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Graphics Software

SIGGRAPH 2001 85

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-read dept.
Morgan McGuire writes "SIGGRAPH 2001, the graphics industry's main scientific conference and gathering for artists, film producers, researchers, and game developers, just ended. I wrote up my experiences as a game developer/researcher at the conference for flipcode." Lots of stuff for those of us who wish we could go every year and see the pretty pictures. Hits on Shrek, Monsters, Inc. and a variety of new techniques floating around.
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SIGGRAPH 2001 More

SIGGRAPH 2001

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  • No mention of Game Programming Gems 2 which was supposed to debut at the show...

    • Re:doh (Score:2, Informative)

      by Fruny ( 194844 )
      I picked my copy at the CRM booth.
      • Fat Brain lists the Table of Contents as being almost the same as the first one... Specifically


        MATHEMATICS: Algebraic Techniques, Trigonometry and Geometry, Linear Algebra, Matrix and Vector Operations, Advanced Mathematics, Ray/ Polygon/Polyhedra Intersection Algorithms, Handling Large Amounts of Polygonal Data, Triangle Stripification and Fanning Algorithms, Using 2D and 3D Billboards, LIGHTING: Multi-texturing to Achieve Lighting Effects, Shadow Algorithms, Using Simple Radiosity, Projected Texture Lights, TEXTURING: Using Texture Matrices, Bump Mapping, Cubic Environment Mapping, Procedural Textural Mapping, DYNAMIC POLYGON CONTROL: Parametric Curves and Surfaces, Subdivision Surfaces, Multi-resolution Meshes, Spatial Partitioning Schemes ,Camera Techniques/ Movement Techniques GRAPHIC EFFECTS: How to do Lens Flares, Weather Techniques, Sky Domes, Effective Clouds and Fog, Aliasing Effects (Anti-Aliasing, Motion Blur, Depth-of-Field),Teleport Portals, Particle Systems ANIMATION: Inverse Kinematics, Blending Keyframed Animations, Solid Skinning vs. Hierarchical Skeletons, Using Motion Capture Data ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: Finite State Machines, Heuristic Tree Searches, Flocking and Crowding Behavior, Path Planning and the A*Algorithm, MUSIC AND SOUND EFFECTS: Blending Phrases in Interactive Music, Dynamic Audio Generation, Simulating a 3D Sound-Effect Environment, Using Music Cues to Initiate Game Events NETWORKED PLAY: Minimizing Latency in the Network Pipeline, Dead Reckoning Algorithms, Client/Server Design, Encryption Techniques.



        Is that accurate? Thanks in advance...
        • Here's approximatively what's in.

          1 General programming
          Optimization
          DLLs
          Dynamic typing
          Property & Factory classes
          Debugging/Profiling facilities
          Stack winding, self modifying code (in asm)
          Resource files
          Input recording & playback
          Text parsing
          A tweaking UI
          Random numbers
          Bloom filter (hashing for early rejection)
          3DSMAX exporting
          Using Webcams

          2 Math
          IEEE floating point tricks
          Vector & plane tricks
          3D segment intersection
          Inverse trajectory determination
          Camera & flythrough pathes
          Fractals

          3 AI
          Strategies for optimization
          Micro-threads for AI (asm stack tricks)
          RTS command queuing
          Tile-based LOS & search
          Influence maps
          Strategic assessment techniques
          Path finding
          Fuzzy logic, NNs

          4 Geometry management
          VIPM methods
          LOD & terrain tiles
          Sphere trees, AABBs, Quadrees
          Fishtank effect
          Print-res rendering
          Decals on arbitrary surfaces
          Skyboxes
          Self-shadowing
          "Mario 64" 3rd person control

          5 Graphics Display
          Cartoon rendering
          Dynamic per-pixel lighting
          Procedural clouds in hardware
          Faster lens flare, shadows
          Impostors (replacing geometry with pictures)
          Hardware-accelerated procedural texture animation (NVidia texture shaders can do cool things)

          6 Audio programming
          Design patterns
          Voice reuse in a sample-based synthetizer
          Software-based DSP effects
          Interactive DSP pipelining
          Music sequencers
          API

          Compared to the first book, I think that a lot has moved from the book to the CD which I haven't looked in detail yet.

