Over the last 30 years every creative medium has gone from being very expensive and difficult to do on a mainframe to cheap and easy on a desktop. Today individual writers, artists, musicians, and filmmakers produce professional-level work in their own studios. The one glaring exception is 3D animation and simulation.
There are plenty of powerful workstations and user-friendly 3D apps on the market. All are an order of magnitude or two more capable and affordable than the ones used back in the Big Iron days. But the reality is that pulling off serious 3D work still requires teams of artists, technical directors, programmers, and system operators. That's about to change, thanks to a new generation of 3D software that takes advantage of 64-bit OS and hardware developments.
In this article, I take a look at how Autodesk's 64-bit revs of its flagship 3ds Max 9 and recently acquired Maya 8 software are redefining desktop 3D. I also examine Autodesk's 32-bit MotionBuilder 7.5 character animation application and make a couple educated guesses about where the field's headed.
Why 64-bit Matters
Programs like Max and Maya have evolved into brawny desktop apps over the last 10 years, but they've been hamstrung by limited access to memory. Even with the Windows PAE switch turned on to accommodate 3.5 gigabytes of RAM, 32-bit Maya 7 could still only glom onto a single gigabyte.
This severely constrained the complexity of animations and simulations. Every time I tried to design something fun (such as a long-haired haired yeti break dancing in a toga) I felt as if I was trying to cram an ocean of information into a thimble-sized data bucket. In short order the program would run out of RAM and crash, often locking up the entire system. It was like trying to craft the Gettysburg Address out of one-syllable words.
"How in the world," I would wonder, "do the Big Boys like Pixar and ILM use this software to create movies like Cars and Spiderman?" The answer is that while programs like Maya and Max are an integral part of these studios' production flow, they're typically cogs in a larger machine made up of mountains of proprietary inhouse software, rooms of networked Linux boxes, and teams of specialists who make the whole shebang hum.
However, the most significant bottleneck preventing individuals or garage bands from doing it on their own is not processing power or a big budget. It's not being able to access enough RAM. So I jumped for joy last year when Microsoft finally released 64-bit Windows XP, which can address up to 256GB of RAM, about 15 times more than the current crop of motherboards can even accommodate.
We immediately built a 64-bit workstation with eight gigabytes of high-speed RAM. But sadly there was a dearth of 64-bit apps released to coincide with the 64-bit XP rollout (to this day there's no 64-bit desktop photo or video software).
