The technology in Sketchbook began life as a part of the high-end industrial design toolset developed by Alias, which was founded in 1983. Alias is the font of some of the most widely used digital content creation software in use today including Maya and Alias Studio, both of which are now part of Autodesk after the long-ago acquisition of Alias–Wavefront … Read more
The SPEC Graphics Performance Characterization Group (SPECgpc) has released an update to its SPECviewperf benchmark. The SPECviewperf 2020 V2.0 benchmark features an updated Solidworks-06 viewset. The viewsets can be downloaded individually. V2.0 supports all the features of SPECviewperf benchmark V1.0 released last October and adds on. The SPECviewperf 2020 benchmark license is available for free to all except the sellers of computers and … Read more
AMD has added hardware acceleration and scaling to their GPUs and AIBs to enhance and speedup gaming and make it a realtime operation. The company has offered the enhancement to developers in an open-source manner via its OpenGPU program. That will make it useful for any GPU, of almost any vintage. AMD has branded it FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR). Raster-scan … Read more
Blender has been right on the verge of its V3 release and guess what happened. It released 2.93, which has been pretty much according to plan. As the company says Blender 2.93 LTS marks the end of a series “twenty years in the making.” It’s a big release but the developers say it’s solid. Therefore, the Blender 2.93 release is … Read more
Nextflow Software, headquartered in Nantes, France, was founded in 2015 as a spinout from HydrOcean when that organization was acquired by Bureau Veritas (BV) to form their Marine & Offshore Solutions Group. The technology was originally developed at the Ecole Centrale Nantes (ECN) and the Bureau Veritas group continues to support research at ECN. Siemens notes that ECN and the … Read more
Khronos announced their 3D Commerce Viewer Certification Program. 3D viewers are software engines that enable users to display and interact with 3D models. Viewers are used by retailers, social media sites, and brands to create experiences on e-commerce storefronts, search engines, ad platforms, and in native applications. Khronos says their Viewer Certification Program enables 3D viewers across the industry … Read more
AMD’s latest workstation lineup includes the W6800, and a W6600 for desktop and mobile. (Source: AMD) AMD has been rolling out its RDNA 2 across all its product lines first shipping in the fall of 2020. That in itself is noteworthy because AMD has a good story to tell with its broad-based product line. All the products are taking … Read more
Katerra spent big to realize its vision of a vertically integrated design construction powerhouse. Unfortunately, it wasn’t able to see it through. (Source: Katerra) Katerra, founded in 2015 by former Flextronics CEO Michael Marks and Fritz Wolff of the Wolff Co. in Menlo Park, recently notified its employees that it did not have sufficient funds for payroll. News site … Read more
The arrival of the Cesium for Unreal plug-in is fairly recent. It was announced last March and became officially available in April 2021, but the ability to work with large geospatial models in the Unreal game engine is a snowball rolling downhill. The alliance between Cesium and Unreal means that the Unreal Engine supports the open format 3D Tiles pioneered by … Read more
In its first implementations, Omniverse is most useful for enabling designers to create renderings of their work. (Source: Nvidia’s Graphisoft Connector Site) The future is in the ‘verse and Graphisoft has opened its own door into it. Nvidia and Graphisoft have announced the availability of a connector for Archicad 24 to Nvidia’s Omniverse. Omniverse is a 3D development tool now in … Read more
Reflecting a trend in attitudes and awareness, Dell’s latest PC and workstation updates are directed at creative artists with the same enthusiasm that it traditionally had for designers, engineers, and scientists. This is not exactly new. Dell and HP always battled for the high end of creativity—movie makers, VFX, video production, and audio engineers but the tech industry has come … Read more
A ray traced version of Imagination Technologies’ headquarters building Imagination has had ray tracing capabilities since 2010 when they acquired the boutique ray tracing company Caustic. Caustic had developed a hardware accelerator which Imagination turned into an RTL core and added to their stable of IP accelerators. The company has built out their ray tracing SDK and, in the … Read more