    • Re:doh (Score:1)

      by sien ( 35268 )
      It's really good. I got mine there too.

      There is heaps of stuff in it.
  • I keep finding out about these really cool events that I just can't afford to get to.

    Ah to be stinking rich and reasonably idle.

  • Siggraph archive available online in september (Score:5, Informative)

    by Fruny ( 194844 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @01:38PM (#2204824)
    This year there were signs posted here and there in the conference center saying that all the paper presentations, some panels and courses would be put online. They had their video crew recording them.

    The address is http://online.siggraph.org
  • This is the first i've heard of this movie, and the main character looks like he'll be coo-razy to render.

  • Well worth it (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bribecka ( 176328 )
    Having also returned from my first SIGGRAPH, I have to say it was well worth the money spent. For anyone who can qualify for the student rate ($230 for the full conference), my advice is to try to attend it next year.

    In addition to the wealth of knowledge you can get from the conference, the contacts you can make in the industry are worth the price of admission. Where else can you get a class taught by Jim Blinn?

    • I got Jim Blinn's autograph. Yes, I'm a fanboy.

      You might want to try looking into the Student Volunteer program as well. You get go-anywhere passes, discounted merchandise (well, some of it is dicounted), meal vouchers and they put you in a very, very nice hotel. (Westin Bonaventure for me.)

      (You probably remember the SVs. We were the people in the dorky red vests...)

      -grendel drago
      • Just like to say thanks to you and all student
        volunteers for your hard work this year. I
        volunteered for the '92 SIGGRAPH, and it was
        both fun and worthwhile.

  • Yep... he's a gamer. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mikeage ( 119105 ) <slashdot@NOspam.mikeage.net> on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @01:43PM (#2204839) Homepage
    In re: the "panel" (which was not) between gamers and scientists... I work with visualization (*yawn*) and other "scientific" apps... though I was the first to bring 7 megapixel (150" diagonal) quake3 to our lab ;). The truth is, the annoying thing from a research perspective is that there _have_ been huge strides made in the last 5 years or so, thanks to the gaming market (which in terms of people is probably 4 or 5 orders of magnitiude larger, while monetarily "only" 3-4). The agravating part is that despite these leaps, they're not completely focused on the things that "matter" in research. E.g... your average quake3 map requires rendering less than 100 polygons (for the background, at least... throw in another 1000 max for characters) with huge textures... aka... fill rate. Your average scientific display requires 100,000 polygons (minimum... most of the data I see is between 300,000 - 5,000,000 (that's million, not thousand), but with no texturing at all. The difference in a consumer card (Geforce 2, say) and a so-called "professional" card (Quadro 2) is now only a few hundred (ok, maybe 500) dollars... nowhere near the few thousand it used to be. But it's still there, and it doesn't look like it's getting any closer. Still, that's a huge improvement over even a year or two ago. My boss has a FireGL card in one of his machines... it can do 10 - 20 times the number of polygons per second of a Geforce 2 GTS... but in UT, at 1024x768... it only gets about 30 fps. But that card was 1500 dollars just a year ago... and three years ago, it would've required an SGI for 10K+ to beat a consumer card like that in polygons.
    • If anyone understands what this guy just said, send me an e-mail...I need you on my staff of writers. :)
      • :-) like the other poster said, it's stream of conciousness. but basically he's saying that the person who wrote the linked article was attending siggraph and viewing it through a gamer's eyes, not the eyes of someone who uses graphics for "real" (i.e. scientific/engineering/datavis)
        uses. the video card discussion is a way of illustrating how the consumer and professional 3d markets are close ... but still quite divergent ("for a gamer, it's all about fill rate, for a scientist it's all about polygons" and the differing need for texture perf).

      • Re:Yep... he's a gamer. (Score:3, Interesting)

        by sjbe ( 173966 )
        I deal with what he was talking about pretty regularly. Can't say the comment was a well structured bit of prose but it made sense to me.

