Leading architectural visualisation show falls victim to the credit crunch. 'Virtual conference' planned for later this year

VisMasters has cancelled the Design Modeling and Visualization Conference, due to have been held from 28–29 April in San Francisco.

In an email announcement to registered users, DMVC Program Coordinator Jeff Mottle cited reduced travel budgets throughout the architectural visualisation sector as a key factor in the cancellation.

The news comes as a sad blow for the visualisation industry, which loses its only specialist international event. DMVC would have been in its third year, having previously been held in San Diego and Boston.

The cancellation comes just days after an advert for the show went to press in 3D World issue 116, on sale 1 April. Jeff tells us that the event team even went so far as to call attendees of previous conferences individually in an attempt to secure further registrations.

VisMasters is currently considering hosting a virtual version of the conference later in the year, and is soliciting feedback via the show‘s official site. Full details below.

VISMASTERS EMAIL ANNOUNCEMENT
It is with great regret that we at VisMasters have made the difficult decision to cancel this year’s DMVC conference. Due to a large number of companies who have unfortunately had their travel budgets cut or eliminated in 2009, we are unfortunately not able to host this year’s conference in San Francisco. If you have already made payments for your sponsorship we will be refunding the full amount in the next week. We sincerely appreciate your support for this year’s conference, in spite of the troubled economy, and hope that we can count on your support again once company budgets situations are improved.

We are currently examining the possibility of maintaining all of our current speakers to host a virtual conference. In this scenario we would have all of the sessions recorded offline and made available as streaming video. Virtual attendees would pay one flat fee to access all of the videos from the event. If we move forward with this option, there may still be opportunity for sponsoring the virtual event. While still being examined, I would envision there being options to brand the video player and the ability to access registered attendees via email. Other opportunities are also being investigated. If this opportunity sounds like it might be of interest to you, please let me know at your earliest convenience so that we can keep you abreast of any new developments. Partial sponsor support for an online virtual conference, will determine the potential viability of this plan.

Again, we thank you for your continued support and hope to see you all again soon at the next DMVC conference. Should you have any questions, please let me know.

Leave feedback on the DMVC website

Spiral Graphics has released Texture Pack 5 and version 3 of its free texture renderer Genetica Viewer

PRESS RELEASE

Spiral Graphics Inc. has released its fifth free seamless texture pack, which includes 106 royalty-free medieval architecture textures. The texture pack, which will be of benefit to any 3D artist working with a historic or fantasy setting, includes cottage, church, fortress, door, and window textures.

Additionally, Spiral Graphics‘ free texture rendering application, Genetica Viewer, has been upgraded to version 3.0. Genetica Viewer 3.0 is now able to open and render procedural texture files created with the latest version of Spiral Graphics‘ flagship texture editing package, Genetica 3.0. Benefits of the upgraded procedural format include support for vector-based designs and more realistic materials, as demonstrated by the new texture pack.

Texture Pack 5 is available here.
Genetica Viewer 3.0 is available here.

Spiral Graphics Inc. is a software development firm focused on creating innovative software tools for the computer graphics community.

PRESS RELEASE

SAN FRANCISCO and BERLIN; March 23, 2009: mental images, a global leader in rendering software and visualization tools for animators, visual effects artists and professionals who create high-quality imaging today introduced mental mill. mental mill is available in two editions. The Standard Edition is a complete visual development environment that includes powerful debugging capabilities, shader authoring features, exporters to DCC and CAD software, and instant mental ray preview rendering; and the Artist Edition, a subset of the mental mill toolset, that come bundled with Autodesk 3ds Max 2010.

With the Artist Edition, one can quickly assemble complex shader graphs from the provided library of shaders, tweak the parameters, and save them as files which 3ds Max reads natively. In 3ds Max one can then assign the shaders to 3D objects, continue to tweak the parameters in context with other shaders and lighting, and fine-tune the look of the final renderings.

For taking shader creation to the next level, mental images releases the mental mill Standard Edition. In addition to the tasks that can be performed in the Artist Edition, with Standard Edition one can write and edit shader code, and visually debug shaders by interactive, visual inspection of graphical representations of the variables while stepping through the code. Also, one can export shaders for use in targeted software applications including Autodesk’s 3ds Max, Maya, Softimage, Dassault Systemes’ CATIA and NVIDIA’s FX Composer, through the supported, customizable back-end formats such as CgFX, HLSL, and GLSL. With the included mental ray preview plug-in, it is easy to see the rendering results of a shader with mental ray’s photorealistic ray tracer. The Standard Edition will be available for purchase and download from the mental images website www.mentalimages.com in April 2009.

“The mental mill Standard Edition greatly facilitates the creation of complex and visually compelling shaders. In addition, thanks to their representation in MetaSL, these shaders are future-proof and will not need to be recreated or modified to take full advantage of future technology and performance advancements in GPUs, multi-core parallel processing, and rendering algorithms,” said Rolf Herken, CEO and COO of mental images.

