All posts by jnack

Guido Quaroni joins Adobe

3D

Awesome Dad-flex: Telling your tiny, Cars-loving kids that you know Guido the forklift. 😌

Granted, it was a little confusing to explain that I knew the voice of the cartoon forklift & that he was actually a brainy Italian guy who worked at Pixar—but it worked. In any case, now Guido Quaroni—who spent 20 years at Pixar & who was always a fantastic host during Adobe customer visits—has now joined the Big Red A:

“I’ve been a customer of Adobe’s software for a number of years, and I always admired Adobe’s commitment to provide top of the line tools to creatives,” said Quaroni. “When I heard about Adobe’s renewed interest in entering into the 3D market, given how much more pervasive the consumption of 3D content is becoming, I knew it was something I wanted to be a part of. I’m excited to be joining the Adobe team to help accelerate and grow their 3D offerings for creatives worldwide.”

I remain proud to have delivered, at Guido’s urging, perhaps the most arcane feature request ever: he asked for per-layer timestamps in Photoshop so that Pixar’s rendering pipeline could discern which layers had actually been changed by artists, thereby saving a lot of rendering time. We got this done, and somehow it gives me roughly as much pleasure as having delivered a photo editor that’s used by hundreds of millions of people every month. 😌

Anyway, here’s to great things for Guido, Adobe, and 3D creators everywhere!

Behind the scenes: Drone light painting

Photography

I’m a longtime admirer of Reuben Wu’s beautiful light painting work, and planning to head to Death Valley next month, I thought I’d try to learn more about his techniques. Happily he’s shared a quick, enlightening (heh) peek behind the scenes of his process:

I also enjoyed this more detailed how-to piece from Daniel James. He’s convinced me to spring for the Lume Cube Mavic Pro kit, though I welcome any additional input!

AR: Google & Fiat-Chrysler bring super detailed models to your driveway

3D, AR/VR

Psst—wanna see a multi-gig, super detailed 3D model appear in your driveway almost instantaneously?

I’m delighted to say that our work in cloud-rendered streaming 3D is paying off via this year’s virtual CES show. Per the Google Cloud blog:

As part of Fiat Chrysler’s Virtual Showroom CES event, you can experience the new innovative 2021 Jeep Wrangler 4xe by scanning a QR code with your phone. You can then see an Augmented Reality (AR) model of the Wrangler right in front of you—conveniently in your own driveway or in any open space. Check out what the car looks like from any angle, in different colors, and even step inside to see the interior with incredible details.

A bit on how it works:

The Cloud AR tech uses a combination of edge computing and AR technology to offload the computing power needed to display large 3D files, rendered by Unreal Engine, and stream them down to AR-enabled devices using Google’s Scene Viewer. Using powerful rendering servers with gaming-console-grade GPUs, memory, and processors located geographically near the user, we’re able to deliver a powerful but low friction, low latency experience.

This rendering hardware allows us to load models with tens of millions of triangles and textures up to 4k, allowing the content we serve to be orders of magnitude larger than what’s served on mobile devices (i.e., on-device rendered assets).

And to try it out:

Scan the QR code below, or check out the FCA CES website. Depending on your OS, device, and network strength, you will see either a photorealistic, cloud-streamed AR model or an on-device 3D car model, both of which can then be placed in your physical environment.

AR_Wrangler-4xe.jpg