While the full lineup for its Computer Animation Festival had not yet been announced at press time, the SIGGRAPH 38th International Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques through its scheduled production sessions provided a peek of some of what’s in store. The overall SIGGRAPH confab is slated to run Sunday, Aug. 7, through Thursday, Aug. 11 at the Vancouver Convention Centre; nestled in that time frame is a three-day (8/9-11) exhibition of products and services from the computer graphics and interactive marketplace.
As for the taste of the Computer Animation Fest, the production sessions have been set to impart how creative and production talent created the computer animation and visual effects in some of the Festival’s most provocative works. Those sessions include:
• “The Creation of Killzone 3.” This talk details various aspects of designing and developing videogames at Guerrilla. It highlights methods that are very similar to methods used in the CGI industry, and it illuminates some of the most important differences. And it covers the complete breadth of videogame development from artistic design to production pipelines and tool and engine development.
• “The Smurf-olution: A Half-Century of Character Development.” Sony Pictures Imageworks animation supervisor Troy Saliba, and leading members of their Vancouver animation team take the Smurfs from the most primitive pencil sketch to a contemporary 3D stereo rendering.
• “Fire & Water: The Yin and Yang of Creating the Final Battle in Kung Fu Panda 2.” The climax of the CG-animated movie Kung Fu Panda 2 is an epic battle featuring a flotilla of boats, an ancient Chinese-styled city, thousands of wolves armed for battle, action featuring hundreds of characters in a single shot, stylized graphic lighting, fantastical cannon fire and explosions, and a set of effects-supported Kung Fu moves. This talk provides a unique insight into the making of a CG-animated movie that goes beyond the traditional idealized concept of the pipeline.
• “Industrial Light + Magic Presents: Getting Dirty: Bringing the Digital Feature Rango to Life.” This in-depth discussion focuses on the production of Industrial Light + Magic’s first animated feature Rango. ILM’s unique approach to the genre brings a new dimension to the animated feature, giving Rango the visceral quality that the company is best known for in its visual effects work. The presenters review all aspects of the work from initial asset development through animation, simulation, lighting, and compositing.
• And “New Solutions for New Challenges.” The Industrial Light + Magic team delves into the effects created for four of 2011’s largest summer films, dissecting the challenges and revealing their solutions. The panel breaks down the visual effects challenges presented on this year’s slate of films including: Super 8, Cowboys & Aliens, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, and Transformers: Dark of the Moon.
Of course, the Computer Animation Festival will also include commercials, shorts and varied other disciplines. Since 1999, the Festival has been an official qualifying event for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Best Animated Short Film Oscar.
Vancouver venue SIGGRAPH’s host city also has a robust visual effects/computer animation community of its own, with SIGGRAPH attendees perhaps getting the opportunity to get a look-see or at least a better sense of Vancouver, B.C.’s talent and resources during their stay.
Chris Jones, co-founder and executive creative director of Zoic Studios, Culver City, Calif., and Vancouver, oversees both facilities and sees the B.C. market as being in a bullish growth mode, citing its tax credit incentives as a catalyst along with expanded infrastructure and resources.
He noted that Zoic is but one of several prominent visual effects houses to open a significant operation in Vancouver, with others including Digital Domain, Prime Focus and MPC. “B.C. has become a very vibrant, expanding market with capable artists,” he assessed. “Studios are confident about doing high-profile work up there. When you see a SIGGRAPH taking place in Vancouver and the VES [Visual Effects Society] becoming active in the community, these are telltale signs that Vancouver is a marketplace of significance for the long term.”
Zoic’s VFX exploits in B.C. include such features as the recent release Red Riding Hood as well as the recently completed 30 Minutes Or Less (directed by Ruben Fleischer) and Premium Rush (directed by David Koepp), and an ABC-TV pilot Once Upon A Time. Zoic continues to do work in Vancouver for the ABC series V, among other projects. “We’ve developed a pipeline between our two facilities,” said Jones. “We have supervisors and artists going back and forth, helping to ensure that we maintain the same creative and working culture at both studios.”
Exhibit floor Meanwhile SIGGRAPH’s 2011 Exhibition in Vancouver is on pace to equal or exceed last year’s numbers in Los Angeles.
“Since this is the first time SIGGRAPH is being held in Canada, we are encouraged by the positive response of our exhibitors from North America and around the world,” said Peter Braccio, SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference chair from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. “We are very encouraged by this vote of confidence from the exhibitor community. This year’s submissions are even more encouraging. The volume and quality of papers, talks, courses, artwork, films, and interactive demos submitted so far confirm that this will be one of the most memorable SIGGRAPH conferences in years.”
