After months of hard slog, toil and an incredible amount of work led by Mike and Ben on the engineering side - Creator 3.5 is released today.

Principal new features include:

• The addition of the CScript object orientated scripting language, including the ability to import functions from the main CScript module and the ability to call CScript from LISP.
• Smart Objects™ and Intelligent Materials™ frameworks enabling creation of component libraries of objects that can be easily reused between projects.
• All new Animation Timeline Editor, making for ease of use and simpler keyframe editing.
• The ability to turn off global rendering features – such as mirrors, reflections, multi-stage materials and shadows - if the frame rate on less powerful machines drops below certain limits.
• Major Speed improvements across many areas including scenes with multiple animated 2D objects, scenes with multiple complex objects and Material API functions.
• In direct response to customer feedback, improvements have been made to Drag and Drop support including the ability to drop animations and alterations direct from the Asset Browser onto objects.
• New Unit Display Code which allows developers to use real world measurements such as feet and inches as well as scientific, engineering, architectural, fractional and angular (degrees, radians and grads) measurements.
• A host of improvements to the user interface to increase response speed and user workflow. These include better support for scenes with thousands of objects, automatic addition of paths to assets when they are dropped into a scene, automatic generation of supporting geometry when dragging shaders into a scene, through to faster loading and closing times.
• Vector based 2D text that significantly improves the visual quality of 2D text within applications.
• The ability to drag and drop all supported import formats directly into Creator and file format import updates to support RH 5.5. 

We want to thank everyone for their feedback, suggestions and support during the beta period and we are really looking forward to see what you guys go and build with 3.5

thanks everyone!

- Phillip

Hi everyone,

just a quick note to say we are delighted to be one of the sponsors of the current CG Society Steampunk competition. Some of the Esperient team are huge sci-fi fans and Steampunk is a particularly favourite genre, so we are very much looking forward to seeing the competition entries and project developments.

Good luck to everyone, and if you have questions on using Creator in relation to the competition, please just post in the Creator community forums and we will be happy to answer them.

cheers,

Phillip

Esperient is a little over a year old, everyone’s  been working like crazy over the last year, running the company, cranking code for EC, helping customers on key projects and delivering training and before we knew it our  first year anniversary nearly sneaked by. Esperient was started last October – though publicly we announced in May 2008, with Creator 3.0 which was the product of many months of hard work.

As with any team there are times of fun, stress, disagreements, passionate arguments about how something should work, or the priority of a bug, or how something was done (or  sometimes not), all held together with belief in what we set out to do. The entire team work insane hours to run the company, build Creator, deliver services and support and as a result, we nearly let our first anniversary slip by.

However, this week had a special highlight and a first anniversary present of sorts. 3D World magazine is well known in our industry and while a UK based magazine serves the 3D community worldwide. In this month’s issue they reviewed Creator 3.0 and scored us 9/10 for overall capabilities – the highest score they have ever given to a real-time interactive 3D authoring tool. In these challenging economic times, in some ways it was even more satisfying that they rated us 10/10 for value for money.

When we started Esperient our aim was to enable creative professionals to adopt advanced interactive 3D visual computing technologies into their core businesses and creative endeavours. In our forums these last few weeks its been the architectural viz guys. Joe, Riccardo and Tim have been having a great discussion about using 3DS Max, VRAY and Creator for real time visualization. There have been some awesome still shots (here + here), GT is posting his new videos on youtube for his game development and the guys at Metaverso posted a great presentation  (zip file) they put together for one of their customers. One year on, the 3D World magazine review, our customer postings and some customer projects that we can’t talk about just yet, highlight that Esperient is firmly on target and on mission.

Thanks everyone for your feedback and suggestions, please keep them coming.

cheers,

Phillip

I would guess that the topic most under discussion across the World right now is the Credit Crisis and the extraordinary events of the last few weeks.  Having started my career in the early 1980s as an investment banker, I clearly remember ‘Black Monday’, the precipitous falls in the Stock Market in 1987, the subsequent property crash in the UK and the recession.  The fact that Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch – the raging bull – have gone, AIG, Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae have effectively been nationalized and the UK major banks have been partly privatized is almost inconceivable.  This current crisis is quite simply an order of magnitude worse than anything since the depression of the 1920s and, without offering a single shred of real evidence, I suspect that the efforts of most Western Governments to combat this crisis will be shown to be too little too late.

The current status of, and outlook for, the broader economic climate is, of course, relevant to all of us but as the CEO of a small technology company, I have to be concerned primarily about how it will affect us and what we can do to minimize the impact of the downturn.

