Emerging 3D technology is allowing new opportunities in many new areas, including television, as the effects for the Battlestar Galactica display. Images courtesy of NVIDIA. © Sci Fi Channel.

Hardly a day seems to go by without some new application area for CG animation arising — beyond the well-known fields of gaming and film vfx. It’s interesting to speculate how and when all these 3D animation/graphics applications will meet in the middle — when will architects, videogame designers, film previsualization supervisors, vfx specialists, CAM/CAD engineers, medical and technical visualization experts, military simulator designers, virtual set builders, VR (Virtual Reality) and AR (Augmented Reality) animators and many others be able to speak much the same language, use the same tools and file formats and cross-pollinate what are still far-distant fields, and collaborate on projects with shared workflow? Many non-graphics professionals are asking a further question: When will 3D graphics be available for the mainstream — for the many doctors, businessmen, eLearning educators, engineers and others that want to do presentations with animation and virtual environments, but do not have the budget to hire an ILM for their projects?

One of the side effects of the CG application expansion is that companies which specialized in one graphics market are now being faced with a wide range of market demands, forcing them either to offer a panoply of products or focus on a specific niche in the expanding market space. One company that has decided to adapt to the broadening CG field is NVIDIA (www.nvidia.com). Once known mainly for mainstream consumer-level graphics boards, the company now offers everything from high-end workstation GPUs (Graphics Processor Units) such as its speed demon Quadro FX line to graphics chipsets for cell phones. In addition, NVIDIA, which used to only worry about getting shelf space for its products, is now intimately connected with its customers, offering support and technical remedies for professional users that are pushing the envelope. It has gone so far as to develop a programming language, Cg (as in “C” for graphics), which directly addresses the GPUs for gaming machines or workstation systems such as render farms, and which is now included in major 3D toolsets such as Maya, Softimage and 3ds max, as well as CAD programs such as AutoCad and CATIA.

NVIDIA software helped bring to life the fighters in Discovery Channel’s Xtreme Martial Arts special. Images courtesy of NVIDIA. © Discovery Communications Inc.

CG is an example of a new generation of high-level shading languages that includes Microsoft’s HLSL and the OpenGL Shading Language. Shaders — the programs that implement an effect on a set of pixels or vertices — have in the past been targeted to a specific platform. Having cross-platform shading capability means that different graphics apps — such as CAD or DCC (Digital Content Creation) — can now share 3D models that will retain important characteristics such as surface textures and subsurface physical properties. The new shaders also allow on-the-fly iterations for designers, so they can make changes and get instant feedback instead of having to wait for offline rendering. Lastly, this advance makes possible the re-purposing of 3D objects and spaces, so that a beautifully CAD-generated piece of furniture, for instance, can be used in a virtual film set, then by the associated game, and finally (in miniature) for the toys or action figures arising from a successful movie/game project. Eventually the object could be used for an unrelated project such as for a teacher in a 3D virtual learning space, or an attorney creating a virtual room to present to a jury.