Siggraph 2007 - Pictures from Day 3

Here are my pictures from Day 3 of Siggraph! This was the day I went through the exhibition, so I have many pictures from the show floor (except for the first and last ones).

Here is Ton Roosendal (the tall guy on the right), the person who started Blender, and who is still the number one person in charge of it. The man interviewing him is an admin of BlenderNation, a site I go to nearly every day for up-to-the-minute Blender news.


This was the booth for one of many motion capture companies. I thought it was cooler than most of the others because the little nodes that the sensors capture were lit up. It was also neat because as the person moved, they could manipulate objects in a virtual 3D space. The example they had was the woman was moving her arms around in a circle, and causing a fan-shaped object to turn around virtually.


A Big Picture shot of just one of the avenues of the show floor. So many people!


This was awesome. It was straight out of the movie Minority Report - you could see straight through the screen. The best part was that you could manipulate what was on the screen, like move it around and make it bigger and smaller just by moving your hands around.


This was cool in that it appeared to not only 3D-scan the object, but also get its color - a new feature as far as I know!



This was a large 3D projected globe that spun around. It showed the current star constellations, and would probably be used in a museum.



Another Big Picture shot of another avenue of the show floor. Big!



This was a really cool little miniature setup in the Laika booth. They are special because they're making an 3D animated movie out of Neil Gaiman's young adult book Coraline.



This actual car was in the booth for a company that was selling rendering software. They were demonstrating how a virtual car rendered with their software looked just as good as the real car. And it did!



This was a 3D hologram. I wish I could convey how awesome this was in this picture, but it just doesn't do it justice. It was a huge poster-sized hologram that stuck way out into empty space. It was like you could reach out and touch it.



An awesome miniature model constructed by the people at (I think) Sony Pictures Imageworks. It looked real. For many 3D computer animated movies, the artists will create a scale model of what they're working on to get a better idea of what it looks like.



The booth for the Gnomon School of Visual Effects. They held little classes every day in their booth - I wish I would have had time to sit in on one! Plus, the booth looked really nice.



The Disney booth. This image of Mickey in his original animated cartoon wasn't on a screen - it was shown with what looked like thousands of tiny white LEDs that turned on and off to show the animation.



Some of the miniature models created for the Pirates of the Caribbean Movies. This was in the Industrial Light and Magic Booth.



This was neat, because it was a company that sold a device that could create that effect seen in the Matrix movies where the camera would seem to move around people while they stayed in the same position. You can see the array of cameras needed to create the effect there on the right.



And here's how Day 3 ended, at the Electronic Theater! I was waiting in line for a little while, so I decided to take this picture of the outside of the theater. At the beginning, before the show started, they projected three ancient Atari games on the screen, using lasers! Three relatively famous people in the field of computer graphics came out to play them (and I can't remember their names of course). One played Asteroids, the second played Tempest, and the last guy played Star Wars. I totally recognized all three games from my very early years!

The animations themselves were incredible - everything from shorts made by one person, to commercials, to vignettes of feature film special effects like Pirate's of the Caribbean: At World's End. The Best of Show winner was Ark.

Siggraph 2007 - More Pictures

Lots of pictures! Here are a bunch of the beautiful San Diego Convention Center inside and outside. Here is the "Sail Pavilion", where there are a bunch of different things going on, including lunch, posters, and the international meeting place:




Here are the wok cooker people, they made my lunch on the first day!



After eating lunch, I was about to go outside when I heard loud drums overtaking the sound in the pavilion. I walked over and these people were making some great music:



Can't say much about this shot except "wow":



Here are some shots of the back side of the convention center, including the view over the bay. At the bottom you'll see some great pictures of construction going on that my son will love!








More to come! The next bunch of pictures will include the exhibition, which was huge, loud, and fun.

Siggraph 2007 Day 2

What a day! Started with a great session about the movie Surf's Up, which I am so gonna see now when it comes out on DVD in October. It's a computer animated movie that was created as a documentary. They did everything from adding scratches to the "lens" you'd see while watching, to looking at how each character interacted with the camera, to actually making the camera itself a character.

