It’s easy to understand why tracing each individual particle of light as it travels from a light source and bounces from object to object is unrealistic. But even in the world of rendering, in which we use calculations to approximate the behaviour of light in a 3D scene instead of accounting for all available light, the demands on a computer to make light calculations for countless particles in a single image are enormous.

The same goes for working in motion graphics and video. Calculations needed to create streams of static images wear on hardware, which prevents many creatives from continuing to work while they wait for their scenes and graphics to fully render.

Thankfully, in 2018, many APIs for graphics programs have begun to implement flexibility for working between single-threaded and multi-threaded renders. For example, Unity now conditionally enables and disables multithreaded rendering to allow high-performance machines to render while creatives continue to work.

What Improves Rendering Speed?

In the early 2000s, professional-level creative software developers began implementing background rendering capabilities into their applications. Initially, these background rendering tasks ate the entirety of a machine’s computing power. Working with digital video and early digital motion graphics tools meant that when rendering, creative workflows had to cease. Even with background rendering capabilities, machine slowdown completely prevented the continuation of any video, motion graphics, or 3D modeling workflow.

The solution to improve rendering speed became the render farm. By stacking purpose-built machines capable of handling rendering tasks, creative professionals were freed to continue building models, keyframing, and editing while another project rendered, completely unhindered, in the background.

But it takes more than just a powerful system to efficiently assist with rendering. The machine’s architecture has to be prepared for CPU or GPU rendering engines and flexible enough to work as either a turnkey farm or a personal node. Because the rendering speed demands of a world-class CG movie studio are so distant from those of a budding product design firm, rendering solutions have to be built to accommodate different budgets and business plans.

The goal, however, is the same: provide enough power with enough compatibility that creative professionals in nearly any industry can set rendering tasks aside while driving their workflows forward.

Machines Make Rendering Faster

Purpose-built rendering machines take advantage of architecture that’s only possible with current-generation technology, including:

• Multiple GPUs – Dedicated graphics processing has come a long way since the earliest graphics cards and chips. Harnessing multiple processing pathways enables large-scale rendering.

• Multiple CPUs – For CPU-based rendering, multiple processors with multiple cores keep multi-threaded rendering tasks on the move.

• Customizable PCIe slots – Keeping slots available for customizing machines to work within a unique company’s processes and systems is indispensable.

• Multi-User Support – Large teams need to be able to pull resources from render farms without worrying about changing settings or overloading systems.

Interested in seeing first-hand how rendering while you work is possible? Check out BOXX CPU rendering and GPU rendering solutions or talk to us about your workflow needs.

Architecture, engineering, & construction are nothing without fully realized designs created in our favourite architectural software programs. BOXX systems support tons of architectural software, and you can benefit from our purpose-built rendering solutions as 2019 unfolds with the following software.

AutoCAD

AutoDesk AutoCAD has been a go-to for architectural & engineering projects since before the age of the internet and continues to be the standard of architectural CAD software in education and real-life work for professionals. CAD applications are specialized and enable you to work outside of the baseline modelling and drawing functions.

AutoCAD Architecture addresses constructional engineer and architecture needs specifically; it includes pre-built objects for common placements such as walls and windows as well as automation for floor plans, elevations, and sections. Mechanical design tools are purpose-made to help draw piping, plumbing, ducting, and electrical circuitry for everyday construction projects.

AutoCAD Civil 3D takes it a step further with modern-day Building Information Modeling (BIM) workflow support. It’s a more versatile tool that aligns with all-digital workflows perfectly in a sleek, contemporary format. Plus, it makes it easy for architects and engineers to see how their work will affect the work of others on the same project.

AutoDesk pours incredible resources into supporting their current and next-gen products, so you can count on frequent useful updates in 2019

ArchiCAD

Graphisoft’s ArchiCAD 3D architecture software was the first of its kind when it came out, and it continues to provide flexibility in 2D and 3D geometry that fiercely rivals its competitors. Recent design tool improvements, including a remastered Façade Design workflow & smoother 2D navigation, coupled with logical expression functions have created a nearly seamless and automatically updated workflow that keeps your head inside the design space.

Demand for highly creative structures in 2019 will benefit hugely from improved workflows, like ArchiCAD’s, that further enable today’s architects and engineers to safely unleash their creativity.

Revit

Revit’s BIM takes environmental and economic impact into every design consideration. Coupled with vast positive changes in design, drafting, and modelling processes, you’ll have a hard time finding more precise and client-friendly software for architecture and engineering.

Revit is much more of a rapidly changing database than it is a CAD program. It’s collaborative, iterative changes that are pushed throughout the entirety of the project, and changes are made simultaneously across all views. Designers can easily show major and minor changes to hands-on clients at any point in any project.

Waste minimalization is part of the ongoing optimization of architectural workflows that will continue in 2019. Revit stands to put itself ahead of the pack by focusing on turnaround time and error detection ahead of its competition.

SketchUp

SketchUp has developed significantly since its first iteration many years ago. Coming into 2019, it’s one of the most intuitive design tools available for architects.

