Industry Focus
(version September 16, 2007)
Short articles and blurbs with links to the web dealing with aspects of 3D and Animation.
If you have a question about any material presented at this Web site or if you have a suggestion for a topic to be included here, please contact us.
- in person at the DMS Service Desk on the Second Floor, just past the main elevators
- by telephone, calling (806)742-2245
- by email at
Second Life [08-06-2007]
Beryl Project for Linux [07-30-2007]
Princeton Shape Retrieval and Analysis Group [07-27-2007]
2.5D [07-23-2007]
Open Croquet Consortium [07-23-2007]
Renderfarm Technology [07-23-2007]
3D Databases [07-20-2007]
Industry Newsletters [07-19-2007]
Kirisute and Post-Processing [07-15-2007]
Vista Internet Products [07-14-2007]
Where the Jobs Are [07-09-2007]
Roman Ormandy, Founder of Caligari Corporation [07-10-2007]
- [08-06-2007] SECOND LIFE.
This short feature focuses on Second Life. Second Life has been in the news frequently for a number of reasons. A Second Life conference is opening in Chicago this month. The founder of Second Life stated last week that virtual worlds, such as Second Life, will dwarf the Internet within 10 years. How is that possible? If you have not been digging deeply behind the new scenes you might have missed that fact that Sweden opened an embassy on Second Life some months back. News bureaus such a CNET have a Second Life office. Broadcast television service just opened up on Second Life. People are paying real dollars to purchase virtual objects and space on Second Life. Colleges and universities are opening virtual campuses. Virtual police raid Second Life gambling and shut it down. Respected authors hold book discussions, and a U.S. congressman holds a town meeting on Second Life. SLURLs (Second Life URLs) allow registered users to link directly into a site on Second Life in much the same way that you can double-click an Internet URL and go the web page. Computer modelers sell virtual clothing so that you can make a fashion statement with your avatar. The site http://slreader.com/ keeps the interested posted about events, shops, and sales. Second Life videos are possible, with tutorials and guidance from the experts (http://www.secondlife.com/community/media.php and http://static.secondlife.com/downloads/advanced_machinima_tut.zip). The statistics page (http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php) is booming with activity. Directional sound has been added in Second Life for headset users to create the sense of 3D sound. The video event Alice In Cyberland (http://video.tipsdr.com/item/WKR0NX4GL6KD6FC2) brought theater and virtual worlds together. Second Life is new enough that there are still many experiments taking place in the virtual side. “Dancing with my Second Life avatar” (http://video.tipsdr.com/item/K2VWZ76920GLFX74) is another example of this blend. The American Cancer Society will hold its third annual virtual relay (http://slreader.com/tag/charity/).
Take a look at the “Top 20 Educational Locations in Second Life” ) http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Top_20_Educational_Locations_in_Second_Life) to gain some balance against the oddities, of which there are many. The “7 Wonders of the Grid” (http://slreader.com/2007/07/23/7-wonders-of-the-grid/) is the virtual counterpart to the Seven Wonders of the World. For 3D modelers and animators, Second Life is one place that you should visit and look around in. Here is an abundant market for computer modeling and animation. Take a look at the video “Seven Wonders of the Digital World – Part 1” before you go (http://video.tipsdr.com/item/K4HWJNR2Q6LNDTVS). And give http://www.secretsofsecondlife.com a try. And finish up with “Exploring Second Life and its Potential in Real Life AEC” at http://www.aecbytes.com/buildingthefuture/2007/SecondLife.html. All the references here will lose most of their weight and significance in a short time in this rapidly changing world. If you have not taken a look recently, you just might.
