Exhibition

There wasn't much groundbreaking stuff on the floor-- standard mocap, cg shops, 3D CG apps, gpu vendors, etc. I had little time to see everything, but did zig-zag the whole floor, stopping to check out anything relating to matchmoving, 3D scanning, pre-viz, and face modeling.

SynthEyes was the most impressive thing on the floor-- it can be used in fully automatic mode, or geometry can be imported and the user can track points and constrain them to the geometry. Russel Andersson Ph.D. is the whole company-- 15 years at Bell Labs and "other companies," and he has considered just about everything. Single-parameter radial distortion can be solved, and it has a distortion 2D processing mode. More complicated distortion is not considered.

The 3Q scanner is now "3dMD, a 3Q Company" and is pretty polished-- three cameras and one projector per pod, and they were showing a two pod rig. I didn't speak with them-- it looks the same.

Brian and I stopped by the Shake booth and he grilled a demo artist on some new tools in Shake 4: basic 3D compositing, flow-based retiming on fileIn nodes, and flow-based smoothing and resizing. The results looked OK, but it was difficult to tell how good their flow solution is-- they showed a 2-second shot extended to 21 seconds, so of course the hair had a lot of artifacts. They would do better with a 10-second shot with a real background (not sky!), speeding it up to 7 seconds, slowing it down to 15 seconds.

Genmation has a product called GenHead for converting a 2D image to 3D head. It would be great if the 3D reconstruction wasn't clearly wrong!

Illuminate Labs Turtle renderer for Maya looks very good-- I'm not familiar with their technology. OpenEXR output-- the industry has adopted the standard pretty well.

Konica-Minolta has two non-contact scanners, .6m to 2.5m range which seem to be the same scanner with different cases. They looked nice enough, but not applicable for us. Also-- in the literature but not at the booth: PSC-1 Photogrammetry System. It automatically solves camera positions using to "scale bars" and "coded markers." The scale strips just have a few coded markers on them, similar to what Dan Piponi has kicking around his office.

Realviz has turned their matchmoving tools into plugins for Maya, 3ds Max, and I think XSI. They said version 2 of their Storyviz package would be out soon, and I got a spec sheet which is not impressive in the least. The price has been lowered to $1200.

Antics has a $500 pre-viz tool-- their demo video was embarrasingly bad.

Point Grey has a "Ladybug2" spherical camera with improved resolution-- 3800 pixels horizontally. The head unit processes the images into a panorama and can run at 30fps if compressing with JPEG, or 15fps uncompressed. The nodal points seem closer than in the previous version. They also have a "Dragonfly Express" with a 1394b interface allowing 640x480 output at 120fps, or 200fps if "Format 7"-- what is that?