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Susan Smith
Susan Smith has worked as an editor and writer in the technology industry for over 16 years. As an editor she has been responsible for the launch of a number of technology trade publications, both in print and online. Currently, Susan is the Editor of GISCafe and AECCafe, as well as those sites’ … More » Computer Graphics Goes Back to the Future at SIGGRAPH 2018August 16th, 2018 by Susan Smith
Vancouver, British Columbia is the venue for the 45th SIGGRAPH 2018 conference, this week, August 12-16, where technology vendors and aficionados gather to view the latest and greatest in virtual reality, artificial intelligence (AI), computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Each year outdoes the last in terms of wow factor and some of these announcements most likely will be of interest to AEC professionals. Live ray tracing and a new level of visual quality are just a couple of the new advancements on the horizon. What has taken root in the entertainment industry finds its way into AEC as better graphics means better ways to display concepts to stakeholders, and to show the guts of a project as it is being built. The conference also spotlighted womens’ contribution to the computer graphics industry, noted at the end of this article. At the heart of computer graphics are graphics cards and GPUs. NVIDIA announced its first Turing™ architecture-based GPUs, enabling designers to render photorealistic scenes in real time, add new AI-based capabilities to their workflows, and enjoy fluid interactivity with complex models and scenes.  NVIDIA Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs According to company materials, NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang unveiled the NVIDIA® Quadro® RTX™ 8000, Quadro RTX 6000 and Quadro RTX 5000 bring hardware-accelerated ray tracing, AI, advanced shading and simulation to creative professionals. Also announced was the Quadro RTX Server, a reference architecture for highly configurable, on-demand rendering and virtual workstation solutions from the datacenter. The Chaos Group gave a sneak peak at Project Lavina, a groundbreaking new technology designed for photorealistic real-time ray tracing. Debuting as a SIGGRAPH tech demo, Project Lavina (named for the Bulgarian word “avalanche), depicted a large 3D forest and several architectural visualizations running at 24-30 frames per second (FPS) in standard HD resolution. By leveraging the dedicated RT Core within NVIDIA’s Turing-based Quadro RTX GPUs, Project Lavina fundamentally changes the direction of computer graphics, introducing a new level of visual quality for real-time games, VR, and 3D visualization. Instead of using game engine shortcuts like rasterized graphics and a reduced level of detail, each scene features live ray tracing for truly interactive photorealism. Lavina has the capacity to handle massive scenes at real-time speeds – over 300 billion triangles in one case – without losing any detail. “We’ve been developing ray-tracing technology for 20 years, and this is one of the biggest breakthroughs we’ve ever made,” said Chaos Group co-founder and CTO Vlado Koylazov. “Real-time and ray-tracing coming together is the beginning of something big.” “We are thrilled to see how well Project Lavina takes advantage of the RTX stack debuting on our new Quadro RTX line,” said Bob Pette, Vice President of Professional Graphics, NVIDIA. “True real-time ray-tracing is our goal with RTX, and it’s great to see a market leader like Chaos Group achieve it with us.” The SIGGRAPH tech demo uses 3D scenes exported from V-Ray-enabled applications directly in Lavina. This is a departure from a traditional game engine that requires assets to be rebuilt and specially optimized. Lavina simplifies this process with direct compatibility and translation of V-Ray assets. Upon loading the scene, the user can explore the environment exactly as they would in a game engine without having to translate, and thus are able to experience physically accurate lighting, reflections and global illumination. AMD announced a high-performance addition to the Radeon™ Pro WX workstation graphics lineup with the AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 8200 graphics card, delivering significant workstation graphics performance for under $1,000i for real-time visualization, virtual reality (VR) and photorealistic rendering. Among their announcements, AMD also unveiled major updates to Radeon™ ProRender and a new alliance with the Vancouver Film School. The new turbocharged AMD Radeon™ Pro WX 8200 graphics card allows professionals to easily accelerate design and rendering. It is the ideal graphics card for design and manufacturing, media and entertainment, and architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) workloads at all stages of product development. Autodesk announced a collaboration with StarVR, a provider of virtual reality for the enterprise, to bring breakthrough VR to the automotive design and engineering industry with VRED Professional, optimized for the StarVR One head mounted display. The Autodesk VRED Professional software solution is a 3D product visualization and virtual prototyping software supporting automotive designers and engineers. It is used for product presentations, design reviews and virtual prototypes in real-time. VRED Professional for StarVR takes advantage of the StarVR headset’s high resolution with 16 million subpixels plus high fidelity of VRED’s rendering capabilities. The two technologies come together to make a high quality VR experience for the automotive industry. These “women in technology” spotlights aim to note the impressive contributions of women across the industry. SIGGRAPH 2018 Conference Chair Roy C. Anthony said, “Among our presenter ranks are women who play a huge role in their respective fields.” Some of the many women who presented work at SIGGRAPH 2018 include:
In spite of the fact that the fields of computer graphics and interactive techniques, like many other industries, have been dominated by men, the women participating in SIGGRAPH this year are working at the cutting edge of advancements across the spectrum of the industry. Among women-focused events at the conference are the International Resources Committee’s annual ‘Women in CG’ session, various lunches and networking events for women organized by big companies like ILM, and even women mentoring initiatives, which are currently in their early stages. The Women in Animation (WIA) Vancouver chapter presented a Women in Animation Vancouver Summit, in partnership with Spark CG Society and supported by Emily Carr University of Art & Design, on August 11th. The co-located event is free to attend and will feature panels, presentations, TED-style talks, and various discussions with leading speakers such as:
In a nutshell, the SIGGRAPH Conference promises better, faster, greater accuracy and hopefully, greater enlightenment. Tags: 3D, 3D cities, 3D printing, AEC, architects, architecture, Autodesk, building design, building information modeling, engineering, engineers, generative design, laser scanning, reality capture, visualization Categories: 3D, AEC, AEC training, AECCafe, architecture, Autodesk, Bentley Systems, BIM, Cloud, engineering, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, IoT, plant design, point clouds, project management, reality capture, render farms, rendering, simulation, site planning, sustainable design, traffic simulation, video, video surveillance, virtual reality, visualization, wearable devices |
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