At first glance, the current situation is not good.  We are looking to raise funding and even though our Business Plan and strategy has been widely praised, available capital is difficult to find and, quite frankly, is becoming harder.  We have a number of positive discussions that are continuing, about which we are very hopeful, but it will certainly make us all feel happier when the details are finalized.

Putting the capital issue to one side, I am very pleased to say that the cloud of gloom does have a silver lining:  We have a small team of dedicated, hard working professionals with absolutely no slack in it at all and minimal overheads; We have an internet-based sales and marketing model with no dependence on a high cost direct sales force and support staff; We took the decision, earlier this year, to reduce the price of the Creator from $2,000 to $500, massively increasing our TAM; and, we have greatly increased the product’s functionality while making it substantially easier to use.   

By targeting new industrial sectors and expanding sales into new geographic regions – our user base now encompasses 30 Countries – we have spread our risk and, by reducing the price of the software, we will benefit as purchasing budgets are increasingly put under pressure.  All in all, we are in good shape …… now, we just need to figure out a way to resolve our funding issue!

I’ve had a rare privilege over the years of working with very bright motivated people who want to push the boundaries of what they do. It is an intoxicating feeling that drives you to get up early, work late and work hard, because you get to see very smart people doing the things they do very well. At Esperient, each week seems to bring a parade of cool, very cool and “how on earth did they do that” technology! Well this week Ben and Mike topped all - and finally made me speechless!

Mike integrated NVIDIA’s CUDA technology into Creator’s Procedural Image Maker. If you are not familiar with it - Creator comes with a brilliant tool – called the Procedural Image Maker, which enables you to generate pretty much any type of image you want to use in your scene.

[Esperient Creator Procedural Image Maker and example procedural images]

If being able to make any type of image you want wasn’t good enough, the sizes of procedural images are extremely small because only the parameters for the procedures used to generate the image, are stored in the scene file.  

Currently, procedural images are computed on the CPU. However, CUDA integration changes things enormously as these can now be processed on the graphics card taking the speed advantage of all the parallel processing goodness on the GPU.

What does that all mean?  Imagine being able to calculate and visualize the fractal growth of ice crystals across a window texture in a winter scene and updating your view in real time so you can see the ice grow…. pretty cool, huh? Well that’s the direction the procedural image maker is heading and the early work on CUDA integration is both technically stunning and has a huge potential for Creator applications.

If that wasn’t enough…

When I started out in the graphics industry, real time smoke and fluid flow was a holy grail - the province of very expensive super computers and days and days of calculations.  Well it turns out all you really need is a little graphics card technology, a little magic and someone called Ben Mistal mixing it together. Ben is our resident shader guru and the video shows just what can be done in real time with Esperient Creator’s shader engine and DirectX 9. If you click on the image below you can get a preview of a current work in progress.

[click on image to download video]

As you can tell work on EC 3.1 is proceeding well and it is promising to be a special release, please keep the beta feedback coming – it is very much appreciated.

More next week

Cheers

Phillip

Feedback on the visual computing post has been interesting and varied and by in large very complimentary about Creator and our direction. Thanks for the compliments and yes we will post more on this theme in coming weeks. It has been a crazy couple of weeks again here on the Esperient team and this is just a quick note on the blog to update everyone.

Some of the team has been travelling over the last few weeks and everyone has been working like crazy (as usual). Sue has been out and about delivering product training to some major manufacturing companies that are adopting Creator for their immersive based simulation training and sales needs – a growing trend we are seeing Creator being widely adopted for.  Sue also managed to squeeze a day at SIGGRAPH into her busy schedule, thanks goes to everyone that stopped her to say hi to the team and that asked about Creator and Esperient.

Last week, Ben and I were in Germany at a private event, where we met a number of leading simulation and training companies and a major manufacturer describe what they do and their future needs. It was a good event and very nice to see some Creator customer showing how they use Creator as their interactive training tool of choice.  It is great seeing Creator being adopted and used to deliver these mission critical projects and we will be sharing more of our customer success stories in the coming weeks.

The next beta for 3.1 will be available in a week or so, so please keep an eye out for that. Feedback on the beta and feedback on CScript in particular has been excellent and it is clear that CScript is a very welcome addition to the Creator feature set. Please kept the feedback coming, we appreciate your comments and they help us make the product even better.

On the website, we have added some getting started videos on to the main site  – which will help new comers to Creator, build their first project and get quickly familiar with the product.  We will be adding more to these in the coming weeks so please keep the feedback and requests coming in, as they help guide our priorities.

