Windows NT makes animation inroads

Electronic News, August 18, 1997 by Cynthia Bournellis

Los Angeles--One year after Windows NT Workstation was introduced as a graphics platform, it has gone from zilch to owning 20 percent of the computer animation market, or 43,624 NT boxes, in 1996, according to the 1996 Roncarelli Report on the Computer Animation Industry.

Computer animation is a broad area that encompasses advertising, broadcast, film and video, various flavors of CAD, PC games, virtual reality and more. The recent Siggraph 97 show was a sure indicator that Windows NT Workstation has become a favored low-cost alternative for the creation of 2-D, 3-D and other digital content on low to mid-range workstations (EN, Aug. 11).

"1996 was a watershed year in the computer animation industry," said Robi Roncarelli, publisher of the Roncarelli report. "NT software took off, and there was a new platform for doing computer effects." He said Windows NT and Windows 95 are becoming the industry standards for computer animation software operating systems, with Macintosh and Unix graphics workstations being regulated to a support status. However, Silicon Graphics workstations continue to dominate at the very high end of this field.

Nonetheless, the number of software developers hustling to get onto Windows NT, and the Intel architecture, is growing. In 1996, Kinetix, a division of Autodesk and the fifth largest PC software company worldwide, moved from DOS to Windows. Now supporting Windows NT, Kinetix can scale up its internal processes by using NT's capabilities to do symmetrical multiprocessing, multitasking, as well as running "render farms," said company officials. Render farms consist of multiple servers that consolidate a lot of processing power. Companies such as Sun Microsystems enjoy a good share of this market.

For Quiet Man, a 3-D animation house in New York, Windows NT has become the firm's "great equalizer" between its Macintosh and Silicon Graphics systems, said Dave Shirk, head of 3-D there. "We can filter anything (content) through it."

Electric Image, Inc., a loyal developer of 3-D animation and rendering products for the Macintosh platform for more than a decade, ported to Windows NT this spring. "The performance of it on Pentium II is no slouch," said the company's CEO and president, Jay Roth. However, Mr. Roth did admit that NT still can't perform as fast as both Silicon Graphics' and Sun's platforms in terms of RAM speeds.

But the real indicator that NT's time has arrived in this arena is its acceptance by software giant Electronic Arts, in San Mateo, Calif. About to ship its 10 millionth CD-ROM title for the PC, Electronic Arts also makes games for the Sony PlayStation, Sega Saturn and Nintendo 64 machines. The company is also a third-party developer for software for 32-bit game machines and PCs. Windows NT has become a major factor to the company's bottom line. "The NT box is a win for us when it comes to funding and development," said Keith McCurdy, director of technology at Electronic Arts. "Although we use both NT and Unix systems, NT is more flexible to use and write tools on. (With the money it saves us) we can pour our ROI back into creativity, productivity, writing custom tools and authoring."

The attractive cost of NT also gives Electronic Arts the flexibility to train new graphics artists. "Training on Unix is costly," said Mr McCurdy. "So we have to ask ourselves 'Do we buy someone who may not even be good at it (the job) a $40,000 Unix system and an additional $15,000 worth of software, or do we go with a less expensive solution?' "

Many other software companies are developing on Windows NT because of its low price point. Two-year-old animation house Blur Studio, in Venice, Calif., which had $2 million in revenues last year, attributes its fortune to a large degree to Windows NT. "Most of our animators have come up by the bootstraps and work from home," said the company's co-founder Tim Miller, who said he's always been a devout PC user. "NT is cheap to set up, and it lets you have a full-blown workstation at home."

While a lot of the buzz at Siggraph 97 was about Windows NT and Pentium II, the Alpha processor was being boasted by some as the choice for motion-capture technology. Motion capture, one of the more interesting highlights at the show and a technology that is becoming ever more prevalent in PC games, is the next wave in 3D animation. Modern Cartoons, a company that does real-time animation for television programs in Venice, Calif., demonstrated its proprietary motion-capture software running on a quad-processor, 466MHz Alpha 4100 Windows NT server from Digital Equipment. Motion capture takes human movements and applies them to 3D characters. This is done through a type of "body suit" that is rigged with magnetic sensors. A person dons the body suit and performs various motions. The suit then tracks the wearer's movements, which are then applied in real-time, as they are being recorded to a 3D model of a character. In Digital's demo, the wearer performed motions for a 3D skeleton character, who appeared on a large screen as sort of an MC. When the wearer waved his arm, for example, so did the skeleton.