SIGGRAPH: Emerging Tech

+ SIGGRAPH continues to reveal programming highlights for the July 24-28 event in Anaheim, CA. On Wednesday, check out the Emerging Technologies “Best of Show” presentation, featuring HALUX projection-based interactive skin for digital sports (the next thing for real-time mo-cap?), Perceptually Based Foveated VR and ZoeMatrope — a display that can present and animate realistic material by compositing real objects.

+ Chaos Group has planned a blockbuster lineup for V-Ray Days, offering behind-the-scenes looks at projects from FuseFX (American Horror Story, Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), Encore VFX (The Flash), Digital Domain (Golden Age of Pirates), Atomic Fiction (Deadpool), Scanline VFX (San Andreas, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children), game studios Square Enix (Kingsglaive Final Fantasy XV) and Blur Studio (Halo Wars 2) and more — plus a special presentation on new Live VR Rendering technology. More details online.

+ The Foundry will be out in force, showcasing how its tech and R&D have helped high-profile film and TV projects including Finding Dory (Pixar), The Jungle Book (MPC), Kubo and the Two Strings (LAIKA), The Angry Birds Movie (Sony Pictures Imageworks), Deadpool (Blur Studio) and The Flash (Deluxe’s Encore VFX). Plus, Framestore LA will showcase its 360 video for BMW, “Eyes on Gigi Hadid,” while Magnopus discusses its latest 360 experience, The Argos File. The Foundry’s research team will also give a sneak peek at two new cloud technologies at its annual Tech Preview. More details online.

+ Epic Games and Ninja Theory will present on July 26 at 5:30 p.m. a new demo that expands on its lauded GDC presentation: Hellblade at Real-Time Live. Cubic Motion and 3Lateral will join Epic and Ninja onstage for “From Previs to Final in Five Minutes: A Breakthrough in Live Performance Capture” — body, face and voice performance will all be captured in live real time to create a photoreal scene, with never-before-seen results driven by the new Unreal Engine 4 Sequencer tool.

+ GPL Technologies and NVIDIA will conduct a joint demonstration of its powerful new virtualization solution, the VDI workstation — designed by GPL and using NVIDIA’s GRID tech, featuring a remote workstation running Mechdyne’s TGX desktop software. A separate demo will show how a workstation remotely logged into an NVIDIA Quadro VCA can run an Iray GPU rendering plugin to facilitate creation of photorealistic imagery, delivering immediate visual feedback. The companies will also introduce NVIDIA’s DGX-1, the world’s first deep learning super-computer in a box. GPL will also be promoting its VFXnow service and raffling off a slew of prizes at Booth #275.

+ Pixar has released RenderMan 21 ahead of the show. This major release of the Academy Award-winning software features shares and lights used by Pixar, as seen in Finding Dory and its companion short, Piper. Also new this version is the Pixar Surface Collection, an expansive catalog of physically based materials and lights. Check out the RenderMan 21 features overview here.

+ Also pinging on the production tech radar this week: ftrack has launched a brand new integration with MAXON Cinema 4D‘s digital content creation package. The new integration allows C4D users to access projects, publish and import files, and manage activities via an ftrack panel implemented in the C4D user interface. Check it out in person at Booth #768.