To make the camera a character, they rigged it up with a motion-capture device and a little screen for a viewfinder. A real camera person would hold the camera and watch what was happening by looking through the viewfinder, which showed a 3D view of the characters interacting and the environment. The cameraman's movement was recorded and then brought into the movie, making it extremely realistic. It's like watching a reality tv show, but it's animated!

The movie was about surfing, so a large part of the presentation was about how they did the ocean, and more specifically the waves. They put a massive amount of work into the waves, and it all paid off, because they look AMAZING. Check out the preview on IMDB and you'll see it.

After lunch I went to a session called "Sharing Ideas in Teaching 3D Animation", which was interesting and helpful. It really made me think about not just how to teach this stuff, but how the students might understand it better. There is so much to learn when it comes to computer animation. Do you teach the technical stuff (the software) during class, or just talk the concepts (camera positions, basics, animation theory) during that time? Much to think about!

I then ran all the way across the convention center to watch Glenn Entis, the Chief Visual and Technical Officer of ALL of Electronic Arts speak. He gave a good talk about graphics, games, and the tools to create them, from way back in 1979 until today. In the end, the basic premise was that the new "wow" of games right now is user-created content. He mentioned The Sims, which he said is actually the best-selling game of all time, and that the biggest draw of it turned out not to be playing the characters but the creation of your own objects in the game. He also mentioned Spore, which will be hugely user-changeable. It's all about the tools, and if normal game players / users can use the tools to create their own stuff, they are going to have fun and really get into it.

Then I ran all the way back across the convention center to the Blender Artist and Developer Showcase, which was really cool. I saw and heard Ton Roosendaal, the creator of Blender (and got a picture of him... I'll post it soon!), and a bunch of the people I read about and see the work of on all the Blender websites. The director of Elephant's Dream was there, showing his latest work - very impressive stuff. Some great developments will be coming soon from Blender!

Right now I'm sitting in the session for Happy Feet. They took almost the direct opposite (and yet strangely similar) approach of Surf's Up. This movie, also featuring penguins, was also shot as if it had real people, but for this one it was directed like a normal movie. The director had no experience with animated movies, and managed to make it as if it were real "people" (penguins) doing the acting. They made it a really iterative process, which is unusual for an animated movie, because once you get the animation done it's difficult to get back in and change things. They also made very heavy use of motion capture, which as I said above Surf's Up almost didn't use at all. They actually had real people learn to walk like penguins and do all the acting!

And that's all I did today! I took more pictures today, and also still have some from yesterday, so I'll post them soon.

Why I Love Coming to Siggraph

This morning, just now, on my way to the session on the movie "Surf's Up" (The Making of Animated Documentary), I overhear one person saying to another,

"So, I was the visual effects supervisor on Spider-Man 3, umm, yeah."

To some, eh, whatever. To me, WOO HOO!!

Siggraph 2007 Day 1 (even more continued)

The OpenGL course today was incredible! The three presenters literally wrote the books on OpenGL programming. One of them, Ed Angel, wrote the book I used in my computer animation class back at WPI! They gave a great introduction to OpenGL, which served to refresh my brain on much of what I've forgotten the past few years. Plus, for the second half, they brought out some more of the advanced features you can implement, such as shaders. It was great, and will help me for sure in my own graphics programming. At the end I was even able to ask a question directly to one of the presenters about something I had read online. He refuted it, so I was glad to ask! (for those wondering, the question was about glut)

After that I attended the Fast-Forward Papers session, which was quite good. They had every single paper presenter (must have been like 100 people) do a 50-second synopsis of their research up on a stage with a few powerpoint slides. The range of different presentations was amazing. Some had videos to show, some just read about what they were doing with a few words on the screen, some got all dressed up in some funny clothes, and a couple even wrote little poems about their research! It was funny and interesting. A few had people in the audience going "ooooh" and "wow" and clapping even during the 50 seconds. I was pretty amazed at some of them, and maybe will try to get into their real paper presentation whenever they do it in the next four days.