        Everything he mentioned is pretty much true. "Gaming" cards do emphasize features which are not terribly useful for folks who need to move a lot of polygons. (CAD, scientific modelling, etc) That difference is why I'm still using an SGI Octane comfortably for 3D CAD graphics even though a gForce3 equipped PC by the specs should blow it out of the water. Since I don't care about textures, the Octane can hold it's own against the gaming cards for "professional" applications despite being 3-4 years older.

      • LOL. I wish I could mod that up... you're right... it made very little sense upon rereading it ;). Classic brain fart. Oh well... sorry.
    • so-called "professional" card (Quadro 2) is now only a few hundred (ok, maybe 500) dollars... nowhere near the few thousand it used to be. But it's still there, and it doesn't look like it's getting any closer. Still, that's a huge improvement over even a year or two ago

      +4 self-contradicting statement.

  • My "siggraph experience" (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tcc ( 140386 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @01:43PM (#2204842) Homepage Journal
    What I find really sad is the fact that now the internet is mainstream, web and video technologies are available to anyone that wants to play with them, and now we're talking about THE graphics show and multimedia experience, and there's still no webcasting of events or a centralized press release/video depository of events.

    You have to go to EACH companies's siggraph website (that's when they take or have the time/staff to do so and not everybody running around fixing last minute issues).

    I was locked on Newtek's streaming event for a while and was thinking to myself "god, that would have been so cool having a reporter on the floor going from companies to companies, webcasting all day, and a place with different archived video of reports for me to check, by companies" you know, something SIMPLE compared to the whole organisation needed to make such a show a reality.

    Don't get me wrong, this isn't a siggraph bashing, I'd LOVE to attend the show once in my life, but also, since it's so BIG and all the major announcements for the next 6 months are happening there, and the fact that industries that pushes visual technologies are represented there in an "international show", I don't understand why in 2001 we still don't have that simple technology available to make this event even bigger.

    To get the most attendee possible without people thinking "I'll stay home and watch the show"? I don't think it would cut in the attendance, because people that WANT and can afford to go there won't be satisfied with a webcast, but people who WISHED they were there at least will have a glimpse...Probably even potential people that might want to go the year after because they can feel the atmosphere (with good reporting :) ) might need just that little boost.

    Cost? That also I wouldn't agree, one word: Advertising... want traffic? tell me that wouldn't bring any traffic to their site? They could get their extra troubles easily refunded with that, plus even generating more money. The siggraph.org web site looks so.... dunno... dull maybe? Pictues/companies PRs/video would give it more life.

    Anyways I'm sure they could have pulled this off easily, one webcasting server, 1 camera man, one reporter and one video editing/archiving /web technician and voala... if Newtek pulled it off for their booth (and I am sure they aren't the only company who did that), why can't siggraph itself do something like that? Just an Idea.
    • it's so BIG and all the major announcements for the next 6 months are happening there

      There really aren't many announcements that occur at SIGGRAPH; any announcements are usually for products that only the deeply CG technical community cares about. It's not like Comdex or some trade show like that. While the exhibition was good, I don't think it's enough to have a roaming webcasting reported going from booth to booth showing the latest products--maybe a 5 minute best of clip.

      Most things presented are technical papers (which are usually availbable on the net 3-6 months beforehand), or technical classes. I do agree that it would be nice to stream these classes, but that probably *would* cut into attendence, since that is what a fair number of people go for.

    • SIGGRAPH's policy forbids cameras (not that people really care).
      • SIGGRAPH's policy forbids cameras (not that people really care).

        No, you can take pictures of just about anything you want. There were plenty of people walking around with cameras (video included). There was one talk that I went to that did forbid pictures--they just said so before the session started--because they showed some just-finished FX clips from Spider-Man (which looked very cool).

        • No, SIGGRAPH prohibits you to take pictures from any of the technical sessions (courses, papers, panels, sketches and applications) and from the computer animation festival. You can't take pics during the session, though nothing prohibits you to take pics after one. Here it is directly from their website:

          a/v Recording Guidelines

          Only registered media representatives who have completed and signed the SIGGRAPH 2001 Audiovisual Agreement may be granted photography/ videography permission. The Audiovisual Agreement will be available on-site when you pickup your media badge.

