ZBrush was tested by Weta Digital’s modeling department during post-production work on The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Digital artist Dave Cardwell notes, “I and other highly-experienced modelers have been able to do things with ZBrush that we could not do digitally before we had this beta…it brings to life things that you can’t paint in a 3D paint package.”

Time to Get Moving
OK, so you built your models, textured them and gave them their individual personalities, so now we need a way to get them moving. Well, you can say that the current wave of 3D applications on the market offer some very efficient means of getting the job done and on time, but, as we know, there’s always room for tools that can make any job just a bit easier.

Over the course of last year, animators were treated with some of the more innovative and intuitive tools to date. A few of the more memorable tools consist of Sega’s Animanium and Kaydara MotionBuilder 5. What’s notable about both of these tools are the increased user feedback and intuitiveness when crunching out your frames for that big project, while taking the headaches out of dealing with problematic complex rig setups, which leaves the animators with more time to do what they do best. Another quality that I found honorable with most outside developers such as Sega and Kaydara is that they’re adopting methods to extend their products to most major 3D applications such as Alias Maya and Softimage XSI, thus keeping your investments sound and growing.

MotionBuilder 5 includes biped and quadruped control rigs, allowing two or four-legged characters to be animated without having to create rigs or constraints.

Render On
Computing power is thankfully and constantly always keeping ahead of the game, improving in considerable leaps and bounds throughout every year, and 2003 was no exception. One impressive revelation that was the talk of last year was the major shift to Linux operating systems. Many large and small reputable animation studios such as DreamWorks, The Walt Disney Co., Pixar Animation Studios and Blue Sky Studios, to name a few, have made the switch to Linux-run operating systems within the last year. Promising more memory and greater processing power for the rendering process, arguably one of the greatest demands in our industry today, many studios are realizing their once mighty render farms are beginning to tap out at the 32-bit system memory threshold. Thankfully, within the last year scalable and clustered systems are becoming better solutions and readily available for our needs, and with the introduction of 64-bit processors such as AMD’s Athlon 64 FX Processor, the choices are becoming very obvious and simple.

Other hardware vendors such as NVIDIA and ATI have also locked horns within the last year, delivering the next wave of graphic processors. Both sport impressive 128-bit floating-point precision, giving power users the much needed realtime performance. ATI had put up a great fight and continues to do so with their Radeon 9800 family series, but no other vendor created as much stir as NVIDIA with their high-end Quadro FX series of graphic cards, touting the “Industry’s only true 128-bit floating-point graphics pipeline.” With the introduction of the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3000, NVIDIA succeeded in delivering to the power users of our industry.