The 2011 Exhibition will provide attendees up-close and hands-on experiences, enabling them to witness the newest hardware systems, software tools, and creative services from hundreds of companies, while exploring products, systems, techniques, and inspiration that are creating the next three generations of computer graphics and interactive techniques. The Exhibition represents the opportunity for attendees to meet with potential new vendors and reconnect with the organizations they currently do business with.
Adding to the energy will be the 21 first-time exhibitors who have thus far committed to showcasing their wares at SIGGRAPH. Nineteen of the 21 exhibitors are from outside the United States, representing six different countries.
Paper trail The SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program is a premier international forum for disseminating new scholarly work in computer graphics and interactive techniques. SIGGRAPH 2011 will feature 82 Technical Papers, selected from among 432 submissions.
“Each year, the SIGGRAPH Technical Papers program evolves to feature the most cutting-edge advances in technology,” said Hugues Hoppe, SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers Chair from Microsoft Research. “This year is no different as SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers will provide a look into some of the latest achievements in facial animation, stereo and multi-layered displays, procedural modeling, and rendering.”
In addition to core topics of modeling, animation, rendering, imaging, and human-computer interaction, the Technical Papers program encouraged submissions from areas related to computer graphics, including: computer games, design, vision, scientific and information visualization, audio, and robotics.
Featured highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2011 Technical Papers program:
• High-Quality Passive Facial Performance Capture Using Anchor FramesA new technique for high-quality facial performance capture that leverages the repetitive structure of face motions to automatically locate frames with similar expressions, called anchor frames. High-resolution geometry is reconstructed and temporal motion is propagated in parallel using robust image-space matching between the anchor frames. Practical application as suggested by the Technical Papers Chair: Highly detailed facial capture using multiple cameras without markers.
Authors: Thabo Beeler, ETH Zürich and Disney Research Zürich; Fabian Hahn, Disney Research Zürich; Derek Bradley, Disney Research Zürich; Bernd Bickel, Disney Research Zürich; Paul Beardsley, Disney Research Zürich; Craig Gotsman, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology; Bob Sumner, Disney Research Zürich; Markus Gross, Disney Research Zürich
• Bounded Biharmonic Weights for Real-Time DeformationDeformation by linear blending dominates practical use as the fastest approach for transforming 2D and 3D shapes. This paper develops “bounded biharmonic weights” that produce smooth and intuitive deformations for any combination of points, bones, and cages of arbitrary topology, making control of deformations simple and flexible. Practical application as suggested by the Technical Papers Chair: An elegant UI framework that unifies cages, skeletons, and point constraints for 2D and 3D deformations.
Authors: Alec Jacobson, New York University; Jovan Popovic, Adobe Systems Incorporated; Ilya Baran, Disney Research Zürich; Olga Sorkine, New York University
• A Temporally Quantized Diffusion Model for Rendering Translucent MaterialsThis new model for subsurface scattering remains accurate for high absorption, supports high-frequency illumination, and can handle very thin materials. It is efficient to evaluate and works well in production. Practical application as suggested by the Technical Papers Chair: Amazingly realistic human skin.
Authors: Eugene d’Eon, Geoffrey Irving, Weta Digital Ltd.
• Physics-Inspired Upsampling for Cloth Simulation in GamesWith this method for learning linear upsampling operators in physically based cloth simulation, coarse meshes are enriched with mid-scale details in minimal time and memory budgets, as required in computer games. Practical application as suggested by the Technical Papers Chair: A practical approach to enhancing cloth animation in real-time games.
Authors: Ladislav Kavan, Disney Interactive Studios; Daniel Gerszewski, University of Utah; Adam Bargteil, University of Utah; Peter-Pike Sloan, Disney Interactive Studios
• Real-Time Eulerian Water Simulation Using a Restricted Tall Cell GridA new real-time Eulerian fluid simulation that uses a hybrid grid of regular cubic cells on top of a layer of tall cells above an arbitrary terrain. The method includes a novel multigrid method and several fluid solver modifications, and achieves 30fps in real-world scenarios on a modern GPU. Practical application as suggested by the Technical Papers Chair: Realistic fluids rendered in real time.
