Orad will unveil Morpho 3D, a new 3D character generator at IBC2008. Morpho 3D is the first SD/HD CG to feature true 3D graphic capabilities. TV stations look for solutions that are easy to use and affordable. Up til now there was only simple 2D character generators or a complicated high-end 3D system. Users can import files from video, Photoshop layers, and 3D Collada into the layer structure. Morpho 3D supports drag and drop of images and RSS feeds directly from browsers.

Futuremark has created a demonstration for Audi’s future concept In-Car Graphics System which will be shown at NVISION in San Jose. In-Car graphics systems are evolving rapidly with an increasing amount of digital instrumentation used inside of automotive designs. Futuremark will adapt OpenGL and OpenGL ES for rendering the backend of the digital instrumentation. The demo is based on OpenGL ES 1.x and ES 2.0.

JonPeddie.com gives a positive review of the recent COLLADA 1.5 Spec release from the Khronos Group. To read the full review you will need to purchase the latest TechWatch from Jon Peddie Research: “Jon Peddie’s Tech Watch, is a biweekly newsletter on the PC graphics industry. Covering international trade shows and offering firsthand analysis of the newest products and trends for the future.” Jon Peddie Research is a technically oriented marketing, research, and management consulting firm with over 30 years in the graphics and multimedia fields.

Khronos Group has uploaded the Siggraph 2008 HandHeld BoF slides to the public developer library. Includes are presentations from Adobe FlashLite, HuOne, OpenVG, OpenWF, Jon Peddie and the Handheld Overview slide presentations. As well, Khronos has uploaded the OpenGL ES slide set to the OpenGL BoF library. A collection of photos from the OpenGL BoF are also available online.

The Khronos OpenGL ES Working Group has released the complete set of OpenGL ES 2.0 man pages, available in the online SDK.

The COLLADA BoF delivered news of wide adoption and product support from leading companies in the graphics industry. A dozen speakers from Bitmanagement, Crytek, Forterra, IBM, Intel, Maxon, Shapeways, Smith Micro, Softimage, Sony Computer Entertainment, and Yumatech delivered a fast paced odyssey of presentations that highlighted COLLADA feature support in authoring, browsing, gaming, and 3D printing products that include: BS Contact, Cinema4D, CryEngine 2, OLIVE, Poser, Shapeways Creater, and XSI 7 and MODTool. Imagine comparing your favorite 3D models in a visual asset manager and 3D printing a real figurine! To view the COLLADA BoF presentation, please visit our developer library.

Almost 300 developers and industry leaders gathered to hear the details about OpenGL 3.0. Feedback was positive - great functionality has been added to the specification and the mechanisms put in place to move the specification forward quickly. In particular, Blizzard’s insights into why OpenGL 3.0 met their commercial needs - and the fact that NVIDIA announced immediate availability of OpenGL 3.0 drivers drew rounds of applause.

DMP has just announced the OpenGL ES getting start course and the OpenGL ES advanced course for September 2008. DMP has also announced the “Introducer Campaign” for the training course. When a person who already has attended an OpenGL ES training course introduces a friend or colleague to OpenGL ES training getting started course, the introducer and the new attendee will receive a 3000 yen gift card. Complete details (in Japanese) can be found here. Complete details for the advanced course are here, and complete details for the getting started course here.

Imagination Technologies announced that POWERVR SGX is the world’s first 3D graphics acceleration solution to achieve conformance on commercially available production silicon for all of the Khronos™ mobile 2D and 3D graphics APIs which includes OpenGL® ES 2.0, OpenGL ES 1.1 and OpenVG™ 1.0.

Khronos.jp this week was relaunched under the guidance of Miacis.com. If you require up-to-date information in Japanse on Khronos Group activities, look no further than Khronos.jp. A special thanks to Hitoshi Kasai for working so hard to make this happen for Siggraph.

NewTek Inc. recently announced the release of LightWave® v9.5 for Windows®. New capabilities include FiberFX, a complete hair and fur solution, a new lighting system and many improvements to animation, rendering and workflow. LightWave v9.5 also allows import and export of FBX and Collada scenes and objects.

Strata 3D CX has added lots of power and is even more userfriendly. New features include: COLLADA import and export, functionality of the Design 3D[in] plug-in, 3D Texture Maker and Exporter, dynamically linked PSD texture maps, render to Photoshop layers and more.

The register has a good followup to the ‘firestorm’ centered around the recent release of OpenGL 3.0. In an interview with Neil Trevett, president of the Khronos Group which heads up OpenGL, shows great promise within a short time period. Trevett personally hopes OpenGL 3.1 can be delivered in six months’ time, as opposed to the two years it took to craft 3.0. In OpenGL 3.0 we have introduced a deprecation mechanism for the first time in OpenGL’s 16-year history. The deprecation mechanism will let OpenGL planners flag up features that’ll be removed from the next version of the 2D and 3D graphics rendering and visualization spec.

The Khronos™ Group announced today it has released the OpenGL® 3.0 specification with strong industry support to bring significant new functionality to the open, cross-platform standard for 3D graphics acceleration. OpenGL 3.0 includes GLSL™ 1.30, a new version of the OpenGL shading language, and provides comprehensive access to the functionality of the latest generations of programmable graphics hardware. The OpenGL working group has also defined a set of OpenGL 3.0 extensions that expose potential new functionality for the next version of OpenGL that is targeted for release in less than 12 months, and a set of extensions for OpenGL 2.1 to enable much of the new OpenGL functionality on older hardware. Additionally, OpenGL 3.0 introduces an evolutionary model to assist in streamlining the specification and to enable rapid development of the standard to address diverse markets. Finally, the OpenGL working group has announced that it is working closely with the emerging OpenCL standard to create a revolutionary pairing of compute and graphics programming capabilities. The new OpenGL 3.0 specifications are freely available at www.khronos.org/opengl.

Digia joins the Khronos Group as a Contributing Member to support the evolution of open standards that enable the authoring and acceleration of UI graphics, games and media on a wide variety of platforms and devices, such as mobile phones. Khronos is an open, member-funded consortium committed to developing royalty-free standards for mobile and embedded markets. Khronos has extensive membership from all aspects of the mobile industry including carriers, handset OEMs, middleware vendors, games developers and semiconductor providers.