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... While we wait for 3D graphics to take hold on the Web, feature films and games fuel the content creation market In this era of intense competition to grab and hold the attention of viewers, the demand for 3D content--and for the tools to...

the art of games.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... DEVELOPERS REACH NEW LEVELS IN COMPUTER GAMING REALISM AND INTELLIGENCE Less than a decade ago, gamers were awed when id Software released the fast-paced, first-person 3D shooter game Wolfenstein 3D for the PC. Today those graphics would...

gaming gets real.(Software Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2001... In Shenmue's dramatic opening scene, a young man named Ryo Hazuki witnesses the death of his father, a master in martial arts, over the location of a mysterious set of mirrors--the Dragon Mirror and Phoenix Mirror--mysterious objects from...

morality Play.(Product Development)
March 1, 2001... IN THE GAME BLACK & WHITE, GRAPHICS REFLECT A PLAYER'S CHOICES ABOUT GOOD AND EVIL I've asked a lot of people who are crazy about computers just why it is they are so crazy about computers. They will hem and they will haw, but eventually...

It's an odd, odd, odd, odd World.(Product Development)
March 1, 2001... DEVELOPERS TURN A 3D `ODDYSEE' INTO A CINEMATIC EXPERIENCE FOR THE UPCOMING XBOX In stark contrast to the countless "run around, shoot 'em up" computer games, a title under development by Oddworld Inhabitants (San Luis Obispo, CA) for...

Live Action.(Product Development)
March 1, 2001... EA RACES TO ADD BROADCAST-QUALITY REALISM TO ITS PS2-BASED FORMULA ONE GAME The "next-generation" game consoles such as Sony's PlayStations 2 are delivering 3D graphics that are tantalizing close to realistic. These graphics are not...

flying deep.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... INTEGRATED DESIGN AND ANALYSIS TOOLS DRIVE SUBMERSIBLE VEHICLE TECHNOLOGY TO NEW DEPTHS Hold on to your seats, we're going down." These are not words passengers want to hear from their pilot when in flight over the ocean. Yet the ominous...

Body of Evidence.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... FORENSIC ANIMATION EVOLVES DESPITE SECRECY, CONTROVERSY Forensic animation would not appear at the top of a list of applications that push the edge of computer or graphics technology. Compared to animated feature films, for example,...

Imaginative Architecture.(Industry Trend or Event)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2001... Architects and students abandoned the realm of the real to explore purely imaginative themes from literature, music, poetry, and cinema for the seventh annual Graphisoft virtual building design competition. Using Graphisoft's (Budapest,...

DESIGNS FOR THE JET SET.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Manufacturer creates custom interiors for luxury aircraft For the rich and famous who purchase their own private jets, outfitting these ultimate status symbols with off-the-shelf "coach-class" cabin furnishings is out of the question....

ISLAND ON THE MOVE.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... A six-minute animation covers more than 1.5 billion years of geological history The Danish island of Bornholm is a geographical oddity for several reasons. First, it's off the coast of Sweden rather than Denmark. Second, due to tectonic...

FOCUSING ON HISTORY.(Technology Information)
March 1, 2001... Effects artists restore old film footage of atomic weapons tests for the film 13 Days More than four decades ago, during the 13-day Cuban Missile Crisis, the world hovered on the brink of nuclear disaster as two world powers squared off,...

Character Studio 3.(Software Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2001... Animatable behaviors, better IK, and crowd animation highlight new release Character Studio, Discreet's character animation plug-in for its animation and modeling tool, 3D Studio Max, has been available since Max was first released almost...

G4 versus PIII.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2001... Is there a new hardware platform to consider for 3D CAD? Ever since the introduction of Apple's Power Macintosh with the Motorola G4 processor, many articles have compared its speed to top-of-the-line Intel-based PCs. However, most of the...

UG/Shape Studio.(Software Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2001... Industrial design module for UG V17 offers new capabilities Unigraphics Solutions is now shipping Version 17 of its Unigraphics (UG) CAID/CAD/CAM/CAE software, which includes UG/Shape Studio, a product targeted at industrial designers. The...

RenderDrive RD3000.(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2001... ART's dedicated rendering machine The RenderDrive is a computer that does one thing and one thing well: It renders. ART's RenderDrive RD3000, which the company refers to as an appliance," is designed as a compact and powerful replacement...

SOFTWARE.(Buyers Guide)
March 1, 2001... DESIGN ENGINEERING COLOR FOR CAD WIN ColorFast allows coloring of CAD drawings, letting users apply multiple color, border, shading, and display order options to their designs and then render them. The view can be quickly modified and...

HARDWARE.
March 1, 2001... BOARDS GRAPHICS ACCELERATOR WIN/LINUX The Gloria III professional graphics accelerator is optimized for mechanical computer-aided design, professional game development, and film animation and effects. It is based on Nvidia's Quadro2...

INSIGHT.(Illustration)
March 1, 2001... The inner structure of a brain mitochondrion becomes crystal clear when viewed with advanced visualization tools. Here, the energy-producing organelle has been reconstructed using data obtained from electron tomography--an imaging technique in...