This week Mike and BenV from the Esperient team will be at the Nvidia Nvision event – so if you see them please stop and say hi.

take care and cheers,

Phillip

The term visual computing has a long history in the 3D graphics industry and seems to come and go as with fashion. This year it is most definitely the in thing, however this time around it is more than a marketing fashion coined by a single company and it is starting to define a diverse but heavily inter-related market recognized as strategically important by major IT companies.

The term “visual computing’ came into prominent usage circa 1995 when Silicon Graphics (SGI)’s CEO Ed McCracken received the National Medal of Technology  “for his groundbreaking work in the areas of affordable 3D visual computing.”  SGI continued to use the term in several marketing campaigns to encapsulate the diverse graphics markets they sold products into including engineering, manufacturing, entertainment, geo/sciences, medical, government, and education.  In recent years visual computing has evolved to mean advanced interactive  visual user interfaces, immersive interactive 3D graphics and computer vision – and often the melting point between these developments . Jeff Hans original multi-touch demonstration at TED in 2006 introduced many people to the concept of multi-touch displays but also how they link to new graphics developments such as Nasa WorldWind to deliver radically different user experiences.

Microsoft has its own visual computing initiatives that are driving innovations such as Microsoft Surface – the interactive multi-touch display system that utilizes camera based sensing. Visual computing is also guiding product acquisitions such as SeaDragon Software in 2007 and Caligari in 2008. SeaDragon has now been integrated into Silverlight, and renamed  DeepZoom.  (If you don’t know SeaDragon, you best watch  Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ incredible presentation at TED in 2007).  While Caligari’s  Truespace  3D modeling product has been positioned as Microsoft’s free answer to Google SketchUp, replacing the 3D Via  modeler Dassault developed .

Intel is also in the visual computing game. Adopting ‘Visual Computing’ as its catch all phrase to define the markets it is pursuing with the Larabee projects, Intel see rich user experiences  driving growth in computing in business and home markets. Details of Larabee will be unveiled at SIGGRAPH next week and is scheduled to enter into the market in 2009.

NVIDIA started using the term ‘visual computing’ in 2006 when it introduced the QuadroPlex 1000 and the company is arguably the current visual computing hardware market leader and uses the tag line – ‘World leader in visual computing technologies’ on its website.  As the quote byJen-Hsun Huang, President and CEO, NVIDIA below (from the press release for the forthcoming NVISION08 conference) shows visual computing is moving into the mainstream of our user experiences in multiple markets - and its only just starting.

 “Visual computing is transforming industries all over the world -from games, movies, and automobiles, to advertising and medicine.  Yet this is just the beginning of the visual computing era.  We are excited to launch this one-of-a-kind event to celebrate the achievements of our industry and to create an environment where we can collaborate to create the future of visual computing.”

- Jen-Hsun Huang, President and CEO, NVIDIA

So what has this all to do with Esperient?

As the hardware companies are pushing the enabling technology which is taking visual computing into the mainstream – every day designers, developers and users need software tools to enable them to take advantage. Much in the same way that Visual Basic helped drive client server computing in the early 1990’s or Macromedia Director drove CD-ROM publishing; or  Flash and Dreamweaver helped drive web development – we are seeing Creator being adopted at the forefront of visual computing across a breadth of application areas. Esperient Creator users span design, engineering, manufacturing, entertainment (broadcast and games), geo/sciences, medical, government, and education.  Our customers are at the forefront of pushing the boundaries of where visual computing is going and the ease of use, feature set and power of Creator is enabling them to do so.

You may have noticed the new tag line on our website ‘ Visual Computing for next generation Web’. Hopefully the visual computing part is now clear – as for the web – Creator is already used regularly to deliver online 3D content,  however we are working on making this significantly better, easier and more integrated.  We will be writing more on this in the coming weeks and you will see a number of new web related features coming through in new builds and developments in the coming weeks and months.

While visual computing is the new black and it is nice to be in fashion – it is even better to be one of the essential tools enabling a new generation of developments in a solid defined and growing market.

Cheers

Phillip

It has been a couple of weeks since we posted and its time for an esperient update. 

On the marketing team side we have been busy  migrating servers for website, downloads and forum. Download demand outstripped our expectations and floored esperient.com a couple of times in the first couple of months. The new infrastructure will help us avoid that in the future. Unfortunately there were one or two issues and gremlins that cropped up during the migration and we thank everyone for your patience while these are being fully resolved.  The best thing about the new server environment is that it will aid us in delivering more in terms of content and services to Creator customers in the coming, weeks, months and years.

