The SIGGRAPH showfloor opens on the third day of the event. This is the place where companies and studios gather to present their products, services and courses.

Right at the opening time, the guys from MOVA presented their new capture system. What this does is to perform a complete realtime 3d scan of your actor, including not only model data but also texture data.

What it does is to create a model and texture by capturing the actor with an array of cameras, as seen in the picture. The results are not only impressive, but also you get a very high-resolution model.

Personally I don't see this system being used on something else than facial capture or repetitive animation cycles. You are able to capture the actors fully dressed and performing, but I don't know why you would capture a complete movie. However, this always happens with the new technologies so we will have to wait and see what happens next.

Another interesting device was the "3D mouse". The idea of this mouse is that you would use the little joysticks to drive translation and rotation of the objects. When I tried it I actually had a hard time trying to get used to it, but then it was fun to use.

The problem that I found is that it's very difficult to operate when you want to rotate your object only a little, because you have to quickly "tap" the joystick. You can set a "snap value", but that doesn't make the job greatly easier. Another thing is the price: It sells for over $80.00, which may sound a little steep for a mouse.

Another thing to consider is that the mouse only works on Truespace right now, so if you were even considering to get it to work on Maya or any other application, you will have to wait till next year...

Autodesk unveiled Maya 8, MAX 9 and a new compositor called Toxic, which is based on Flame. What's so special about Toxic is that it was designed for groups of people working over a network. Now people can work on their parts of the same shot at the same time without having to wait for others to deliver their parts.

Users can create "snapshots" of their current projects, so others can use those snapshots and bring them into their own project. The cool thing about this is that if the users update their snapshots, they are automatically updated on everyone's machines, so you don't have to reopen your projects everytime someone creates a new snapshot since Toxic does that automatically.

I also had the chance to meet Matt Sederberg. There are some very interesting new features in TSplines now, and you should be able to get the Maya 8 version really soon. TSplines is also available for Rhino, but since I am not a Rhino user I can't give you my impressions about it.

Something worth mentioning is that Matt's father, Thomas Sederberg was awarded an achievement award during the SIGGRAPH keynote.

Another booth worth visiting was Lucas Films. They held some interesting talks about the projects they had worked on, including Mission Impossible, Pirates of the Caribbean 2, a new Indiana Jones game, and others.

On the picture you can see John Knoll on a talk about Pirates 2. The main focus of the talk was Davy Jones although they talked about how they created all the different digital characters for the movie. Actually a TD from ILM offered a course that went even deeper on the creation of Davy Jones and I can tell you it was very good.