The software, which features an interface designed to make it feel as if you’re building with your own hands, also has incredible flexibility for materials, quickly creates beautiful imagery to share with clients, and integrates with different types of software (including Google Earth) to enhance the customer service side of the architecture & engineering professions.

It will be imperative in the coming year to be able to set the right expectations for clients as design and construction projects get bigger and more involved. SketchUp will give you the edge in customer relations thanks to its built-in client friendliness.

BOXX APEXX workstations are purpose-built to accelerate SketchUp, Revit, AutoCAD, ArchiCAD, and other architectural applications, so accelerate your workflow and increase your productivity in 2019 with BOXX..

Contact us for your workstation and Autodesk or Sketchup software requirements

As most engineers and product designers will attest, time-to-market schedules have become increasingly compressed. Twenty years ago, a product that may have had a schedule of two and a half years from initial design to the final product, today may be as short as 15 months. As for the future, one can expect that cycle to be even further abbreviated. This is a difficult challenge to be sure, but it also presents an opportunity.

Computer hardware and CAD software are becoming faster, so although competition is fierce (and will continue to be so), with the right tools, a solid design engineering team will be able to keep pace, and even outdistance their competitors.

That’s where the BOXX APEXX S3 featuring 9th generation Intel® Core™ i7 and i9 processors comes in. If you look at these benchmarks, the advantage of the 9th generation processors over previous technology is definitely impressive, especially when you consider how these performance increases will benefit you over the course of your day, your work week, month, and year. Think of the time you’ll save.

SOLIDWORKS benchmarks

BOXX focuses on the professional 3D design and visualization markets, and our strong relationships with software providers and hardware component manufacturers enable us to focus on the future, survey the landscape, and determine ways to improve and support the latest features of your updated software applications.

As SOLIDWORKS users ourselves, we’re excited to offer these new 9th generations Intel Core i7 and i9 processors in our new APEXX S3. It’s a competition out there and being able to work faster within a shorter time to market while still maintaining the finest in design quality AND achieving ROI should excite you as well.

With good engineering and purpose-built CAD workstations from BOXX, challenges become opportunities—big opportunities.

BOXX Technologies continues to innovate high-performance computer workstations, rendering systems, and servers by equipping our workstations with the industry-leading NVIDIA Quadro RTX. The first Turing architecture-based GPU of its kind revolutionizes a new era for computer graphics professionals. This new architecture transforms the work of designers by giving them the ability to render photorealistic scenes in real-time, advancing AI-based proficiency, and providing fluid interaction pertaining to complex models and scenes, BOXX brings this groundbreaking advancement to market months ahead of commodity workstation manufacturers.

Turing-Based Design’s Revolutionary Effect

Impacting millions, the powerful, ahead-of-its-time capabilities of the NVIDIA Quadro RTX reimagines the workflow for graphics professionals. The new Turing architecture has the ability to simulate the physical world in virtual reality systems 6X faster than its previous generation architecture, delivering greater hardware-accelerated ray-tracing for the first time. Ray-traced, photo-realistic details give designers and artists the ability to interact in real time with their complex designs and visual effects. Additionally, new improvements in AI capabilities enhance advanced shading and simulation for creative professionals.

Building designs for the most exceptionally demanding visual computing workloads, the Quadro RTX provides new cutting-edge technology to industries such as film and video content creation, automotive and architectural design, and scientific visualization. Film, VFX, and animation studios now have the ability to recognize maximum throughput production rates while rendering their workloads. This innovative improvement provides the opportunity to significantly reduce time and costs across a range of graphics specialities.

Advantages of New Quadro RTX GPUs

The inclusion of NVIDIA’s new high-performance GPUs greatly reduces the processing time for animation rendering. What once could take hours will now be cut down to real-time rendering, providing unprecedented time-saving..

• Real-time ray-tracing of objects and environments – new RT cores allow for real-time ray-tracing which enables physically accurate reflections, shadows, refractions, and illuminations. This vastly improves speed and precision of animation and virtual effects for media & entertainment industries.

• Improved support for real-world physics – up to 4,608 CUDA cores enable up to 16 trillion floating point operations and 16 trillion integer operations simultaneously. This allows for more accurate physics simulation for environmental conditions such as wind, rain, and snow.

• Enhanced performance of VR applications – New developments in programmable shading technologies has been implemented to improve the performance of complex visual, virtual, and graphics experiences. This allows for more realistic and authentic actuality in programs such as video games, virtual reality, and augmented reality.

• AI-enhanced rendering – Turing Tensor Cores provide up to 500 trillion Tensor operations per second to accelerate deep neural network training and inference. This advanced performance dramatically improves AI-enhanced features and capabilities such as denoising, resolution, scaling, and video re-timing.

BOXX Continual Innovation

The inclusion of the NVIDIA Quadro RTX solidifies BOXX Technologies as the leader in workstation computer technology. Our unmatched innovation and development, as well as our strong partnership with NVIDIA and other technology providers, enable us to introduce revolutionary technology long before tier one commodity workstation providers. The unparalleled performance of the Turing-architecture-based Quadro RTX GPUs unlocks infinite capabilities for creative experiences that were once unimaginable. Spearheading the movement for real-time ray-tracing, BOXX’s inclusion of the NVIDIA Quadro RTX allows designers and developers to interact and simulate with their creations like never before.