Authors: Nuttapong Chentanez, Matthias Muller, NVIDIA Corporation
The papers to be presented were chosen by a committee of 52 experts from academia and industry. This year’s Technical Papers program also includes conference presentations for 33 papers published this year in the journal ACM Transactions on Graphics (TOG). ACM stands for the Association for Computing Machinery, the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, uniting educators, researchers and professionals to inspire dialogue, share resources and address the field’s challenges. The ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (ACM SIGGRAPH) holds assorted events, including this annual SIGGRAPH confab.
Keynoter Cory Doctorow, science fiction novelist, blogger, and technology activist, will give one of the keynote presentations at SIGGRAPH 2011,
Doctorow is a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Wired, as well as co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He was formerly director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. He is a visiting senior lecturer at Open University (UK) and previously served as the Fulbright chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.
“As an author, scholar, future-thinker, and creator, Cory Doctorow brings a lot to the table that should be of immense interest to the SIGGRAPH audience,” said SIGGRAPH 2011 Conference chair Braccio. “His dynamic vision and creativity are certain to be interspersed throughout his presentation and will be a conference highlight for everyone.”
In 2008, Doctorow’s novel, Little Brother, was a New York Times best seller. Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays called Content: Selected Essays in Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Doctorow’s latest works include an adult novel, Maker, published by Tor Books/HarperCollins UK; For the Win, a young adult book about video games, labor politics, and economics; and a short story collection entitled Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.
Doctorow has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc. in 2003. He serves on the boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.
SIGGRAPH keynote speakers represent a variety of prominent industry luminaries and technology experts who explore various aspects of computer graphics and interactive techniques.
Open panel Among the panel discussions slated for SIGGRAPH is one addressing “The Need for Standardization Within Global Visual Effects Productions Through Open Source and Open Standards.”
Moderated by Sam Richards of Sony Pictures Imageworks, the session will highlight some of the open-source projects that are helping VFX companies share data worldwide and explore areas for future improvement. In most cases, production companies need to set up a hub to ingest data from sets and/or locations during principal photography, and then send and receive data from the various VFX vendors during postproduction. Because there is not much standardization in this area, a standard framework for information exchange could provide significant efficiencies for both production companies and vendors. The panel examines options for sharing assets such as plates, models, and textures as well as new issues related to stereo conversion.
Panelists for this discussion include Hannes Ricklefs of The Moving Picture Company, Ray Feeney of RFX Inc., Rob Bredow of Sony Picture Imageworks, Steve Cronan of 5th Kind, Ryan Mayeda of Digital Domain, and Tommy Burnette of Lucasfilm Singapore.
Interacting with the future The SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies program is home to the latest developments in technology, including displays, robotics, and artificial intelligence. This year will feature 23 of the latest innovations selected by a jury of industry experts from more than 100 submissions. Topics range from displays and input devices to collaborative environments.
“The SIGGRAPH Emerging Technologies program is unique in its interactive approach that allows people to experience the most cutting-edge developments first-hand,” said Cole Krumbholz, SIGGRAPH 2011 Emerging Technologies chair and Koduco Games’ co-founder. “This year, conference attendees will experience the latest achievements from industry and university research labs.”
Highlights from the SIGGRAPH 2011 Emerging Technologies will include:
• Face-to-Avatar Hiroaki Tobita and Shigeaki Maruyama; Sony Computer Science Laboratories, Inc.
This floating avatar system integrates a blimp with a virtual avatar to create a unique system of telepresence. The blimp avatar contains several pieces of equipment, including a projector and a speaker as the output functions. Users communicate with others by presenting their facial images through the projector and voices through the speaker. A camera and microphone attached to the blimp provide the input function and support the user’s manipulation from a distance.
The user’s presence is more dramatic than a conventional virtual avatar (CG and image) because the avatar is a physical object and moves freely in the real world. In addition, the user’s senses are augmented because the blimp detects dynamic information in the real world. For example, the camera provides a special floating view to the user, and the microphone collects a wide variety of sounds such as conversations and environmental noise.
Potential Future Use: Allows the user to have a moveable, physical presence in the real world from even the most remote location.
• And A True 3D Display Hidei Kimura and Akira Asano, Burton Inc.; Issei Fujishiro and Ayaka Nakatani; Keio University
This research team was the first to use laser-plasma technology for a true-3D display device that allows users to draw 3D images in midair. Now the team has developed a much more compact and precise display, called SRV (Super Real Vision)-5000, based on advanced laser technology. One remarkable feature of the new device is its enhanced resolution: from 300 points per second to 50,000 points per second. It displays 3D objects more faithfully in real time and increases the range of possible applications.
Potential Future Use: Advancements in 3D displays will impact many fields from medical research to gaming.
