The Area: What kind of performance enhancements can we expect to see in the upcoming version of Mudbox?

Dave Cardwell: Performance was one of the big things that people wanted to see improved in Mudbox. We're completely re-architecting the rendering engine and the brush engine to substantially increase the performance in the application. What you're going to see in Mudbox 2009 (that's what we're calling it, Mudbox 2009) are completely new rendering and brush engines that will give you the ability to visualize the entire model, with all the high resolution details on screen at once, and not just small local subdivision regions.

This will allow you, as an artist, to work faster and make better decisions about the characters or the environments you're working on. Also, it's also going to give you the ability to more effectively present the full asset to your art director, client or the director of the project.

The performance is geared towards the rendering speed, camera interactivity and brush speed; also the number of polygons you can subdivide up to, and, how fast you can subdivide...actually changing level speed. That is really slow in Mudbox 1.0 and we're actually improving that a lot.

File size is another thing we're reducing. The amount of memory that the files take up on disk is being reduced. So you'll be seeing all those performance enhancements in Mudbox 2009.

So there's been a lot of development work in this release?

Yes, as I mentioned, the architecture for the rendering and the brush engines are getting a lot of rework. We're implementing a stamp-smoothing algorithm that was in development for ten years - the same algorithm that was used in Alias StudioPaint, so you're going to see much smoother brushes.

In Mudbox 1.0, if you do really tight circles and curves, you end up with a really faceted line - you won't see any of that anymore. And you'll also have explicit control over stamp spacing. That's going to help you in applying textures and patterns in a very controlled way. For sculpting, it's going to mean a lot smoother strokes, and very little lumpiness. Performance improvements all around! In some cases, we're enhancing a significant portion of the code to be able to accomplish this.

Are you taking advantage of hardware and multi-threading?

Yes, we are taking advantage of the GPU and of course, the graphics card has multiple threads - even more than the main CPU processors in some instances. We will be using multi-threading for certain things, but not across the entire application. What that means is that the application still could get quite a lot faster in the future.

One of the nice things about being at Autodesk is that you get a heads-up on the technology that's expected to come down the pipeline from various hardware manufacturers, be it graphics cards or processors. And so based on this, we're making sure Mudbox is in a good position to take advantage of all that stuff as it comes out. And soon as it's out there, we'll want to be able to take advantage of those technologies with Mudbox because of the code changes that we're making now.

What about hardware needs; do you need a high-specification machine?

Do you need a super computer? No. There's going to be a recommended hardware list, just like with all the Autodesk products, but you can run it on significantly less powerful hardware. There will be a chart of qualified graphics cards. It will basically qualify with very similar hardware configurations as Maya.

As an example, I'm running Mudbox 2009 here on my laptop, a Dell 1520 Inspiron with an 8600 mobile graphics card and I can work with very, very high polygon counts at extremely interactive speeds. You will see a very noticeable improvement over Mudbox 1.0.

Is this what you used to record the video?

No. To record the video, the video that's shown on AREA now, I used my home workstation. I'm running 64-bit Windows. Actually, I've got two graphics cards I use. I use an 8800 GTX which runs extremely well, but for the video I used Quadro FX 4600...it's got a lot of GPU RAM. It's not necessarily significantly faster than the 8800 GTX because that will run equally as well for Mudbox 2009.

But yes, I'm running Windows 64, with 8GB ram, Quadro FX 4600. It's a computer you'll want to use if you're doing production work. You don't want to limit yourself based on hardware, and computers are pretty cheap nowadays anyway :)

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MUDBOX 2009 PREVIEW

Siggraph Preview

Posted: August 11th, 2008

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Movie: This is the demo that was shown at the Siggraph User Group (Monday, August 11th) highlighting the new features found within Mudbox 2009.

Images: These images are screen-grabs of real-time rendering in Mudbox 2009. At 17.5 million quad polygons, the model is being rendered in real-time utilizing HDR lighting, Ambient Occlusion, Depth of Field, Reflections, Specularity and high-resolution texture maps.

The textures were painted in Paint Layers in Mudbox 2009. The eye is separate geometry and was painted in a similar manner using a base map for a start and blending paint layers. Sculpt and texturing by Craig Barr

Rendering Performance

Posted: July 28, 2008

Rendering Performance - Extended Update

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Video: Here is a small update with an extended video of the Goblin in Mudbox with additional sculpting on the model.

Images: Screen stills from the Mudbox 3d-viewport.

Posted: July 26, 2008

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Video: We are happy to share with you another Mudbox preview. In this second video, GPU based rendering technology helps you, the artist, work in an "on target" context to simulate the "look" of your game engine, film render or TV-spot across millions of polygons.

Images: Real-time 3D viewport with fully rendered model.

Performance Preview

Posted: July 14, 2008

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Video: Performance demo highlighting interactive rendering and sculpting on 25 million quads poly mesh, interactive HDR lighting, GPU accelerated Ambient Occlusion in viewport and more.

Images: GPU accelerated real-time 3D viewport with 25 million quads polygon mesh -- model and sculpt by Dave Cardwell.

About Mudbox

Autodesk® Mudbox™ 3D modeling software is a premier digital sculpting solution for today's film.

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