==================================================== T H E T E S S E L L A T I O N T I M E S #535 Issue #35 of 1995, for Tuesday, October 24th ==================================================== *The Tessellation Times* (*Tess*) is Columbine, Inc.'s weekly electronic publication usually posted overnight Monday as an online supplement for *3D Artist* magazine's subscribers and newsstand readers, and also available to everyone interested. The full Web version of this issue of *Tess* is at: http://www.3dartist.com/tess/95/txt/tess535.htm More about *3D Artist* and subscription info can be found at http://www.3dartist.com/ - and - ftp.3dartist.com E-mail recipient count for this issue: 1,755 Also read in forums, on BBSs, and on Web sites worldwide! See "Details" near file end for (c)Copyright restrictions and permissions, and how to receive *Tess* free. ________ CONTENTS 535.00 - Heads Up! 535.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D 535.00.02 - Shows & Exhibitions 535.01 - 3D at GamePC Consortium - by Rob Glidden 535.01.01 - Peddie's 3D Vision 535.01.02 - 3D Benchmarks & Bottlenecks 535.01.03 - 3Dlabs Permedia Chip 535.02 - Velveteen Rabbit Modeling Language 535.03 - Readings 535.04 - News Wrap 535.05 - Follow-Ups 535.06 - Publisher's Comments 535.06.01 - Call for Participation 535.06.02 - Nose to the Grindstone 535.06.03 - Term Limits Departments Masthead - see "Details" below Calendar - events, galleries, classes & artists call grab ftp.3dartist.com/3dartist/calendar.txt Special Offers - grab ftp.3dartist.com/3dartist/offers.txt Contacts - see end of file --------- 535.00 - Heads Up! There may not be a *Tess* next week, or it may go up as far into the week as Wednesday evening, or it even might go up as usual. The uncertainty is due to complex travel plans which were not settled as this issue goes to upload. We will post an update on the *Tess* NewsRoom page, and in a TESS536.TXT proxy file on the ftp site.--B.A. 535.00.01 - The Fortnight in 3D Here's what's up in 3D for the next two weeks: Oct. 26, Boston, Mass.: The BCS CAD SIG will meet at the BCS offices at 101A 1st Ave., in Waltham. This meeting will feature a presentation and demo of Cadkey's DataCAD. Contact coordinator Howard I. Cohen at . Oct. 29-Nov. 1, San Francisco, Calif.: Autodesk University Conference & Exhibition, Moscone Ctr. Contact: Adesk U. c/o Miller-Freeman, 600 Harrison St., San Francisco, CA 94107; 415/905-4994, -2220 fax; . Oct. 30-Nov. 1, San Francisco, Calif.: Macromedia International User Conference & Exposition, Moscone Ctr. 800/287-7141; 203/840-5660; http://www.macromedia.com/. Nov. 1-4, North Hollywood, Calif.: Video Toaster User Expo 95 at the Universal City Hilton. There will be 60 exhibitors and classes on everything from forensic animation to real-world special effects, to advanced spline-based modeling. Winnet Expo Services: 800/643-3976. Nov. 3-5, Philadelphia, Penn.: Scan '95 will host its 15th Annual Symposium of Small Computers in the Arts at the Franklin Institute Science Museum. Contact Misako Scott: 610/664-3417, . Nov. 7-11, Amsterdam, The Netherlands: Doors of Perception 3: Info-Eco is about "How we can use current information technologies to slow down the wasteful consumption of matter and energy?" Held by Netherlands Design Institute, Keizersgracht 609, NL-1017 DS Amsterdam, The Netherlands; 31/(0)20-55-16-506 or -504, -62-01-031 fax; . All this month the Silicon Gallery (139 N. 3rd St., Philadelphia, Penn.) is running a joint show with the Gallerie Graphe in Paris via satellite hookup, to benefit Doctors Without Borders. For more info, call 215/235-6060 or jump to http://www.netaxs.com/~silicong. 535.00.02 - Shows & Exhibitions Nov. 12 & 13 at Fall Comdex, Las Vegas, Nev.: The Infomaniacs, Linda and Erick Von Schweber, along with musician David Arkenstone, and a host of vendors and expert users all in costume will present a super session entitled "Maximum Impact" in the Grand Ballroom of the Sands Hotel and Casino on Sunday the 12th and Monday the 13th as part of Comdex in Las Vegas, Nev. The whole ballroom will become a transportation vehicle, and the passengers will wear 3D glasses to watch on eight 15'x20' screens, all to explore a considerable range of multimedia and virtual reality technology. Promised also is a look at a new graphics engine "just out of MIT's labs." The show will be enhanced with fog, strobe lights, and a special Arkenstone