Future Media & Technology

A still from "Odyssey," a Levi's commercial directed by JonathanGlazer. The film will show in the Electronic Theater.

The crystal ball is often murky when it comes to technology, butit's still useful to know about new trends and initiatives before theyhit the shelves. Here are two new initiatives that will be availablesoon and may change the way we work. Over the next couple of monthswe'll look at four other technologies, including two that are entirelynew and up to a year away from reaching the production industry.

Over the past several years, Montreal-based Kaydara has developedFilmbox, the leading (and essentially only) dedicated motion-captureediting software. But as the software progressed, the product addedcapabilities for previewing complex effects rigs, lighting, particlesystems, etc., all built on what was essentially a full animationsystem. Even though Filmbox was originally intended as a cleanup toolfor data destined for use in Softimage, Maya, LightWave, Houdini, and3ds, it was becoming obvious that Filmbox has a full-blown animationsystem on its hands.

Enter MotionBuilder 4.0, a new animation system based on Filmboxtechnology. The new product has a completely redesigned interface,workflow, and feature set. What makes the product unique is itsrealtime performance. Two years ago, in a demo of Filmbox to ahalf-dozen of New York's best Maya and 3ds users, we were all impressedwith the speed with which Filmbox displayed particles, shadows, shadedcharacters, and multiple lights, while manipulating a fully rigged IK.Scrubbing character motion at full frame rates was possible despite theconsiderable overhead — that's the architecture on whichMotionBuilder is based. Fast as the original product was, MB hasimproved on Filmbox's impressive speed with a new animation engine.

MotionBuilder is part of Kaydara's larger vision for its technologythat includes the growing acceptance of its FBX file format. Accordingto Kaydara, FBX is a 3D wrapper for any 3D data. It allowsmotion-capture data, geometry, and camera data to be moved betweensupporting animation applications such as Alias/Maya, Discreet, NewTek,Electric Image, Motek, and others. FBX was a necessary step in makingFilmbox compatible with other animation products, but now it serves asthe basis for Kaydara's long-term plan to make libraries of motion andanimation data easier to use and reuse in MotionBuilder.

AKaydara, shose Filmbox application was used to record motioncapture in 3D Bob's CG movie The GodMan, will release MotionBuilder4.0 this fall, a new animation system based on Filmboxtechnology.

Kaydara is trying to bring to the high-end professional market thekind of data sharing that has made Poser a phenomenon for the graphicsprosumer. Part of this strategy is to make MotionBuilder extremelyintuitive and user-friendly while maintaining the full range ofprofessional features found in Filmbox. Because the focus of theproduct is entirely character animation, the workflow and GUI have beenoptimized to provide tools according to an object/property-centricapproach as opposed to a tool-based approach. In addition, all aspectsof the user interface are based on floating windows for maximumcustomization of available screen space. Drag-and-drop capability andextensive copy-and-paste functions within the Timeline and Dope sheetallow artists to quickly build character performances for pre-viz andseries projects where recurring actions are common.

MotionBuilder will be available in the fall supporting Windows 2000,Windows XP, Mac OS X, and Red Hat Linux 7.1 and above. Fans of Filmboxwill also like the price of MotionBuilder, which is expected to be lessthan half of Filmbox's.

3Dlabs cards have pretty much set the standard in the high-endgraphic accelerator market for the past two years. Its top-of-the-lineWildcat cards are pricey ($2,500 and higher), but for that you get thefastest OpenGL acceleration available for select Wintel graphicsworkstations.

Enter a new graphics architecture from 3Dlabs based on the visualprocessing unit (VPU). The virtue of the new chip, the P10, is that theVPUs are programmable, allowing application developers to write graphicroutines such as shaders and pixel-level routines directly to the chip.Programmable chips are not new, and competitors Nvidia GeForce andATI's Radeon have some level of programmability. 3Dlabs, with the P10,has raised the bar with the most programmable single-chip designcurrently manufactured.

The P10 is populated with more than 200 32-bit floating point andinteger, general-purpose processors with full addressing and subroutinecapabilities. The P10 is also capable of multithreading to takeadvantage of future versions of Windows, such as Longhorn/Blackcomb andthe further developments expected from DirectX. In the current versionof the chip, DirectX textures (DST1-5) and YUV422 textures aresupported directly.

Which brings us to another development key to the future of graphicsprocessing — the competition between Microsoft's DirectX andOpenGL 2.0, the next version of the industry-standard open-sourcegraphics language. In the mid-'90s when Microsoft made its blitzkriegentry into SGI and Mac graphic territory, Microsoft made it clear thatit would be developing its own graphics API, but it was also going tosupport OpenGL.

The project to share information between a Windows graphic API andOpenGL was called “Project Fahrenheit” and created a greatdeal of excitement in the development community. Ultimately, the effortbetween SGI and Microsoft fell apart, and over the last several years,further development of OpenGL has become highly fragmented and boggeddown in the standards committees' inability to coordinate acomprehensive upgrade.

Conversely, Microsoft has focused a dedicated graphics team on theDirectX initiative with considerable success. If Microsoft had beensearching for an example of the benefits of licensing and intellectualproperty as opposed to open-source development, it needed to look nofurther than DirectX — at least from its point of view. As itturns out, hardware manufacturers do not want to be limited to Windowsor a single hardware platform, which is why most of the hardwaremanufacturers develop for both OpenGL and DirectX.

After several years, when incompatible extensions for OpenGLadvanced the goals of hardware players but not the general graphicscommunity, order and stability may be returning to OpenGL 2.0development. At the 2001 Siggraph, 3Dlabs took the lead in developmentof the new OpenGL spec and was met with approval from the majorfactions, namely the OpenGL committee and competitors Radeon andNvidia. Hardware programmability was at the core of the new spec. Youcan read the white paper at www.3dlabs.com/support/developer/ogl2/index.htm.