- [07-30-2007] BERYL PROJECT FOR LINUX. Compiz and Beryl groups are back together working. The main Web site for Beryl is here. Beryl 3D for Linux has given the user a remarkable appliance that allows the placement of a cube on the desktop that can hold windows
on each face of the cube. The cube can be manipulated, turn and spun and application windows can cross faces. This is a presentation interface, a way to bring computing alive to users. It's catchy, it allows flashy simultaneous play of videos, but best of all it enables breaking the two-dimensional view of the desktop. Desktops can be 3D for good reasons: you can fit more intelligibly on the screen and wrap windows around multiple faces. When the entertainment part is over, you still have a large, workable area that fits well on the desktop. As you get into working with 3D applications, don't you want your desktop to join you in the fun? See the video at this Link.
- [07-27-2007] PRINCETON SHAPE RETRIEVAL AND ANALYSIS GROUP. 3D artists, modelers and animators will appreciate this site for many of its features. One that we especially like is the database of 31,000 free models which can be searched in a variety of ways. You will probably want to take a look at the Search Page. More than that would be hard to imagine, but there is more: 2000 Viewpoint
commercial models, 1000 De Espona commercial models, and 2000 Cacheforce commercial models. The commercial models cannot be downloaded, but the free models (31,000 of them) can be. Links to the commercials models are provided along with ordering information. The group itself investigates shape-based retrieval and analysis of 3D models. A list of publications and videos of the work of the group are found there. From the Web site: One of the main challenges in matching and indexing shapes is accounting for arbitrary rotations. Previous methods that require alignment into a common coordinate system (e.g., with principal axes) are not robust. Other methods that rely upon rotationally invariant shape descriptors are usually not very discriminating. We propose a novel rotation invariant shape-descriptor based on spherical harmonics. The main idea is to decompose a 3D model into a collection of functions defined on concentric spheres and to use spherical harmonics to discard orientation information (phase) for each one. This yields a shape descriptor that is both orientation invariant and descriptive. This link discusses the 3D Shape Retrieval Contest held in 2006. The article 3D Searching Starts to Take Shape is informative and good background reading for this project.
- [07-23-2007] 2.5D. The term 4D is introduced today as a new section at this Web site, but right here we talk about 2.5D. This term ('2.5D") tries to convey the idea that the technology is somewhere between 2D and 3D. In the 1990s the term 2.5D was used to refer to 2D video games which used various styles and methods to simulate 3D appearance. Today products such as Zbrush use the term 2.5D to describe the sculpting effects that are possible in the software. The tutorial Space Poly Continuum: 2D, 2.5D And 3D Understood explains the various 2D, 2.5D and 3D aspects of Zbrush. We introduce the term here to expose our users to it and to show that it has fluctuated in meaning over time. In some cases this is more of a marketing strategy than a specific technology.
- [07-23-2007] OPEN CROQUET CONSORTIUM. Second Life has attracted over 100 schools and universities to its services. What happens when a college or university wants to have a remotely accessible classroom with some of the features of Second Life but with higher resolution displays than commonly available in Second Life? If you are teaching a class in Art History, it will be difficult to see all the detail needed in the limited resolution of Second Life. But that would be needed for the Art History classes to work: students need to be able to see fine detail of paintings, they need to be able to look at brush technique and styles of blending colors and interacting with the canvas. Open Croquet is a consortium project using open source which attempts to address these needs. (Individual and institutional memberships are available.) In one example of this technology being used, we watched developers bring up a wide screen where three windows were displayed: (1) a display of high resolution art work; (2) a Web browser showing various searches; and (3) a chat window where participants could exchange ideas. All windows were made available to the participants. As a user you could scroll over to the window of your preference and see what happening there while other users were interacting with different windows. The Open Croquet toolset is designed to provide higher resolution images than are typically available to Second Life users, addressing one area of need for image quality in particular applications. Some of the Open Consortium participants maintain a presence in Second Life as well distribute Open Croquet applications. In this way a wider range of users and interests can be met rather than relying on just one of these systems. We will follow this application toolset and report on its use at this Web site.