“Our publisher signed off on the look of our characters before level design”, said Izmeth Siddeek, Character Art Lead at Blue Castle Games. “mental mill has revolutionized the development pipeline for the making of our latest game, Dead Rising 2. We are looking into integrating mental mill even more.”

During GDC mental images and Blue Castle Games will host a joint session entitled “Platform-independent Shader Development with mental mill: The Making of Dead Rising 2” on Friday, March 27, 2009 from Noon to 1:00 pm, Room 2011 (West Hall). The session will be presented by Izmeth Siddeek of Blue Castle Games and Laura Scholl of mental images.

About mental images
mental images®, founded in 1986, is the recognized international leader in providing component and platform software for the creation, manipulation and visualization of 3D content. Its world leading rendering and other technologies are used by the entertainment, computer-aided design, architecture, scientific visualization, and other industries that require sophisticated images primarily as part of their software products and application services. mental images is a wholly-owned subsidiary of NVIDIA Corporation with headquarters in Berlin, Germany, a subsidiary in the United States, mental images, Inc., and a subsidiary in Melbourne, Australia, mental images Pty.. mental images has a multinational staff of top qualified engineers exclusively dedicated to basic research and development in the area of 3D graphics and 3D Web Applications and Services technologies. For more information, visit www.mentalimages.com.

The stop-motion legend visited the UK recently to present a screening of Jason and the Argonauts and a signing of his latest book, A Century of Model Animation, at the Watershed in Bristol. We spoke to Ray and co-writer Tony Dalton about the difficulties of researching over 100 years of animation history

© Edinburgh International Short Film Festival 2008 Helena Smith

Is this the first time you've covered the wider history of animation in your writing?

Ray Harryhausen: That’s right, we did everything connected with me on the first two books and now we want to show the history. I think that everybody who admires animation would like to know how it all started, way beyond the dawn of time… or the 1900s, at least!

Tony Dalton: We wanted to write a book on [Ray‘s friend and mentor] Willis O’Brien as we both felt we’d gone as far as we could with Ray’s work. It was a gap in the market that we both felt very passionate about. But then the publishers were keen to focus more on a history of animation. We thought it was a good idea, but rather blindly we only allowed two years, which was nowhere near enough time!

What else would you have liked to have covered?

TD: I would have liked to have covered some of the very early development… we cover it quite a lot in the second chapter ‘The Pioneers‘, but there are some names coming out of the woodwork now that I’ve never heard of.

RH: The book covers animation from Méliès to Aardman, but people that toyed with stop-motion go back way further; unfortunately, as there‘s isn‘t much evidence of this, we couldn‘t cover them in the book.

TD: I wish we’d allowed three years for the book, really, but we’re both proud of it. Maybe one day we can revamp it and put more stuff in it. A hell of a lot is happening in stop-motion at the moment: Tim Burton is doing Alice in Wonderland… in fact, Ken Ralston, who’s working on that, was visiting Ray only recently.

What is it that you admire about the development of animated works in the last century?

RH: Despite most [animation] being done in CGI now, I get a lot of fan mail saying that they prefer the original models over CGI. I like the way that nothing gets thrown out: Kermit the Frog brought back the hand puppets and Thunderbirds brought back the string puppets. CGI is a remarkable tool, but it’s only a tool. In the early days, they gave the impression that CGI was the only way of making entertainment but that’s not true. The whole point of any of the techniques is to entertain and it’s good to have a range of techniques.

What do you think it is about the old techniques that modern artists respond to?

TD: One of the CGI animators we spoke to put it better than I could. He said: “Stop motion can be such a magical art that is capable of expressing personal creativity in a way that I am yet to experience even with the best CGI. Perhaps it‘s the intrinsic nature of the process. CG seems so often obsessed with being real, but stop motion can be better than real: it can be awe-inspiring.”

RH: They’re all just different forms of entertainment and may not be everybody’s cup of tea. People used to call our films horror films in the early days, then they’d talk about the animation and everybody thought it was a cartoon. It’s why we developed the name that came out in the 7th Voyage of Sinbad: Dynamation, just to prove that it was different to an animated cartoon. We were using three-dimensional models even though we were using the same techniques as the animated cartoon.

TD: I think Ray‘s right: CGI is just another tool. These CG animators still look to Ray for inspiration – Nick Park was inspired by Ray’s work, and Tim Burton recently sent Ray a letter to ask for help with something. There’s a fantasy that’s not always there with a CG movie.

Does this latest book naturally progress onto the next?

TD: We’ve just cleared out some materials from Ray’s LA garage and he said “it’s all rubbish, there’s nothing there,“ and I said “what’s rubbish to you Ray, is the history of cinema to the rest of us!” There are things from the 1930s, armatures of dinosaurs and lots of marionettes from Ray’s experiments with string puppets in his early days. We found a skeleton… the first skeleton Ray ever made, probably around 1934–35 soon after [seeing] King Kong. We also found some imagery and other materials so there’s a possibility of it leading to another book, but we’ll have to log it all first.

A Century of Model Animation by Ray Harryhausen and Tony Dalton is available now, published by Aurum Press Ltd.

Buy the book
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