          Images or video obtained at SIGGRAPH 2001 may be published or aired only by a credible media outlet. Material may not be commercially sold or bartered. Media representatives must obtain permission from the person they are recording.

          NO CAMERAS ARE ALLOWED IN THE TECHNICAL SESSIONS OR COMPUTER ANIMATION FESTIVAL, INCLUDING THE ELECTRONIC THEATER. ALL CAMERAS AND RECORDING EQUIPMENT MUST BE HAND-HELD.

          Any media representative in violation of these guidelines may have their credentials revoked and may be removed from the Los Angeles Convention Center for the remainder of the conference.

          And here is the link where it states so:

          SIGGRAPH 2001 media guide [siggraph.org]

          Now there were plenty of people that would sneak in video cameras and record those sessions but they would sit in a place where they could hide, if you noticed.

          There were several places where they did forbid explicitly any recording, the Virtual Stars session (where John Dykstra showed the SpiderMan clip), and the 2001 special session (with Bob Abel, Syd Mead, Peter Hyams and Dennis Muren).

          • At the back of my badge :

            "No camera or recording devices are permitted at SIGGRAPH 2001. Abuse of this policy could result in the loss of your registration credentials."

            And well, aside from the technical sessions & the animation festive, all you have left is... the exhibition floor. Not very exciting IMO.
          • Well, I have egg on my face. Yum.

            Seriously though, I was going by the fact that I saw many, many people taking pictures during the technical sessions. And I'm assuming they weren't a "credible media outlet" since they had disposable cameras.

            • All media people had little purple badges with the word media printed on them. But it seems there was a shortage of student volunteers this year. in previous years I saw people have their camera taken off or at least giving a warning to put it away. This year in the biggest technical seesion there was barely anyone watching. So people sneak in cameras. I saw several people. usually they put their feet up, and the video camera beteween their legs or beside. It's OK to take pics afterwards, or in the case of the 2001 special session, they actually said it was OK to take pics during the session as long as you didn't take pics/video from the screens (though i saw plenty of people that did anyway).
              So it seems they lacked manpower to better monitor this year.

              Of course there are a couple of people besides media that can take pictures, mainly the presenters themselves. Jill Smolin took pictures from the presenters in Course 36 and also for the 2001 special session.

              As for the Exhibition Floor, it depends. there are times when you have exciting stuff being shown, cool demos or products or really creative booth design. But this year was very lackluster in that respect. It was smaller and there was not much excitement around (maybe with the exception of the Deep paint girls ;-)
    • As someone who just came back from SIGGRAPH and whose mission it was to RECORD and STREAM over the web all the PAPERS, PANELS and many of the COURSES presented there, I understand your plea for adding this media type to the SIGGRAPH experience. A dedicated team of volunteers (yes, volunteers!) did all this work, capturing over 200 important, but ephemeral events. We are working hard still, in post production, to get the server in place so we can stream it out over the web. Our goal is to be up and running in September with over 240Gigs of content: lectures, papers, panels, slidesets, demos and audio. It will happen. During the actual event, we worked closely with SIGGRAPH TV, another group of dedicated volunteers, and the AVW crews (a great bunch of true professionals). SIGGRAPH TV's charter included some local broadcasts, and hundreds of interviews with key personnel, as well as covering other special events. We discussed doing live webcasts, both with them and on our own, but it was not possible, alas. As for your comment, "Anyways I'm sure they could have pulled this off easily, one webcasting server, 1 camera man, one reporter and one video editing/archiving /web technician," well, I can hardly begin to describe how naive that sounds. It is a much bigger event that you can possibly imagine. Don't get me wrong, it's a great idea, but having just worked about 100 hours with little sleep or time to enjoy the conference, I bristle at your suggestion that it was easy. I assure you, your suggestion would be anything but easy. That being said, we are still very proud of the unprecedented work that we did accomplish. We would like to see this effort continue to grow (possibly to include a webcast). We think what we pulled off was great and executed well. Please visit our website http://online.siggraph.org in September, let us know what you think and voice your support for this kind of electronic outreach. And if attending SIGGRAPH is still your ultimate goal, why not volunteer?