- [07-23-2007] RENDERFARM TECHNOLOGY. If you work on your home computer building 3D animations, you have already found that rendering an animation is very time consuming and downright slow. And you probably are looking at producing something smaller than the latest HD Hollywood release. How do studios do it? How can they process all the video needed from an animation in a short time? The upcoming SIGGRAPH 2007 conference in San Diego will shed some light on this problem. Purdue University is sponsoring a self-service rendering far for running on Purdue's TeraGrid that incorporates over 4,200 computers. Maya and Blender animations are two of the supported products which can have their animations rendered on the TeraGrid Distributed Rendering Environment (TeraDRE). What do you get when you run on a renderfarm? A tremendous savings in time (6 days turnaround time instead of 142 days time, as reported by one user at last years SIGGRAPH conference). a notification that your job is done, and a cell phone version of the rendered movie. 3D products not only test the imagination of users, but they also test the capabilities of systems and hardware. If you need to make several test renders to get your project file in shape, then the savings in time comes again and again. Services also exist on a per hour fee-schedule basis for allowing registered users remote access to renderfarm technology. See for example: http://www.ultrarenderfarm.com/ and http://www.startaid.com/comment/777817/Render-Farm-Service.html as just two instances of this type of service. In most cases renderfarm technology is tied to specific products: you must have your animation project files in a specific vendor format. If one renderfarm does not support your 3D product you will have to look for other services which do what you need. We will track our work on developing a RenderFarm to the 3D Animation Lab at the Web site.
- [07-20-2007] 3D DATABASES. 3D medical databases have been around for some time and provide research capabilities for work on molecular studies and cancer research, to mention just two areas. What about using 3D presentation methods to handle "ordinary data"? There are some very successful approaches. Database structure is often difficult for the average user to fully understand. Complex relationships that exist in records keys and in links do not automatically make sense to the human mind. There is a very good example of a 3D Patent Database which presents its information visually to the casual user. It was on display at the Duke University Engineering Center some months back. It allowed the user to interact with the database using goggles and a light-saber. While at the database a user could move display entries around the room to highlight or save them for reading, search by geographic location, and more. While in the same room other users could see the same results if they were also wearing special goggles. What about the use of 3D technology to give visual representations of large, complex databases? To be able to see various kinds of "clustering" of data might suggest new hypotheses for research and study. 3D databases can be used not only for visual data, but to take non-visual data and give it a three-dimensional view thus opening up new results and presenting additional methods to study existing data.
- [07-19-2007] INDUSTRY NEWSLETTERS. There are many free newsletters which go beyond simply advertising a line of products. Take a look at Cadalyst and consider subscribing to some of the newsletters offered; there are many to choose from. Cadalyst covers a wide range of the 3D industry and presents many new products with reviews. eDigit is another newsletter that may be of interest to users of the 3D Animation Lab Web site. It is from Digital Arts Online. See http://www.digitalartsonline.co.uk/edigit/ for free subscription information. Based in the UK the publication offers a perspective useful to a wider international community. One additional publication worth taking a look into is the newsletter from Animation Magazine Online. The free newsletter often has links to excellent short animations and provides some coverage of contests. One more noteworthy group of newsletters is available from Campus Technology. Take a look at the offerings from this new source on happening on college campuses in the arena of technology. Each of the newsletters that are described here can provide you with a wider perspective on 3D and Animation.