score. See the Comdex program for more info, or E-mail to or call 520/284-2828. Sponsors who should have passes for the extravaganza include Autodesk, Caligari, MetaTools, 3Dlabs, and Vream. Can't be there? Order the video! Jan. 22-25, 1996, Las Vegas, Nev.: NATPE '96, the big television industry show at the Sands Expo Center, has exhibits in new media and developing technologies. NATPE Registration, 2425 Olympic Blvd. #550E, Santa Monica, CA 90404, 310/453-4440, -3398 fax. 535.01 - 3D at GamePC Consortium By Rob Glidden 3D topics played a large role at the GamePC consortium meeting attended by some 175 people in San Francisco on 20 Oct. The consortium, founded by leading edge graphics chip makers to woo game developers to high-end systems, and to lobby Microsoft on game standards such as Direct Draw, is considering developing a set of 3D benchmarks (stay tuned). In addition, several speakers focussed on 3D topics of interest to 3D artists, as summarized below. 535.01.01 - Peddie's 3D Vision Jon Peddie of Peddie & Associates presented a generally upbeat assessment of the consumer 3D field with a few cautionary notes. For 3D chipmakers in particular, Peddie noted that there are too many chips in development and there are signs of feature mismatch with market needs. Also, Peddie has surveyed 3D developers, and concludes that developers are very skeptical of the graphics performance claims of 3D chip companies, but at the same time very enthusiastic about the possibilities. On the 3D API front, Peddie believes there is still room for other 3D APIs after Microsoft's acquisition of Rendermorphics and Reality Lab. "This is not going to be a slam-dunk for Rendermorphics," according to Peddie, because developers are choosing their 3D API based on the particular features they need for their applications. In the long run, prospects for 3D are very bright according to Peddie. Two years from now, all-in-one chips should cost $20 and eventually "all computers will come 3D enabled." For graphics chip makers, "3D has created a new life in the industry... This year has been the most exciting year in a long, long time." 3D artists certainly will hope that this raw excitement at the chip level will translate into new 3D markets. 535.01.02 - 3D Benchmarks & Bottlenecks If you take a standard 3D Studio model, export it into triangles, dump it into a realtime 3D API, and play it back on a 3D graphics board, expect to be disappointed with the performance. That was the message delivered to 3D content developers by Stephen Johnson, 3D graphics engineering manager at Diamond Multimedia (which sells the Diamond Edge 3D board based on the NVidia 3D chip). The reason, according to Johnson, is that optimizing 3D for realtime is fundamentally different from the traditional linear 3D authoring process. The key constraint currently facing 3D hardware designers could be called, curiously, the "Pentium bottleneck." According to Johnson, back-end rasterization has reached a high level of functionality, with fill rates of tens of millions of pixels/sec. becoming common. But geometry calculations (lighting and transforms) are performed by the host processor, and this is what currently sets the upper limit on 3D acceleration. This should change, however, as low-end accelerators soon add geometry acceleration. Also, there are rumors that Intel itself is working on a more "multimedia-aware" CPU for the consumer market. Moral to 3D realtime content developers: keep your vertex count low, try to use quad meshes and triangle strips (which reduce the total vertex count by sharing adjacent vertices), and test on target hardware to see if you are actually getting the performance you expect. In the long run, Johnson suggests, high-order primitives such as spheres or Bezier patches may be the best route to 3D graphics acceleration. In fact, early tests show that it may be faster to tessellate a Bezier patch in hardware than to accelerate polygons tessellated in software. 535.01.03 - 3Dlabs Permedia Chip On a mission "to make world-class 3D available on every new PC, be it in the home, office or plane," 3D chipmaker 3Dlabs announced its new Permedia family of graphics processors at the GamePC meeting. Scheduled for availability to certain OEMs in first quarter 1996 ($50/chip), Permedia will offer "a complete multimedia graphics solution" (integrated 3D, VGA, and video) expected to sell for under $250 to consumers. 