Computer Graphics World articles from March 2002

Computer Graphics World archives from March 2002

Reel Arabs. (editor's note).(Editorial)
March 1, 2002... Last month in this column I urged movie studios to fulfill their obligation to society by producing films that will help us cope with conflict in this new age of terrorism. That won't be easy. However, the greater challenge will be to...

A fair Shake. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2002... I am writing to correct several errors that appeared in the review of Nothing Real's Shake Version 2.4 compositing software that appeared on pg. 48 of the January 2002 issue. First and foremost, the headline of the review refers to "Shake...

Time for new Mac comparison. (letters).(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2002... I just read the "G4 vs PIII" review you ran a year ago (pg. 62, March 2001) and I enjoyed it. However OS X is out and we now have faster Macs, like the new dual 1GHZ with a 64MHZ video card. Maybe you could do the tests again and this time you...

3Dlabs Intros Wildcat III. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Two new cards represent the third generation of 3Dlabs' Wildcat graphics card family: the Wildcat III 6210 and Wildcat III 6110. These additions push the high end of the 3Dlabs line a bit higher, with the 6210 described by the company as...

3D TeamWorks from Solidworks. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Solidworks' new collaboration workspace, 3D TeamWorks, provides project team members with secure online access to design data. The Web-based environment allows the head team member, called the "owner," to upload data--a product design, for...

Making Web models with 3D ScanTop. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Olympus created its 3D ScanTop system for the quick and easy conversion of digital camera imagery to 3D Web content. It is designed primarily for e-commerce applications--to photograph a number of items for an online catalog, for example. ...

AMD Athlon MP powers new Boxx workstations. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Boxx Technologies is shipping two new workstation lines that are aimed at digital artists, game developers, and animators. Both the 3DBoxx R1 and the RenderBoxx RI series are based on the AMD Athlon MP processor and are designed for creating...

Apple rolls out Final Cut Pro 3. (product spotlight).(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Highlighting the list of features in Apple's Final Cut Pro 3 nonlinear video-editing software are a new offline format and color correction tools. The offline format, called OfflineRT, is based on a new QuickTime Photo-JPEG codec that...

Bricsnet.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... Bricsnet (Gent, Belgium), a provider of integrated software technology and services to real estate organizations, today announced a management buyout of its CAD software, Bricsnet Architecturals and Bricsnet IntelliCAD. The management buyout is...

NXN Software.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... NXN Software (Los Angeles), a supplier of digital production management systems for animation and new media industries, has entered into an agreement with Electronic Arts (Los Angeles) whereby EA will use NXN's alienbrain software to manage its...

LightWork Design.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... LightWork Design (Sheffield, UK), a supplier of software for rendering and simulation, has announced the spin-off of its NavisWorks Division into a separate, independent company, NavisWorks Ltd. NavisWorks will focus on developing markets for...

Best DesignReview performers. (benchmark).(Hardware Review)(Evaluation)
March 1, 2002... The Wildcat II 5110 graphics accelerator, paired with both a Dell and an IBM M Pro system, earned the highest scores out of nine workstation and graphics card combinations tested with the DesignReview (DRV-07) subset of the SPECviewperf 6.1.2...

Think small. (viewpoint).
March 1, 2002... The Web is easy to neglect. Sure, it has valuable product information, software patches, perhaps the occasional discussion board. But for content creators, the value of developing true graphical complexity has not been apparent. So the best bet...

Gaming for the masses: part 1: massively multiplayer games are positioned to invade the mainstream market.
March 1, 2002... the allure of massively multiplayer online games (MMOG) has been that a person can play with or against thousands of others simultaneously, bringing a social atmosphere to what was typically considered a singular form of entertainment. But...

Gaming retrospective part 3: our 25-year anniversary celebration continues with gaming highlights.
March 1, 2002... Game graphics appeared as a blip on the computer screen more than 40 years ago, and eventually made their way into the commercial arena by way of television sets with Atari's Pong. When Computer Graphics World was founded during the late-1970s,...

About time: Digital Domain and ILM developed new technologies to create effects for the movie The Time Machine.
March 1, 2002... How do you make time fly? That's the question Digital Domain had to answer visually for The Time Machine, a film based on the novel by H.G. Wells, which begins in the 1890s and proceeds to 800,000 years in the future. Directed by Gore Verbinski...

Virtual testing: automakers drive to eliminate physical prototypes.
March 1, 2002... WOULD Y0U DRIVE A CAR whose components have been designed without the aid of physical testing? Actually, you are probably already doing so. The Big Three automotive manufacturers have put years of effort into the testing of virtual assemblies,...

Aesthetics of mathematics. (portfolio).
March 1, 2002... Typically, artists are right-brain thinkers, whereas mathematicians tend to be left-brain thinkers. Digital artist Earl Einhorn, however, fits both categories. That's because his works combine Fortran programming with traditional oil painting...

Making prehistory: researchers digitize a cave-art gallery. (digitizing).
March 1, 2002... Not so many years ago, if you wanted to see prehistoric cave art in its original setting, you could. You might visit Altamira in Spain or Lascaux in France, where, standing in the caves of our Paleolithic ancestors, you could view the stylized...

Digital map making: MSNBC uses 3D maps to pinpoint international news events. (broadcast).
March 1, 2002... A few months ago, most US citizens had never heard of Kabul or Kandahar, or even knew the geographic location of Afghanistan, the country in which these cities are located. When Operation Enduring Freedom placed these areas in the spotlight, it...

