The Siggraph computer graphics conference returned to Vancouver (Canada) this year, meaning it cost me only a half-tank of gas to attend it. Also returning are attendees, with roughly 18,000 making the trek to the five-day event -- up from the last few years. The dip seems to be over, said Jon Peddie, a Siggraph co-founder who tracks the stats.
Part of the Siggraph show flow in Vancouver, Canada
The curious name of Siggraph derives from "SIG (special interest group), graph (graphics)," a term more common in the 1980s than today. I first attended the show in the late 1980s, when there still was a deliberate CAD component to it.
The show has since had little to do with CAD, although Lenovo chose this Siggraph to unveil their new, really-thin (3/4") engineering and DCC [digital content creation] P1 laptop with (up to) 64GB RAM, (up to) 4TB solid state drive, (up to) 4K resolution, (up to) Xenon CPU, but starting at US$2,000. ESRI and ANSYS were the only ones to have booths that could be remotely linked to CAD software, along with a more modest booth from the money-losing Media & Entertainment division of Autodesk.
My professional photographer daughter came along for the day, and she noted that technology which was "WOW!" just a few years ago had become common-place today, like 3D printers (every other booth seemed to have one -- or several of them) and black motion-capture suits covering unhappy-looking models. Indeed, the exhibition floor to me lacked the wow-factor of previous years. A good sign of maturity, given the excesses of "3D TV is for real!" hype of a half-decade ago.
The Back of the Show
The back of the exhibition floor is the most interesting part. Dozens of small booths are hosted by new companies showing us their fresh technology. One of them attempted to 3D-print a BiC-like pen: ink on the interior and clear plastic on the exterior. The result was not pretty, and my daughter pointed out a hand-printed sign warning of getting leaking ink on your fingers -- I quickly put back the pen I was holding.
Another firm figured out how to add delicate strings of LED lights to the insides of shirts, lights that outlined the patterns in the cloth, or created sequential patterns of their own. The front of this booth was crowded several deep with impressed passers-by.
Shirt embedded with thin LED lighting
But the most impressive development to me was a remote robotic exoskeleton that helped a handicapped person assemble parts. Another person operated the exoskeleton remotely, watching a tv monitor as the exoskeleton wrapped itself around the patient, with two clawed arms acting as ersatz hands.
Then there was VR180, not at the back of the show but at the back of the Google booth. I'd never heard of it, and the demo jock was apologetically undetailed about what it entailed, so I looked it up. It's a file format created by YouTube to combine two versions of a scene:
- 180-degree 3D, when seen with a VR viewer
- Wide-angle 2D, when viewed on a regular screen
The VR180 booth
What we saw at the VR180 table were a few dual-lens cameras that take images in the VR180 format, starting from $250. "Interesting, I wonder how useful it actually is," said my daughter.
Why 180 degrees? Research by Google found that people wearing VR goggles spend roughly 75% of their time viewing the front 90 degrees of a 360-degree environment. I am unsurprised to learn this, as none of us are owls, and so in the real world we never twist our necks around to see behind us; that's what ears are for -- they give us our 360-degree surveillance. Learn more about VR360 from https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/04/the-first-3d-camera-built-on-google-vr180-tech-arrives/
I learned to be careful when encountering the word "construction" at Siggraph, because it might not mean what I think it to mean. Contruct3D, for instance, is an upcoming conference on 3D printing. Doxel, by contrast, is AI for construction sites: "Our deep-learning based 3D semantic understanding algorithms automatically measure progress on construction sites, at a hyper-granular level and with superhuman accuracy" through autonomous robots collecting LIDAR scans and high-resolution photographs of unfinished buildings. https://www.doxel.ai/
Benchmarking by SPEC
I met with the co-chairs of SPEC (Standard Performance Evaluation Corporation), the software and workstation benchmarking group made up of makers of workstations, graphics boards, and CAD and DCC software. We spent an informal half-hour chatting about trends in MCAD and computing.
The group released updated benchmarks for Solidworks during the week of Siggraph, with Creo 4 being the next on the software benchmark release schedule. On the hardware side, SPEC will soon be releasing an updated benchmark suite (apps and test files) for workstations, named version 3, complete with some tests that employ GPUs.
Some of their future plans involve...
- Determining which add-on software to include in benchmarks, such as external FEA systems
- Including more 3D models, especially complex ones for specific MCAD systems
- Finding a way to include Catia from Dassault Systemes
So, write bobc@cramco.com if you...
- Have suggestions for commonly-used add-ons for your CAD system
- Have complex 3D models in native MCAD formats to contribute (you get credit!)
- Have an in with Dassault so that Catia can be added to SPEC's benchmarks
https://spec.org/benchmarks.html
Generative Design by nTopology
nTopology is one of a group of very small, very new CAD-related firms run by very bright people who have spotted opportunities in niches. Three of the nTopology's programmers came out from New York to look for technology at Siggraph that could possibly assist their software, and so spent a 3/4-hour with me.
Variable lattices designed by nTopology
Their software generates incredibly complex lattice designs incredibly quickly, yet through a dead-simple interface. Whereas the lattice design capabilities in mainstream CAD software, like NX, fills volumes with simple repetitions, nTopology does variable lattice designs with variable spacing and variable thickness of members. These are needed where the surface areas are curved, and where more (or less) strength is required -- or where the design requires it. For instance, where stainless steel meets bone, a coarser lattice is needed. Designs can be sent directly to 3D printers, bypassing the need for triangulation.
The demo jock gave me a preview of version 2 of the software, but then paused: "Maybe I wasn't supposed to show it to you yet." I have already scheduled a second look at the software once it's announced.