3D artists will want to take note of Permedia's positioning as a "pervasive 3D" solution, aimed at bridging the gap between low-end 3D game boards and high-end 3D professional boards. This could mean both low-cost accelerated 3D boards good enough to drive modelers such as 3D Studio Max as well as new high-volume 3D content outlets. Also, Permedia represents another step on the path to "3D on the mother board," the widely-stated ultimate goal of the 3D chip industry (including NVidia, Rendition, 3DFX, and others). Permedia is the second generation of 3Dlabs' low-cost 3D chip line, and incorporates some of the features of 3Dlabs professional-class Glint chips. The first low-end generation was the 3D Blaster board from Creative Labs, which has a minority stake in 3Dlabs. (Watch out for short shelf lives for early consumer 3D boards: 3D Blaster boards were provided to developers in August and are scheduled to ship for Christmas 1995, while Permedia chips begin to ship within the following three months.) Features: Texture mapping ("true perspective correction and full bi-linear filtering"). Gouraud shading, optional Z-buffering, fogging, blending, translucency, overlays. Video (MPEG-compatible YUV conversion, video can be used as a texture). Specifications (from 3Dlabs): --Overall 3D: 40fps (frames/sec.) at 600x400, bilinear textured, 2.5 depth complexity (each pixel drawn to an average of 2.5 times). --Pixel fill: 25 MPixels/sec, 500Kb polygons/sec (textured, bilinear, no Z-buffer, perspective corrected, 16-bit framestore, 50 displayed pixels per polygon, meshed, 640x480 at 75Hz). 13 MPixels/sec, 270K polygons/sec with a Z-buffer. --Video: 30 fps (320x200 YUV source zoomed and filtered to 640x480x16 "RGB"). Supported APIs are Autodesk's Heidi [see 3DA#21 and Tess#528.03.03], Apple's QuickDraw 3D, OpenGL, Reality Lab, Direct 3D, BRender, and RenderWare. Noticeably absent from the list is direct support for Intel's 3DR, used mainly by trueSpace 2.0, but 3DR itself could end up interfacing to Direct 3D, which is supported. At the hardware spec level, Permedia will use SGRAM (Synchronous Graphics RAM) for Z-buffer and texture, with a 64-bit data path supporting 400Mb/sec. (will double to 800 Mb/sec). The chip is a 3.3V, 0.35 micron device using a BGA (Ball Grid Array) package. Initial clock frequency is 50 MHz, with upgrade path to 100 MHz. Permedia will also work with a soon-to-be-released floating point geometry processor from 3Dlabs (the Delta chip), aimed at the arcade game, simulation, and virtual reality markets. 3Dlabs is positioning Permedia for the "pervasive 3D" market, which they predict will include Web browsers, presentations, publishing, and 3D GUIs and navigation, in addition to 3D games. 3Dlabs estimates the 3D chip market at 4 million units in 1996, 20 million in 1997, and 40 million in 1998. Although to date consumer 3D chip makers have targeted the 3D game market, expect that they and others will follow 3Dlabs' shift to promoting the 3D-everywhere message. And expect a very tall order for content and software developers to meet the resulting demand for 3D graphics. Counting on consumer 3D addiction, 3Dlabs predicts that "3D processing will absorb all compute power [and memory bandwidth] well into [the] next century." Publisher's note: Accompanying 3Dlabs 23 Oct. news release were notes that Permedia boards will run (faster) 3D software designed for the 3D Blaster board, and reports that Creative and Televideo have announced they will produce Permedia boards. Also that Microsoft plans to support the son-of-Glint architecture in its 3D APIs. 535.02 - Velveteen Rabbit Modeling Language By Alex Kiriako VRML for the Web is coming alive, like the child's stuffed toy rabbit that through love became a real rabbit. Some more browsers are hopping to the starting line, but, since the VRML spec is a moving goal line, don't expect any clear winners soon. Recently out of the gate are Caligari Corp.'s Fountain and Chaco Communications' VR Scout. Scout is said to be a fully VRML 1.0 compliant external browser that works standalone or with HTML browsers like WebSurfer, Netscape, and Mosaic. It uses Intel's 3DR technology on Windows 3.1/95/NT. Featured support reportedly includes inline objects, transformed textures, ASCII text and fonts, point-sets, automatic GZIP/ZIP decompression, Level of Detail (LOD), scene and texture caching, extensive help, and a headlight