CGSociety :: Special Feature
2 January 2013, by Paul Hellard
CGSociety is very pleased to present the Top 20 list for 2012. In collating this traditional retrospective as voted by you, the CGSociety community, we called out for nominations between November 5 and December 22 on a thread especially opened on CGTalk. Items could be anything related to the Computer Graphics industry. It could be software releases, new hardware, movies, games, short films, in fact any product that made our lives better or filled us with awe while in the pursuit and creation of better CG and VFX. Over 4,130 people viewed and contributed to the thread and now, at the start of this next exciting year, we present the 2012 Retrospective Top 20.
While this wasn't large on my radar, the 38 Studios debacle over on Rhode Island has slid into the Top 20 by the slimmest of margins. The story was hitting the USA headlines at the opening of the list, so I can imagine this is why it made it on. Here's the background.
The Rhode Island Economic Development Corporation (EDC) filed a lawsuit, trying to recover the $100 million it'd handed to a team of game studio execs, allegedly under prepared to correctly allocate funds for the survival of the complex business. The complaint also says that the company was "undercapitalised by many millions of dollars," and that the project was, "going to run out of money in 2012." The 17-count suit was filed only one day before the two-year cut-off. Yet another entertainment company run by shonky accountants.
Source Filmmaker is a story-telling tool made inside the Source Engine at Valve Software by the crew of technologists and artists. They've condensed their entire animation pipeline down to run on a gaming PC. Using the Source Filmmaker means game makers can make all their movies on location, inside the game world.
This 3D world of the video game combines the worlds of cinematography, animation and film editing. Add cameras, pose characters, tune lights, all without leaving the context of the show for the final audience. The video game world will become a massive backlot for people to rebuild the world as their own new creative exploration. The Source Filmmaker is now in beta.
The Foundry pushed NUKE 7 out the door in early December and the compositing world lit up to the biggest release to date. NUKE 7.0 comes with a host of polished and perfected tools for day-to-day workflows, and there are new additions to complement its highly acclaimed feature set.
NUKE 7.0 is packed with RAM cache to give artists real-time playback and a variety of GPU accelerated nodes for NUKEX including MotionBlur, Kronos, Denoise, VectorGenerator, Convolve and ZDefocus. Day to day compositing the way you want it. With entirely redefined roto tools, Primatte 5, the new 2D tracker, support for new camera raw formats and improvements to the SplineWarp tool and DopeSheet. Artists can now relight renders in the comp environment using the ReLight node and even model using NUKEX's new ModelBuilder. NUKE 7.0 will streamline workflow with a number of additions to the Deep Compositing workflow.
One of the most enthralling sessions at SIGGRAPH Asia last month was by Hugues Ricour, Ubisoft Senior Producer and Georges Torres, Senior Technical Director for Assassin's Creed, who took us through the physics engine creation for Assassin’s Creed 3, which includes sea battles on real-time generated game oceans.
An amazing leap into the wet stuff, with depth, mass, wind and damage to the vessels. Sure there are usual leaping from street to buildings, but the marine confrontations have to be played to be believed.
The Nintendo Wii U was released around the end of November as the eighth generation of game platforms. This one has been a long time coming, with the rather familiar looking GamePad borrowed from the DS design. While this incarnation of game player looks pretty much the same as the Wii, the beefed up processor inside stops any further comparison.
However, with the announcement of this additional piece of hardware I can't get past the fact that I'm looking at yet another grey plastic box that does the same as the last grey plastic box. Once again, I am beginning to think the only reason this made it on to the Top 20 is because it was released around the time of the vote. Yawn.
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