On the engineering side of the house – as usual they guys have been busy creating more magic and getting much deserved praise for their latest creations.  Creator Script or C-Script (for short) is previewed as beta in the latest release and adds a C/JavaScript like scripting language to Creator.  If you have any experience with JavaScript, ActionScript, Java, or C/C++, the addition of C-Script makes it very easy to pick up scripting interactive 3D visual computing applications with Esperient Creator.   C-Script adds an easy to use, yet powerful object orientated scripting language that is easy to learn and a joy to work with.

When you are building large scenes and powerful visual computing applications – having a clear understanding of exactly what memory usage and scene resources you are using becomes very important. Long time Creator users will know that the scene report (Tools -> Scene report)   enables you to review how much RAM your scene assets such as geometry, materials and sounds are using. However the newly improved scene report tools go much further and now give a great means of optimizing and profiling your scenes. Need to see how much RAM an object is using, compare RAM usage, the number of vertices or how long objects are taking to be created, render or be animated  - all that information is in the Scene Report.  Looking to find a specific object that is particularly resource intensive – simply double click its name and it is selected in the Scene tree.   Newly improved functionality in the Scene report image tools enables you to select all the materials that reference a given image or select all the objects using a given image. Even better, if you are using odd sized images or a variety of image formats, simply right click and you can either automatically  resize your images to optimum sizes or convert them to fast loading formats such as .DDS.

We now have over 30 universities using Creator for everything from architectural visualization and product design, design concept presentations and virtual engineering through to medical imaging. Every week brings a new surprise question and a delight in discovering how Creator is being used.  The image at the top of this post is from  work undertaken at University Otago in New Zealand, if your interested in Marine biology – then you might want to take a look at the  visible and virtual dogfish. From aerospace to video games, from video games to marine biology - its amazing where we are seeing Creator be adopted - more of which in the next couple of posts.

cheers,

- Phillip

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Yesterday was the 4th of July  in the USA and earlier in the week was Canada day – which means some of our team, had a few hours well deserved break to enjoy time with families  and friends as they snatch a short break on their respective national holidays. It is early on a Saturday morning here in Europe and I’m just taking a few minutes to sit back and reflect on the last few months before my workday kicks in,
Today Esperient is 8 months old. In the last 8 months we have

•  Taken over development of Creator from Right Hemisphere
•  Started building a company for the long term based on a firm foundation of solid business plan, good infrastructure, a great culture of hard work, deep fun, respect and a truly outstanding team
•  Continued to significantly improve the software adding new features and improvements with every release ( these have included :real time reflections, SSAO, advanced render to texture, object grips on 2D and 3D objects  and in the latest release the new C-Script language in preview and enhanced scene report tools)
•  Introduced Esperient Creator 3.0 in May  which has been very well received by existing and new customers
•  Secured  keynote industry reference customers such as Boeing  who are using Creator on significant projects (more on this in a few weeks)
• Seen a major US sports broadcasters adopt Creator for creation of innovative on air graphics seen by millions of viewers
• Recruited our first resellers in Europe and Asia
• Committed to a program with our partners Nextspace that will see Creator being actively used by every school and college in New Zealand
• Began discussions with other education partners, with the results we are seeing the number of schools and colleges adopting Creator grow steadily across multiple disciplines
•  Watched the Creator customer base grow into over 30 countries
• Enabled our customers to thrive and move forward on a variety of new digital media projects across a broad range of disciplines from architecture, through engineering and product design to medical imaging,  games, broadcast television, simulation of biological ecosystems, business data visualization and Creative media  to mention only a few

 It has been a busy 8 months – and we are only just getting started…
- Phillip

I have been asked frequently what does ‘Esperient’ mean and what is the origin of the name?  Well, I can categorically confirm that the name originated from my colleague, Phillip, who lives in France not far from the mountains of Geneva.  I surmise, therefore, that he was looking out of his window one day looking out at the pine trees and came up with a simple anagram!  Then I remembered him saying that, as a child, he was greatly influenced by a School teacher called Peter Enis. So, perhaps I was on the right track after all and Phillip had been even cleverer than I thought drawing the same anagram from two different sources of inspiration.

I was not altogether convinced: This track had to be a pretense, I thought, as the name clearly hid further meanings, some of which – ripe teens – should obviously remain hidden!  So, a conundrum – Was Phillip being clever when he came up with the name or was he, indeed, an inept seer? 

The answer, of course, is that he had been clever.  The name is based on the Latin, Spero, meaning ‘I hope’ that has come into present day French as ‘Espere’ (vb) and Italian as ‘Speranza’ (n). So, in addition to meaning that we provide hope to our customers that we can solve their content and publishing problems, it also has the similarity to the word ‘Experience’ which is a great reflection of the team!