brightness control. VR Scout 1.1 is free for noncommercial use to individual users, and can be downloaded from http://www.chaco.com/vrscout/. Commercial users and those desiring technical support can purchase a copy for $49 direct from Chaco through E-mail at . Fountain, from Caligari, is both a VRML creation program and a VRML browser sporting texture mapping, interactive lighting, 3D primitives, 2D polygons, lathing, sweeping, and TrueType font extrusion. It also allows you to paint on individual vertices and faces. Fountain imports 3D objects from trueSpace, DXF, 3D Studio, Wavefront, Imagine, and LightWave 3D, as well as reading VRML files. It supports LOD and inlining, and requires at minimum a "fast" 486 with 8Mb RAM. You can download Fountain via Caligari's Web site at http://www.caligari.com/. No price is given, but Caligari gives you "an evaluation period of 90 days." The next rabbit Caligari will pull out of its hat is World Builder, which they say will be for professional level VRML authoring. It is due in December and is expected to support numerical modeling, 3D Booleans, surface sculpting, deformations, polygon reduction, compression, simple behaviors, and animations. It also will offer OLE and Microsoft RealityLab support. Avid followers of VRML development will notice how features like LOD, textures and ASCII text, which were missing in the most recent crop of browsers [Tess#529.02], are now being implemented. 535.03 - Readings From New Riders (order from Prentice Hall; 201 W. 103rd St., Indianapolis, IN 46291; 800/653-6156; 317/581-4670 fax, http://www.mcp.com/newriders) Review: *Kai's Power Tools, Filters and Effects*, by Heinz Schuller (ISBN 1-56205-480-5, $45). Kai's Power Tools is the program with the groundbreaking interface everyone loves. Unfortunately, its black-and-white documentation leaves much to be desired, and its tendency toward supplying hints rather than working methods leads many people to both fascination and puzzlement at the same time. The ease and absolute fun of the interface are a marvel, but little has been done to illustrate the fine points of working in KPT until now with *Kai's Power Tools, Filters and Effects*. What you get is an elegant book which supplies the color examples sorely missing in the KPT manual. There are also useful tutorials describing how to get the best out of KPT and its interactions with Photoshop. A small section on the Gradient Designer plug-in for 3D Studio also offers examples of how it works and what type of results you can expect. Two CD-ROMs are included (one each for Mac and Windows) with lots of art examples, demos of Gradient Designer, Vector Effects, and Convolver, as well as five KPT filters, and some example movies. Though KPT _is_ easy to learn and use, Schuller shows you a professional approach to getting subtle results instead of those garish "gee, that was done with KPT" effects. Consistent with this approach are professional time savers like image series that catalog the results of different filter percentages in color, and a variety of techniques for getting results that aren't obvious. Professionals will most appreciate its time saving documentation. Of course this book is for KPT v2.0. Version 3.0, which adds some new twists to version 2.0 plug-ins plus several new plug-ins, is scheduled to arrive for both Mac and PC sometime soon. For now, however, Schuller's book is simply the best documentation available on KPT.--A.K. Publisher's note: Heinz Schuller has written several how-to and review articles for *3D Artist* magazine starting back in 1992. He runs a support page for his book, along with his own gallery and other pages, at http://www.mcs.net/~heinz. 535.04 - News Wrap 4DVision (formerly Schreiber) is now shipping Sculptor v1.0 for 3D Studio. It's a spline-based modeler that imports and exports to 3DS meshes. While this isn't a review, early first looks here and by 3DA writer Robert Undi indicate that this is _serious stuff_ for 3D Studio users. Sculptor gives you a variety of object primitives to work with that can be pulled and twisted like clay with a variety of tools. The resulting model can be saved to a Sculptor format file or turned into a 3DS mesh file. Sculptor lists at $495 but can be purchased until the end of October for $300. Spatial Technology, Inc., publisher of the ACIS 3D geometry engine is moving ahead with its new Windows 3D file format. Dubbed the CF_ACIS