The was the major 3D stereo hype around 2010. The recent years was about VR hype based on my experience.
But there is another sign of "revolution". I tend to call it Cloud VFX Studio. There are more and more VFX/CG solutions are available online (for rent). They offer not just the softwares or tools, but also offer their pipeline and project management stuff.
Some of these cloud stuff I've encountered during the past years:
Nimble Collective
is a cloud animation platform as you can read on their site. One of the key member of the crew is Jason Schleifer who was (is) one of the greatest Maya guy ever. He recently started to use Blender because everybody who has some kind of cleverness :) recognize Blender sooner or later.
Clara IO
is an online free! 3D creation package which is developed by the Exocortex team. I don't know and see anybody who used their tool but there are bunch of tutorials on the net.
Metapipe
One of my best collegue called my attantion to Metapipe. They offer complete VFX pipeline on the cloud. Contemporary prome video: happy music, motion-graphics, what else do you need?
Elara
is a scalable VFX pipeline using the elastic power of the cloud - as they said. I watched their webinar. I looks promising, but there is no website so it hasn't lanched yet I guess.
So as I discussed earlier open-source solutions in the VFX/CGI industry have huge impact. We can think of the OpenEXR or the Alembic formats for example.
Pixar's USD was a new level of the open sourced technologies beacause basically we can adopt a high profile pipeline solution originally developed one of the biggest 3D animation studio of the Globe.
MaterialX could be another milestone of the VFX/CGI industry however it is not clear for me how it will evolve. Quote from their description: "MaterialX
provides a schema for describing material networks, shader parameters, texture and
material assignments, and color-space associations in a precise, application-independent,
and customizable way."
If we look at USD in production viewpoint it is rather a tool for the 3D layout (whatever it means) and of course it is in connection with modelling, animation, fx. So it basically deals with geometries (maybe volumes as well) in a software agnostic way.
But MaterialX propesed to be a standard for look-development data transfer. So it should mean 2D (like textures) and 3D (materials/shaders) type of data in render engine agnostic way. If we think about in a long term it could means every rendering soultion would understand MaterialX data...we will see.
MaterialX was used on the feature film Star Wars Rogue one for example.
Comprehensive document about photogrammetry. I think we are witnesses of the beginning of a new era of the computer graphics, because photorammetry is a way to capture surface and color at the same time. Previously we could digitalize only the surface and collect color information separately. The future of the process I think is to collect information about the surface and the material (meaning that not only RGB values).
Okay, it is oldies right now but I think it is worth to mention a couple of thing. I think Nuke and Maya now related to announce the latest release almost the same time. I can't say that huge development going on. I miss the feeling when a software release hit me and I say "waaoooo amazing! I can't wait to try the new features".
Maya 2018
It's a little bit strange that there is no official announcement video. Maya 2018 released so quietly. We can think that Autodesk knows there is no reason to do the hype. So here are what I found:
The devil lies in the details. I guess they were tired to create fancy feature videos but if we go through the user guide we can find a lot of useful stuff especially in connection with modelling. But still no breakthrough at Bifröst. There is now sing of a general procedural workflow inside Maya. The (new) render setup system seams still not working with references so it kind of a worthless.
Nuke 11
And Nuke announcement is also a bit woozy (or something like that, and the music is shitty as well).
So there is new Lens Distortion and Precomp node has a new name called LiveGroup, background rendering. What else? I guess the VFX Reference Platform is interesting for big studios for pipeline TD's but not for artist.
I guess with Nuke is the main problem is that Nuke is a complete software. Probably the best choice for compositing for films (is there competitors? Maybe Fusion?). There is no certain direction to develop Nuke because it would overlap other Foundry related softwares like Modo and Mari. In a business point of view there is no reason to develop for example a better modelling toolkit for Nuke to do better photogrammetry and re-modelling, projecting, texturing workflow. There is Modo and Mari for that. But for an artist it is always better to use one software for related tasks saving "tons of time" to export-import, naming, versioning, convert files.
What you may haven't seen this article about the making of the vfx stuff. Quite comprehensive article (I wish I could write things something like this):