  • Black Oil (Score:2, Interesting)

    by MikeyNg ( 88437 )

    Mechanical trick? Alien virus? Nope, the black oil is a ferrofluid [ferrofluidics.com], a suspension of regular oil and magnetic micropowder.


    A quick glance at the site was rather informative. Hey! Do an article on ferrofluids or something. They look like they'd be incredibly fun to play with.



    • Whoa
      Hold on a second here,
      The name of this company is FerroTec?
      Anyone else see the boiler room?
      So what is your next posting
      Selling stock for their ipo at $8 /share and it's a bargain right?
    • Black Oil? This is either the precursor to Black Goo Alien Virus from X-Files, or the "polymimetic alloy" of the T-1000 [twinsuntimes.com]. Or an unholy combination straight out of a geek science fiction nightmare?


      Ahhhhhhhh!!!! Run away!!!!!

  • that I've seen at SIGGRAPH is this [uec.ac.jp] one (stolen from today's memepool).

    Some startlingly beautiful images [sanu.ac.yu] are obtained by mixing a magnetic fluid suspension and some electromagnets. It's pretty damn neat, IMHO.

  • Was just me, or was Siggraph much smaller this year? I've been going for over 10 years, and just seemed as though there weren't as many people and vendors. Side Effects (Houdini) wasn't there, and Disney also pulled out at the last minute. I think everyone I ran into mentioned it was a much calmer show than previous years.

    Also - the level of technical advancement seems to be leveling off. In the past, my jaw always dropped at least once during the show. The NVidia/Square realtime Final Fantasy was cool, and there was a nice IBM 600dpi monitor, but that was about it. Outside of a few things (ExLuna, for one) no huge software releases, either. Mostly incremental improvements.

    Perhaps it's to the point where the technology is getting "good enough" (relative term, I know...) The only things that really made my jaw drop was the content itself. In the Electronic Theater, I'd see a really good film, then the credits would list just one person... Jaw drop. Pretty amazing how far it's all come.

    • Yeah. The numbers were way down. Normally an LA SIGGRAPH gets about 50 000 people. This year it was only 30 - 40 000 I heard.
      Floorspace was easy to get, which is apparently rare.
      Also, job adds were down to about one third of what was there in 2000.
      As welll as being indicative of the fact that graphics, at least non-realtime, has got incredibly good it's probably a fairly good note that there is a recession coming or indeed we're already in one.
    • People, that was NOT REALTIME RENDERING. Really. It was OpenGL previewing. Lit, shaded, high-poly-count previewing, yes. But just a very nice preview.

      The final shots had an average of ten or so layers on each frame. Not to mention that they were antialiased in the first place.

      Trust me, people, it's a LONG way from being realtime.

      -grendel drago
    • Wait until next year. The GeForce3 was released past the paper submission deadline. I fully expect to have loads of applications of the pixel/texture/vertex shaders next year.

      As they say : "Speed-up any algorithm by a factor of 100 and everybody will find new applications for it."
    • Yep. Floor space was definitely not as full as even two years ago (which was also in LA, thus I'm using it as a mental comparison). I noticed Microsoft didn't bother to have a booth, which was curious.

      There was, however, some pretty good stuff in the academic circles, demonstrated by some pretty good papers and panels.

      A follow-up to your comment on the electronic theater...did anyone notice how on the big film-production "how-to" reels that the credits were often massive? Pages of animators and video effects folks in tiny little print at the end of, say, some of the work on "Pearl Harbor"?
    • 34,000 this year versus 45,000 in 1999.