And, as promised, some more pictures! First, two gorgeous shots of the sunset from the plane just before landing in San Diego:




Here's my room at the Mission Valley Resort, and a bunch of pictures from the outside.






Tomorrow I'll put up some pictures of the convention center and the view outside of it, which is quite nice. It's right on the water in the harbor. Until then, goodnight! The day begins early tomorrow...

Siggraph 2007 Day 1 (continued)

Found a little time (and a power plug) before the openGL course starts, so I'm going to post some pictures of the flight :-) I'll admit some of them are just for my son, he loves interesting vehicles! Here they are with some comments (click on them for a larger version):

Here's the plane about to take me from Bradley to Atlanta, ready to be boarded!


This is the little train of cars carrying everyone's luggage. This one is at Bradley, but in Atlanta, they were everywhere. It was like hundreds of little centipedes crawling all over the tarmac carrying their baggage with them! They even had their own tunnel under the concourse.



Here's a neat-looking fuel truck for the planes. It's all gas tank!


Here is the guy putting luggage onto the plane (my seat was right above the cargo door!). I'll say I was a tiny bit nervous, because I didn't see my actual bag going up the ramp. I ended up getting it, so it made it to the plane somehow :-) I'm glad I wasn't out there throwing people's luggage around - it was HOT.


This is what Connecticut looks like from I think about 15,000 feet. Landscapes from a plane are just amazing!


A great shot from the plane window of some downright inspirational clouds, somewhere between Connecticut and Georgia. I was watching a movie on my laptop (The Illusionist - which was very, very good, but that's for another post), and just happened to look out the window at the right time to see this.


This is the plane that is waiting to take me from Atlanta to San Diego. This airport is HUGE.


Here is the inside of the plane going to San Diego. The last time I was in a plane this large, we were going all the way to Israel. The in-flight movie was Spider-Man 3, which was awesome. It was also absolutely perfect, because I hadn't yet seen the movie and I'm going to a session about the special effects in it here at Siggraph!

Alright, it's 1:45 and time for the openGL graphics programming intro course. More pictures to come!

Siggraph 2007 Day 1

Well, here I am! San Diego is a beautiful city, and even the convention center looks great. The architecture around here is like nothing I've seen before. I'll take many pictures! There are thousands of people walking around, and excitement is in the air. I can hear many languages, and I see a lot of diversity (though admittedly the geeks, whatever country they're from, outnumber everyone else!).

Right at this moment I'm sitting in a huge room where four people from Pixar are explaining the concepts and challenges of representing food in their newest movie, Ratatouille. I got here just in time for the break (so I can write this post!), and will be able to catch the second half.

Alright, just watched the second half. The speaker was the manager of the effects department at Pixar, and he did a really good job explaining the challenges of food in computer animation. There are many to say the least! Everything, from steam on hot food, to scum on the inside of soup pots, to stains on a chef's clothes has to be explicitly created. And to do it, they cheated - a lot! When it comes to feature film animation, it's something you absolutely have to do, or your movie will never be finished.

One funny example was when they tried to simulate a sauce coming out of a pan and pouring onto some bread on a plate. The sauce would either take too long to pour out, or be too watery. Also, once it reached a certain threshold of pouring, it would just snap, and a big amount would stay in the pan, while the rest just plopped to the plate. What they ended up doing was literally reducing the pull of gravity when the sauce began to pour, then ramped it up as it poured onto the plate. To solve the snapping problem, they created extra sauce as particles - the whole thing changes from one CG object to another and you don't even notice. One of their programmers needed to create a new in-house piece of programming to be able to accomplish it. Amazing!

So, right now I'm eating a delicious lunch under a huge sunlit tent-like structure between the two massive buildings of the convention center. Later today, after getting back to my hotel room, I'll post some pictures of the flights (I took some incredible ones out of the airplane window) and the area of the hotel. I'm going to finish my lunch and then check out the book store before the next course. Great day so far!