Filmbox 3.5: Kaydara adds keyframe and nonlinear animation. (reviews).(Evaluation)
March 1, 2002... KAYDARA has been a leader in the area of real-time motion capture for the past few years. Filmbox, its flagship product, is an essential tool for anyone creating motion capture or other types of real-time content. Version 3.0 built on a strong...

Quadro DCC: Nvidia's GeForce 3 with extras. (reviews).(Evaluation)
March 1, 2002... OVER THE PAST few years, Nvidia has become the dominant force in 3D graphics processors. The company has been pushing the envelope in terms of price and performance to the point where the line between professional and consumer cards has become...

Pro/E customization tool. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN] With Rand Worldwide's Automation Gateway Version 3.0 programming software, Pro/Engineer users can directly integrate other applications to create custom interfaces and automate either individual tasks or an entire design process. For...

Inventor calculator. (Design Engineering).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN] Geomate Corp. is offering SketchCalc software that allows Autodesk Inventor users to calculate important section properties of an active sketch with the click of a mouse. SketchCalc can be launched from within Inventor to simultaneously...

Adobe improves InDesign. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN|MAC] Version 2.0 of Adobe's InDesign professional layout and design program introduces editable transparency effects such as drop shadows, table creation, long-document support, and an enhanced printing interface. The new version also...

Automated graphics processor. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [MAC] Equilibrium's DeBabelizer Pro 5 is now available for Mac OS X, enabling users to take advantage of the speed of Apple's next-generation operating system to quickly process, optimize, and convert still images and QuickTime movies for...

Digital asset management. (Miscellaneous).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN|MAC] Version 5.5 of Cumulus, Canto's digital asset management software, provides a new pallet view that allows images to be viewed simultaneously in Cumulus and in other applications such as QuarkXPress or Adobe Systems' Photoshop. Other...

Psunami for Softimage/XSI. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Phoenix Tools and Arete Entertainment are porting Arete's Psunami plug-in to Softimage|XSI Version 2.0. The Psunami plug-in is designed to produce photorealistic water and will include tools for simulating and visualizing many types of water...

Automatic matchmoving. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... [WIN|UNIX] Boujou is a fully automated camera calibration aid tracking system, able to derive complex camera tracks and calibration data from film or video for matching 2D and 3D movement in feature films, industrial design applications, and...

WorldBuilder enhanced. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN] Some of the improvements Digital Element has added to Version 3.1 of its WorldBuilder 3D modeling, animation, and rendering package for creating landscapes and scenery include accelerated viewports, the ability to adjust the transparency...

Creating interactive 3D visuals. (Modeling and Animation).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN] Targeted at the live 3D visuals and music markets, Derivative's Touch 007 provides a trio of tools for creating real-time animations as well as interfacing visuals with music using features such as on-screen beat cues, MIDI controls, and...

Titles and effects for Avid. (Video/Multimedia).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Designed for use with Avid's Symphony, Media Composer, Avid Xpress, and Avid Xpress DV systems is Inscriber Technology Corp.'s new Inscriber TitleMotion AVX. The new product includes more than 200 pre-designed templates, more than 50 animation...

Events.(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... march 18-21 National Manufacturing Week, held in Chicago. Contact: Reed Exhibition Companies; www.manufacturingweek.com 19-23 Game Developers Conference, held in San Jose, California. Contact: CMP; www.gdconf.com ...

Multimedia authoring. (Video/Multimedia).(Act-3D introduces Quest3D 1.0)(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN] Act-3D's new Quest3D version 1.0 is a multimedia-authoring product for creating real-time interactive 3D productions. According to the company, the application is based on a unique channel technology that divides a production into...

3D export to Flash. (Web Development).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... [WIN|MAC] Electric Rain's Swift 3D version 2.0 is a stand-alone application that enables users to design and render 3D scenes to the Macromedia Flash (SWF) file format, as well as to Adobe Illustrator (AI), EPS, and the XML-based SVG formats....

High-end projection system. (Input/Output).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... The Odyssey, from Barco Simulation Products, is a multi-channel blended projection display system designed for high-end, stereoscopic collaborative visualization. Utilizing the 180MHz-bandwidth Barco Reality 908 projectors as its display...

Volumetric 3D display. (Input/Output).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Dimensional Media Associates has developed a new volumetric display system that can show 3D images in a variety of formats: as solid shaded images, translucent images in which interior features are visible through exterior features; and...

Glove-like controller. (Input/Output).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... Using discrete hand and finger movements, the P5 glove-like controller from Essential Reality allows full-motion control of images, game action, on-screen characters, and 3D graphics. According to the company, P5 provides gamers with an...

Color-accurate flat panel. (Input/Output).(Brief Article)(Product Announcement)
March 1, 2002... According to Hitachi America, the proprietary S-IPS technology it has incorporated into its new 18-inch flat panel display enables crisp text, true colors, and sharp, distortion-free images at viewing angles of 170 degrees, both horizontally...

Free falling. (insight).(Brief Article)
March 1, 2002... FREE FALLING: The Galileo Probe was designed for a unique, one-way mission: It would plunge into Jupiter's atmosphere at 106,000 miles per hour and transmit data about the gas giant's chemical makeup while dropping to its death. To ensure that...