      (Alternates between CA and somewhere east.
      Have to compare CA years.)
  • Even though this years Siggraph was smaller than previous ones, the science was pretty impressive. There were some cool demos of a variety of items, but one of the best ones was the haptic interface demonstrated by a bunch of graduate students. They had a salt water layer on top of oil (immiscible liquids you know) and the haptic device would let you go through the water but not the oil. You could in fact write you name on the oil but not go through. Very cool with lots of applications in surgery and other environments along with virtual representations of those environments. However the most impressive technology was a project with Intel and Stanford where they addressed the graphics bottleneck issue in distributed computing by utilizing the resident graphics boards in each of the parallel systems and they got them to asynchronously process and output the graphics data thus achieving good graphics throughput on low cost distributed systems. The folks at SGI have got to be scared silly.

  • Well, the SIGGRAPH 2001 website has already posted some pictures from some of the venues here:

    SIGGRAPH 2001 photos [siggraph.org]

    SIGGRAPH also had a TV camera crew walking around the Convention Center so probably in the near future they will put up some clips up. I also took quite a bit of pics for a website, ilmfan.com, but since I use "analog" 35mm it'll take me some time to put up a report ;-)

  • I'm surprised at you geeks (Score:3, Interesting)

    by davey23sol ( 462701 ) on Wednesday August 22, 2001 @03:30PM (#2205303) Journal
    I can't believe that the Slashdot geeks are tarnishing their name so much.. no one has mentioned the "2001 in 2001: How a Film Inspired Our Future" session on Friday.

    We had Robert Abel, the inventer of slit scanning (remember the 4th Doctor Who opening?) who produced the graphics for the final 1/3 of the movie (the Jupiter sequence). There was Syd Mead, the person who designed the look of Blade Runner and 2010. There was also Peter Hyams, director and photographer of 2010 and other (crap) films (End of Days), and Dennis Muren of ILM that helped create some of the real time compositing stuff for A.I.

    They talked about Kubrick a lot, but had some problems staying on topic. Syd Mead gave a great little intro to his vast array of work (including the design of cars and plane), and Bob Abel actually gave some major explainations of how different parts of the movie were done. It was my favorite thing there this year.

    I'm not a graphics guy (I am a Linux admin that works for a department that teaches Maya and 3DM, so I get a free ride, it's in the budget), so SIGGRAPH isn't my major conference (that would be OSCON), but I did enjoy it.

    Oh, on a final note, there were several sessions about public policy. There was a lot of talk about Dimitri, DeCSS and other IP issues that everyone here would have been proud of. ACM and SIGGRAPH are solidly against the DMCA.
    • We had Robert Abel, the inventer of slit scanning (remember the 4th Doctor Who opening?) who produced the graphics for the final 1/3 of the movie (the Jupiter sequence).

      Actually, it was Doug Trumbull who invented the slit scanning technique for 2001. Abel and Associates worked on TRON.

      Also, I saw Final Fantasy being rendered real-time on a Geforce3 and was seeing about 5fps, definitely not the 20fps that the article claims.

      STratoHAKster

  • Heard at the show:
    "I'm disappointed this year. Usually, Siggraph is as big as E3, but this year, E3 was three times as big."

    I remember when I visited the show in 1997 that the whole upper floor was full. The lower floor was the "startup park. This year, there was a lot of empty space on the upper floor. The periphery was a dead zone. I remember when we first exhibited at Siggraph in 1999 in Los Angeles that there were a lot more exhibitors. I think one reason Siggraph will be in San Antonio in 2002 and San Diego in 2003 is that those two venues will be smaller and less expensive than Orlando or Los Angeles.

    One type of exhibitor that is totally gone is the telecom provider with high-speed access. In the past, they helped provided the high-speed datalines for the production houses that needed to move a lot of data to be edited from one country to another (London, England to Los Angles, United States). Telecom has overbuilt for the moment, and the telecom houses have no need to come to the show.

    There has been a lot of consolidation in the 3d card market, with Nvidia presently looking like the winner at the top of the heap. ATI also had a presence, but Nvidia has the products and the buzz. People used to pay thousands of dollars for a video card, but that market has really declined

    Apple was not there at all this year. Sun had the largest spot. SGI had the second largest spot. I'm not sure what presence SGI will have next year. SGI has always been about proprietary CPU and graphics chips, but with the Intel, Microsoft and Linux juggernaut, SGI's future looks very shaky.