format, it will be based on the ACIS SAT file format [Tess#530.03]. It is claimed to provide complete wireframe, surface, and solid geometry management that will also work through the Windows clipboard. Specular announces that they are releasing LogoMotion v2.0 ($199) for the Mac in November. New features include the ability to drag and drop items like surfaces, bevels, and StageHands onto the screen. There is now Phong rendering, texture mapping, ability to save custom StageHands, and a Phong draft rendering mode. Over 500 StageHands are now included on the CD-ROM. These are predefined 3D props, lights, and choreographed motions [3DA#17] which can be seen as animated previews in the file open dialog. Its advanced interface features and faster preview rendering make LogoMotion 2.0 a leader in ease of use, ease of learning 3D, and quick prototyping of scenes and animations. Current users can upgrade for $49. VIDI is releasing its new 3D sound technology for Presenter Pro 3.1 ($1,995) on the Mac. The Digital SoundStage upgrade gives you omnidirectional 3D Sound microphones that can be placed in the 3D scene to yield actual Doppler effects, like a train whistle approaching and receding from you. These effects can be multichannel, directional, or omnidirectional for complex layering of effects to add significant realism similar to theater sound. Other Presenter Professional features include RealPhysics with numerous effects, including collision detection, gravity, mass, momentum, torque, wind, breakability, elasticity, and others. Autodesk has hired Larry Crume to be the new V.P. for its Multimedia Market Group, which is responsible for 3D Studio. Previously he was a vice president at Lotus Development Corp. for several years, following two decades in top management at AT&T Bell Labs. The Autodesk position was last held by Joe Fantuzzi, who left to become president at MultiGen. 535.05 - Follow-Ups & Corrections A new round of Vibrant graphics drivers was mentioned last week in the Tess#534.02 News Wrap. What didn't get mentioned was that that batch of drivers was for AutoCAD for DOS. Vibrant also provides drivers for 3D Studio. Thanks! to the reader who called the omission to our attention. 535.06 - Publisher's Comments By Bill Allen 535.06.01 - Call for Participation Courtroom and forensic animation is the special topic for *3D Artist* issue #22. We already have enough articles, but we're interested in adding a collection of your anecdotes about decision making, working with lawyers, and learning from courtroom outcomes. Next, we're looking for articles 1) about sculptors using 3D graphics for creating real and virtual sculpture, and 2) about modeling techniques and strategies for optimal low-res scenes for realtime games and VRML. Gallery sections are possible for both topics. Architecture is a topic last visited in 3DA#s 18 and 19 and ready to look at again. But don't wait to write something! Because we do special topics does not mean we can't also run articles about those topics between times! General needs for short tips and longer articles include more for LightWave 3D and Ray Dream, and more for Mac 3D in general. To learn how to write for *3D Artist*, grab our writer guidelines at ftp.3dartist.com/3dartist/3dartist/guidline.txt Send text and proposals to , but do _not_ attach images without getting special instructions. The tip you write may inspire someone to write the tip you need. 535.06.02 - Nose to the Grindstone We announced in *3D Artist* #19 that we were scaling back on show participation. In our minds, that specifically included Autodesk University. Later we got caught up in show fever and joined on again. We were right the first time and recently decided to skip the trip. It's a day jaunt for Technical Editor Rob Glidden, so next week he'll drop by to check on news there and at the Macromedia show down the hall. Sally and I, who would have been away a week to run a booth, instead will be starting the drive to get #22 out in the same year. And Alex, the only other member of our crew, will have more than goldfish and dwarf frogs for office companions next week. There are reasons why graphics shows are stacked with magazine booths, and there must be reasons why these shows only happen on work days when working people are at work, but those are stories for another time. Suffice it to say that show distribution has been unproductive for us so far. There are better ways to use our time and your subscription money. For the same number of copies put onto newsstands rather than handed out at shows, we get far better results in income and new subscriptions, and we get better exposure for our advertisers. We encountered almost all of you in ways other than through shows, and few of you get to shows. There's a lesson in that. Still, we will miss getting to come down from the high desert to see the Pacific again, and to meet old and new friends. 