I won't say more than this: these guys have figured out how to present 3D models mathematically rather using traditional modeling kernels, which gives their system its extreme speed. Either that, or it is due to the Razer Blade Stealth 13 laptops that each one of them brandished. https://www.ntopology.com
Jon Peddie Luncheon
The highlight of each Siggraph is the luncheon put on by Jon Peddie Associates for the rest of us in the media. Reporters always love the free food in the five-star Pan Pacific hotel, following which Mr Peddie gives us a brief industry overview, hosts a panel discussion, and then the highlight, gives aways valuable prizes, like top-end laptops from Dell, HP, and Lenovo. Well, it's a highlight for those who win something.
Mr Peddie's research found that hardware and software spending in DCC is at roughly a 50/50 split, a healthy sign, he says. When hardware spending greatly exceeds software, he feels this is a sign that a market is immature.
The five members on the panel discussed the usefulness of DCC on the cloud. Some were highly enthusiastic, because they had products that operate that way. The other panelists were more circumspect, saying balance is appropriate. The developer of Blender intoned that the bulk of the processing power belongs on the desktop, and that the cloud is appropriate primarily for file sharing.
http://www.siggraph.com |
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www.okino.com
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Kubotek 3D's multi-threaded geometric modeling module is named Kosmos Core Modeler. The Kosmos framework includes data structures from...
- Dassault CGM
- Spatial ACIS
- Siemens PLM Parasolid
It runs "on all significant operating systems." www.kubotek3d.com/products/kosmos
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In this day when Dropbox no longer hands out free online storage, you can boost the 15GB Google gives you free with 5GB free from Siemens PLM by signing up with their SolidEdge Portal. Plus, you get an online MCAD viewer that works on most devices. solidedgeportal.sws.siemens.com
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PTC, which sells augmented reality software, issues its own research predicting that lots and lots of companies are going to buy AR within the next year. businesswire.com/news/home/20180816005517/en/
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Doxel uses autonomous robots casting LIDAR scans around construction sites to automatically generate daily progress reports. www.doxel.ai
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Because nobody in real life twists their neck around to see everything around: "Despite viewers being able to look around in 360-degree videos [in VR], Google found that people spent 75% of their time focusing on the 90 degrees in front of them." t.co/7ITHWDrWta
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SPEC updates its Solidworks performance benchmark with 9 graphics and 2 CPU test:
- RealView, ambient occlusion, shadows with shaded and shaded-with-edges display
- Tessellation and PhotoView360 rendering of 10 models with up to 4.75-million triangles
www.spec.org/gwpg/publish/sw2017_rel
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Stabiplan offers the BIM Phrasebook with explanations of terms used in BIM. Download the PDF from constructible.trimble.com/flipbooks/bim-phrasebook-pocket-guide (requires submitting an email address).
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Where Google hides location tracking, and how to turn it off: 1. Go to apps on an Android phone 2. Tap Google 3. Ignore deliberate distractions 4. Tap hamburger menu 5. Tap Settings 6. Tap Google Activity Controls 7. Tap Web & App Activity 8. Turn it off (well, Google calls it Paused.)
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ITI updates CADfix 12 simplification, translation, and repair software with...
- FBX, OBJ, XGL, ZGL formats
- Macro record and playback
- CAD model to CAE mesh comparison
- auto subdivide of CAD faces to quad regions
- 3D hex-skin partitioning tool
info.iti-global.com/blog/cadfix-12
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For late-breaking CAD news, follow upFront.eZine on Twitter at @upfrontezine. |
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Never thought I’d find some decidedly non-CAD content on upFront.eZine. Your book review was a fascinating read. - Dennis Nagy BeyondCAE
The editor replies: I'll have another book review for you in a few weeks.
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There are various incorrect uses of Theil (vs. Thiel) in the review. - Kean Walmsley Autodesk
The editor replies: I have fired the copy editor.
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Interesting story. But I really hate the idle rich. - CADman
1. Loved your comments re tariffs. I think the third one alone pretty much nailed it. 2. IoT: It's not just a matter of "who owns the data" but it's also "who takes the hit if/when mistakes are made?" - Bill Fane
Al Dean wrote: "Autodesk’s Generative Design tools run on GPUs, specifically CUDA. GPUs are cheap. Folks could stack out a machine and do the computation on their own hardware -- as they do now for rendering and viz[ulization]."
GPUs are NOT that cheap. Perhaps they are slightly less expensive than CPUs when you compare them on a transistor-by-transistor basis (an AMD 1950X has 9.6B transistors at $780, whereas a GTX 1080Ti has 12B transistors for $800).
However, the idea that it's trivial to stuff half a dozen high-end GPUs in a workstation is ludicrous, as is that such a system would compare at all to the hundreds or thousands of GPU resources in the cloud.
The number of GPUs you can put in a system is tied directly to the CPU you have. A typical Intel desktop CPU has 16 PCIe lanes meaning you can have one GPU running at 16x, or at most at 8x speed. High-end desktop CPUs like the Core i9 and Threadripper provide 24, 44, or even up to 64 PCIe lanes, but some of those are dedicated to PCIex4 lanes for M.2 SSDs and the like.
Those Core i9s aren't cheap either, with the price of admission around $1,000 for the CPU alone. All told you might get up to 3 or 4 GPUs in a high-end box. Above that, you could go all out and get 8 Quadro P6000 GPUs in an Nvidia Visual Computing Appliance (VCA), which at $6,500 a pop would set you back at least around $60,000.
Even if you build out a GPU farm on your network using a Backburner like technology you need more than a few high-end PCs that aren't doing anything else. Compare that huge outlay to get suboptimum performance to the vastly better performance available in cloud computing, where you have just the rather petty inconvenience of paying for such software and services (horrors!) - Matthew Stachoni (via WorldCAD Access)
The editor replies: Other software firms are able to run their generative design on desktop computers without needing GPUs.
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