    Discreet, Softimage, Maya, Newtek, Maxon, Hash. What type of presence will these 3D modeling and animation companies have 2 years from now? I miss the small 3D companies like Strata, Specular and Ray Dream. I think the people who used to dabble with the lower-priced 3d programs now buy Web development programs like Dreamweaver, GoLive and FrontPage. This reminds me of how the camera market went downhill in the 80's and 90's because all those gadget people into photography turned to computers instead. With digital video and photography, I think the camera companies that have good digital products (Nikon and Canon) will bounce back (I think Kodak has serious problems though). Maybe Shockwave 3d will create a resurgence in 3d applications. Maybe Carrara will have a chance.

    IBM, Compaq, HP. AMD, Intel. Who's going to be there 2 years from now? I'm surprised AMD is still putting up a fight. How about IBM's and Motorola's PowerPC. MIPS and Alpha are gone. Sparc is SUN's chip.

    I like Curious Labs. I hope they do well.

    I think another reason for a decline in vendors is U.S. Department of Defense spending. Evans and Sutherland was one of the pioneers in 3d simulators for the DOD, but they weren't at Siggraph this year. In the 90's they tried to break into the consumer market, but they failed.

    There was a serious lack of any spiffs or giveaways this year. What's amazing is that there were so many giveaways in New Orleans last year. I think the budgets for tradeshows are set months before so the economic downturn hadn't hit the tradeshow spiff budget yet. I think that this year is also worse than last year in terms of the economy and the need to trim costs. I was able to get Swedish candy cane candy from Cycore and a superball from Intel - woohoo!!!!

    I note that there are still a lot of companies still trying to get 3d content on the Web. I think it's only a matter of time before it becomes more popular. I think the main issue right now is Bandwidth. The popularity of Quake and Half-life shows that 3d over the web is viable. We'll have to wait and see more business and consumer applications. Entertainment is definitely the way to go right now with 3d over the web - maybe that's why E3 is so much bigger right now.

    I still don't believe there are so many motion capture companies. I think I saw about six of them at the show. It's funny that the bigger mocap companies have professional dancers while the newer ones have a putz like me trying to show off the technology. Do I really want to see a couch potato nerd with slumped shoulders wearing a skin tight bodysuit jumping around - I think not.

    Sony Imageworks had a drawing class in front of our booth, and they had a 6' 3" really buff male model disrobe so that he was only wearing shorts. I was scared he would crush me when he walked by our booth (I was glad he put his shirt back on or I would have fainted) to stretch out. I was thankful that they had a female model replace him in the afternoon.

    802.11, Airport, Wireless networking is so cool. I could just sit by the wireless node and access the Internet with our Airport enabled computers. Most of the wireless notebooks were Macintoshes. The best thing about Airport enabled Mac notebooks is that the Airport card is unobtrusive with the late model G3's and titanium notebooks.

    I liked the fish motion plug-in from Japan for Maya.

    "Do you have a bag?!" No bags this year at Siggraph. I overheard someone picking an AMD fabric bag and exclaiming, "This bag's made in India!"

    Siggraph L.A. was always nice because Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world. Production people from the local area found it easy to take a day off to attend the show. I wonder how busy Siggraph San Diego will be.

    • I remember when I visited the show in 1997 that the whole upper floor was full. The lower floor was the "startup park.

      I remember that, too. I haven't been back since -- I'm really surprised to hear that the show has actually gotten smaller.

      On the other hand, it's probably like Comdex. Companies realized what a big, wasteful circus the whole thing was, and decided to stop pouring so much money into it. They can still do their announcements and show off their products without having a big booth at SIGGRAPH.

  • - There seems to be a consensus that the audio-interactive magnetic fluid piece was the most interesting thing in the art show this year (previous winners include the wooden mirror, with the raining text coming in close behind, and the computer-driven sand table). The linked reviewer thought so, as did I, as did another person I asked at SIGGRAPH.