Mozilla posted an advisory on September 6, 2018, disclosing the presence of multiple security flaws in Firefox 61. These have been patched in the latest version of the browser. Four of these vulnerabilities have been labeled as being of High or Critical status. As of the publishing of this advisory, these vulnerabilities do not appear to be receiving attacks in the wild

As a Firefox user, ensure you have updated Firefox to the latest version as soon as possible. You can do this following the below steps:

1. Click the ‘Firefox’ menu and ‘About Firefox’.

2. The browser will check for an update automatically and will download the update if available.

3. You will then be prompted to ‘Restart to update Firefox’

Two of the bugs marked as high-impact, CVE-2018-12377 and CVE-2018-12378, are called use-after-free vulnerabilities. This type of bug exists when an application has released data stored in memory and then tries to access that data after it has been released from memory. In some cases (with this type of bug), software applications can crash or they can ‘behave abnormally’. ‘Behaving abnormally’ depends on the circumstances of when that memory section is accessed. The reason that it is called abnormal behavior is because those memory registers could be entirely empty or they could be carrying data from another source that saw the empty space and stored it’s data in that location.

In the case of these two Firefox bugs, the advisory states the existence of a ‘potentially exploitable crash”, which is common for this type of vulnerability. There was no mention of possible remote code execution, a possible consequence of use-after-free vulnerabilities, which suggests that this particular vector of attack is not present in these cases.

The other two vulnerabilities of interest, CVE-2018-12375 and CVE-2018-12376 (marked High and Critical-impact, respectively), are known as memory safety bugs. Memory safety has a rather wide range of coverage including buffer overflows so the scope of these two bugs remain to be seen. In Mozilla’s advisory entries on both of these CVE’s state, “Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption and we presume that with enough effort that some of these could be exploited to run arbitrary code.”

Mozilla’s statement, that they “presume” the reported memory safety bugs “could” be exploited with “enough effort” to run code is an important one. Although, it is not necessarily an uncommon mindset to have, but it is worth bringing attention to it when it comes up. Patching a vulnerability that may not be feasibly exploited today is still critical in a time when techniques and technologies advance so rapidly.

See original article (https://www.wordfence.com/blog/2018/09/psa-multiple-vulnerabilities-present-in-firefox-61/)

See Mozilla’s advisory (https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/security/advisories/mfsa2018-20/)

Technology has changed nearly everything about the way that people in society exist and function. From smartphones to the Internet, technology has transformed the world in just a few decade’s time. For architects, home builders and home designers, technology has taken a front seat in the experience of designing and building a structure. From start to finish, technology affects the way that architects design buildings and even the way that clients experience the design process. Technology can improve building efficiency and durability while making it easier for architects to more accurately render a building design.

Smart Technology Affects Home Designs and Building Designs

Clients now demand smart technology in their homes and buildings. Smart technology can be used to increase security, improve comfort and heighten efficiency. Smart HVAC systems, security systems and lighting systems make homes more intuitive and more beautiful. Now architects are integrating smart technology into their designs to meet customer demand.

While older homes and buildings are being outfitted with these new products retroactively, it can be hard to seamlessly integrate smart technology into an older structure. Smart technology works perfectly with new buildings because the buildings were designed with smart technology in mind.

Climate Change Predictive Software

Climate change affects the environment where buildings exist, and therefore, will affect the way the buildings themselves perform. The new software allows architects to predict the way that differences in climate will affect a building before it is ever made. This enables architects to create more flexible, durable structures. Using specialised software tools, architects can create buildings that will last longer and function better over a period of decades.

Virtual Reality Makes Models More Realistic Than Ever

In the past, clients who hired an architect would be dependent on 3D models and 2D renderings to view the product before it was built. While these renderings can get the job done, there are limitations. 3D models and 2D drawings can leave clients wondering about their finished product. Now architects use virtual reality headsets to allow clients to explore a rendering to their heart’s content. People who hire an architect to design a home, building or home remodel can use the VR headset to walk in the front door, explore the entryway, walk down hallways, open closets, look out windows and experience first-hand what it would be like to walk around in the structure.

Photo-Realistic Renderings Create a Colorful Picture of Finished Product

Virtual reality has changed client presentations, while photo-realistic renderings have changed the way that architects envision buildings. Photo-realistic renderings allow architects to create ultra-realistic images of buildings that are not yet in existence. This enables architects to create a more accurate representation of their final product, which makes it possible to more precisely capture an idea and perfect a design before it is built.

Architecture Continues To Advance With Technology

As technology advances, so will architecture. Technology is constantly improving human life on a day-to-day basis, solving age-old problems encountered by humans. How can we work faster? How can we be more comfortable? How can we improve our quality of life? What can we do to live longer, more efficient and more productive lives? By changing the way buildings are made and by changing the functionality of buildings and homes, technology can positively affect civilisation, one building at a time.

Greg Geilman is a Los Angeles native of over 40 years and owner of South Bay Residential www.southbayresidential.com