535.06.03 - Term Limits I'd like to ask if anyone can remember or can find the term "3D artist" in use anywhere before late 1991. "Virtual Artist" was the working title for the newsletter that became the magazine, but we went to press in October that year with *3D Artist* as a name that related more clearly to what we intended to do with the publication. So far as we know, that was the first time the term "3D artist" appeared anywhere. Even the concept of basing one's art on computer 3D graphics was uncommon then. [======= MASTHEAD =======] [Contacts are at File End] [========================] ____________ SUBSCRIPTION *Tess* is free! To subscribe to the E-mail broadcast, send a message stating "subscribe" in the subject or message to . If you are a *3D Artist* subscriber, include your subscriber number or other info to help us link your E-mail address (magazine subscribers go into the first of multiple broadcasts). To unsubscribe from *Tess*, state "unsubscribe" and send to . Send changes of E-mail address stating old and new address to . _______ DETAILS This file may be passed among individuals and reposted in any online forum _as_long_as_ the file is not modified in any way. Post as TESS535.TXT (TES535.TXT where only six characters are allowed), or compressed with the appropriate DOS-style extension (ZIP, etc.). Reposting to *mailing lists* is _not_ recommended. TESS's master files are maintained with corrections on our Internet sites ftp.3dartist.com and www.3dartist.com, and are the only TESS files for which we can vouch file integrity. Opinions herein are not necessarily those of independent sites or forums carrying this file or pointers to our HTML editions. This file's contents are copyrighted and may not be reproduced in or with any other print or digital publication without permission. Converting to HTML is only approved for straight text without additional markup. Any trademarked names mentioned in this file are the property of their respective owners. Columbine, Inc. and its publications are totally independent. No companies or products are endorsed. Published by and (c)Copyright 1995, all rights reserved: Columbine, Inc. P.O. Box 4787, Santa Fe, NM 87502 USA 505/982-3532 (voice); 505/820-6929 (fax) 505/820-6929x3 voice mail E-mail: tess@3dartist.com Web: http://www.3dartist.com/tess/tessmain.htm _____ Staff Alex Kiriako, Editor, *Tess* Rob Glidden, Technical Editor Sally Beach, Vice Pres., Columbine, Inc. Bill Allen, Publisher & Pres., Columbine, Inc. _______________________ CONTACTS for this Issue Please mention TESS when contacting companies about products reported here! > 3Dlabs; 2010 N. 1st St. #403, San Jose, CA 95131; 408/436-3455 > 4DVision; 4800 Happy Canyon Rd. #250, Denver, CO 80237; 800/252-1024; 303/759-1024, -0928 fax, -3598 BBS; > Autodesk, Inc.; 111 McInnis Pkwy., San Rafael, CA 94903; 800/879-4233; 415/507-5000, 491-8311 fax; http://www.autodesk.com/ > Caligari Corp.; 1955 Landings Dr., Mountain View, CA 94043; 800/351-7620; 415/390-9600, -9755 fax; ; http://www.caligari.com/. > Chaco Communications, Inc.; 10164 Parkwood Dr. #8, Cupertino, CA 95014; 408/996-1115; ; http://www.chaco.com/ > Creative Labs, Inc.; 1901 McCarthy Blvd., Milpitas, CA 95035; 800/998-5227; 408/428-6600, -2389 fax back; http://www.creaf.com/ > Diamond Multimedia Systems, Inc.; 2880 Junction Ave., San Jose, CA 95134-1922; 800/468-5846; 408/325-700, -7070 fax; http://www.diamondmm.com/. > Spatial Technology, Inc.; 2425 - 55th St. #A, Boulder, CO 80301; 303/449-0649, -0926 fax; ftp.spatial.com; http://www.spatial.com/spatial > Specular; 479 West St., Amherst, MA 01002; 413/253-3100, -0540 fax, http://www.specular.com > Vibrant Graphics; 12741 Research Blvd. #102, Austin, TX 78759; 800/937-1711; 512/918-2270, - 3411 BBS; http://www.vibrant.com/ > VIDI - Visual Information Development, Inc.; 136 W. Olive Ave., Monrovia, CA 96016; 818/358-3936, -4766 fax Revision: 25 Oct 95 [end]