WEB site creation

Notorious as a main cause of security breaches, CGI scripts are very popular and almost certainly are running on every Web server. The CGI (Common Gateway Interface) protocol itself is secure, but CGI scripts are very often not written by programmers with security in mind. As a result, Web Masters frequently install them on web sites, oblivious to the risks they are taking.

This is one example of where CGI companies can manage the impossible. By creating a detailed 3-dimensional representation of the section of the city desired, and superimposing data from the Shard's plans, it is possible to make a life-like model of the area that can be viewed and assessed from anywhere inside it.

This means that the full impact of the building can be understood - both in terms of its impressive height, and in terms of any problems that might need addressing before construction actually started. Such use of CGI is vastly preferable and far superior to creating individual artists renderings, which by their nature are costly, time-consuming and restrictive.

With this use of CGI, companies can create mock-ups of their products - whether architectural or otherwise - and see how they will look and act (within reason) before they are actually made. The software is extremely versatile and powerful, and produces replicas of the desired product that rival photographs in their quality. In fact, it is now becoming increasingly difficult to spot the difference between a photo or artist's representation and a CGI model, such is the detail of the processes used.

Popular uses of CGI in Anime Many studios utilize a combination of traditional animation and CG. However, more and more are moving almost entirely to digital. Some studios have strong roots in traditional hand drawn animation cels but choose to use CG for backgrounds and complicated scenes. A subset of CG is 3D CG which uses three dimensional space to animate. For instance when doing action sequences and for situations when a giant robot is transforming, it can be easier to do this in 3D. If there is a need to re-use the motion and maybe apply another camera angle, it can simply be pulled up in the program and manipulated as needed. There is no longer a need to redraw the complicated sequences again and again. Much of the old Anime like Voltron would re-use the same old stale sequences with different backgrounds. As a viewer, I would pick up on this after the first few episodes and grow tired of it. Now, consider the sheer hours and manpower it took to make just the one sequence and the fact that because of this they were willing to re-use and recycle old work. So replacing this portion of the process with CG must have been an amazing benefit to them.

A solution is to envelop the CGI script in a "wrapper". This can (a) ensure that the ownership of a running process remains the same, and (b) restrict the amount of memory allocation for the script, thus shielding the Web server's central processing unit and file system from unauthorized programs. The wrapper is positioned between the CGI script and the Web server software, thus keeping them apart from each other. It alters the user's identity, thus isolating the script from the Web Master's identity and from all other scripts.

CGI companies have just come of age, and they are really only starting to penetrate the market. The next few years are going to see a profusion of the services they offer, allowing designers a powerful tool to model their products virtually in lifelike 3D, which has huge advantages from a development point of view as well as for marketing potential. The use of CGI brings a product or space alive, without having to be physically present of for the product to exist at that stage - and all to a standard that is almost indistinguishable from reality.