- [07-15-2007] KIRISUTE and POST-PROCESSING. What happens when you can get exactly what you want from your 3D software after trying for hours, days, even weeks? You might consider the world of post-processing, often done with Adobe Photoshop, but certainly
possible in other products such as: Artweaver (free) , Project Dogwaffle (has a freeware version) or Corel Painter (demo version available, full version for 30 days). (Corel Painter is available through http://www.academicsuperstore.com.) KIRISUTE has written 7 books in PDF format, all free, discussing various aspects of post-processing for the human figure. The books are available from the Web at various sites. A number of the post-processing books are available from DAZ Productions (http://www.daz3d.com). See, for example, the following link for Book 2 of Post-Processing by Kirisute: http://www.daz3d.com/i.x/tutorial/tutorial/-/?id=683. KIRISUTE has spent considerable time producing these 7 books and making them available to artists for free. The image from Book 7 on Hair (left) is one example of the work that is possible through post processing. Currently not all books are on one Web site. You will need to do some searching around to find them all. But the trip will be worth your time. There is much to learn in artistic technique and creative use of Photoshop when reading these short books. Take time to practice some of the skills discussed. If you are working mainly in Poser, you will find this set of books to be an asset to your work. Poser 7 does an excellent job of figure creation and modeling, and the techniques from KIRISUTE expand that set of tools considerably.
- [07-14-2007] VISTA INTERNET PRODUCTS. Take a tour of Vista Internet Products and you are in for a pleasant surprise. Lyne and Debbie are the two main artists whose models fill the aisles of the Web store. The ducks are realistic enough to QUACK. The Farm Pigs are so convincing that you might imagine that they really OINK. (Of course, you will have to add your own sound files if you need these noises.) In fact there is an entire zoo here: Elephants, Okapi, Gazelles, Squirrels and Skunks and dozens more. This site has been around for quite a few years that we know about. The collection of models is available in popular formats. There are Poser models, Bryce models and Vue models, and some OBJ files which can be read by many programs. The Vue models often have a variety of poses offered in the set. This week's splash screen features some of the models from Vista Internet Products. Delivery is through custom CD purchase. A barn set is available to keep your animals in good spirits. Prices are very reasonable and give a new 3D user the chance to build a model collection affordably. Use the models to explore the farmyard, the jungles of Africa, or bird-filled trees. This is about as close as you want to get to a Komodo Dragon. Be sure to take a look at the variety of animals offered for sale at this site. Steve's trees round out this extensive grouping of computer models.
- [07-09-2007] WHERE THE JOBS ARE. This is the first of the short articles in the Industry Focus section, and here we look at a topic which may be of interest to you personally or for someone in your family who might be entering this field in the future. A good place to look for information about jobs and building a careen in 3D and Animation is a publication by Bryan Brandenburg titled "Become a 3D Art Professional" which is available as an eBook from Content Paradise. Bryan is active in the industry and has worked for Zygote Media and DAZ Productions. He looks at the current state of employment and discusses future trends. He covers much of the field and has sections on how to prepare a resume and how to market yourself. He discusses the marketplace in general. Sections of the book have forecasts for Architects, Photographers and Software Engineers. If you currently have a business in the area of 3D there are sections that may help you increase your reach. For beginners in the field and for those who already are established, the readings will assist you in your career growth. While learning the techniques of 3D you will find that it will also be of help to learn about the industry. This book is a good place to start.
- [07-10-2007] ROMAN ORMANDY, FOUNDER OF CALIGARI CORPORATION. We have trueSpace version 7.51 in the 3D Animation Lab here at Texas Tech University Libraries for several reasons: it is an excellent product in the areas of 3D modeling, rendering and animation, and it has well-presented tutorials which reach all levels of skill from beginner to advanced. Roman Ormandy has been active in the industry since the 1980s and his ideas have been a stimulus for many of the exciting products you find at the 3D Animation Lab. Take a look at his Caligari Corporation Company President biography for a very interesting read about the person, the products and the industry. Biographies in the field of 3D are a good read: you discover that the sources of ideas reach into diverse backgrounds. Caligari Corporation has contributed to the founding of the 3D Animation Lab here at Texas Tech University Libraries by giving us very favorable licensing for using the products in the Lab and by giving us models which serve as tools for learning 3D. The collection of Caligari tutorials in the Lab is far more extensive than on other products. You will learn at the Lab, but you will also enjoy yourself because of the years of experience which are built into the products and training. As we continue this section of the web site, we will focus on a diverse range of modelers and artists.