    - There weren't many teapots in the papers this year, nor were as many bunnies as in previous years. David hasn't yet moved in to replace the bunny (I saw much less of David this year than I did at his debut last year). Instead, it looks like the mesh junkies are using various other non-bunny models from Stanford. One of these days I need to make a graph of the number of teapot, bunny, etc. figures in the proceedings over time. ;-)

    - Yes, it did seem a bit smaller and quieter than previously. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a side effect of dot-com funding drying up. Normally the LA conferences draw more film industry people, so one might expect it to be bigger this year than last.

    • "- There weren't many teapots in the papers this year, nor were as many bunnies as in previous years."

      You had a nice teapot in the festival's hilarious intro sequence, as well as in the fake 'Alien' trailer (After Cube and Sphere... TEAPOT : "In space, noone hears your steam" )
  • BTW, almost all of the SIGGRAPH papers are available on-line.

    The following is a list of links to the various papers:
    http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2001.html [brown.edu]
  • The coolest thing I saw at SIGGRAPH was WETA's demonstration of AI controlled crowds for the huge battlescenes and marching armies in the upcoming Lord of the Rings trilogy. Sure, this has been done before in games, but WETA put some refinements on their system that really makes it shine.

    This is also of interest to computer game players, as the techniques they have developed here will apply to NPC's nicely now that computer firepower is catching up to our ideas. WETA has been working on this software for 2+ years now, ever since they began work on LOTR.

    Basically, each character on the battlefield has a node-based brain full of IF/THEN/OR type junctions. They began by showing a single human character wandering around a maze of walls and blocks. In one corner was a view of what the character was 'seeing' through it's eyes, head-bob, swaying and all. When the character got near a wall, it would stop, look around, turn and walk in another direction. All this was being done by seamlessly morphing between different sets of motion capture data. This in itself was a very nice thing, as it's usually very hard to do that completely automatically and have it look perfect.

    The next step was collision detection. They put multiple characters in the maze, and they would all avoid each other, smoothly, not abruptly. After that, they put a guy on hilly terrain, and he seamlessly morphed between uphill walking and downhill walking as the terrain called for it. (heavy slow stepping uphill, shifting weight backwards downhill...)

    This particular character had about 500 nodes in his 'brain'. The characters used in the movie have around 5,000 nodes. Why? Here's what else they do:

    The characters can be programmed to charge at each other, and when two characters from opposing armies see each other close by, they run at each other and break out into motion capture sword fights! The sword fights are choreographed so that the mocap from one character matches the mocap from the other, so when one guy swings, the other blocks and it all works! And all of it blends together pretty damn smoothly, from one swing to another. Furthermore, each army has different mocap data. One army tends to fight with Eastern combat techniques, and another uses more European style swordplay, and they make all this work together, automatically.

    On top of that, they have a randomizer. The characters will vary in size and attributes, with low and high limits being set, or in the case of shields and accesories, an on-off randomness that will determine if each instance wil have that configuration. Short characters walk faster to keep up with the taller ones, and there are several different walking datasets for more randomness. They showed an 'adventure party' of 6 Orc type characters, first without the randomizer and after with.

    When I was working at Digital Domain, someone came up with a Who generator for The Grinch that made random Whoville citizens with different hats and shirts and sizes and whatnot. This is like the Who generator times 100. Really elegant stuff for in-house software. Also, it's very fast, and I believe at the show it was running under Linux. They had many characters each with a complex brain all running around at once, in realtime. Lots of characters morphing between mocap data, walking up and down hilly terrain and attacking each other, all automatically. And of course each character can be customized or scripted to do specific things to get more control in the foreground.

    This demo was given at the SGI booth, the big one just as you come in. They had lots of demos from different companies throughout the day.

    The second coolest thing was some new tracking, panorama and cleanup software from a company called (I think) 2d3 or some such thing. I'll mention it to the general crowd here because it has usefulness outside of my rarified industry. They had one piece of software that would take a recording of a video camera being panned around in a circle on a tripod, and turn that into a 360 panorama. Furthermore, you could tilt up and down and it would just get whatever you shot, by continuously tracking your motion to see where you're moving. on top of that, it would use many frames of video to assemble each section, so it would have an interpolative effect and you'd get a lot more resolution out of each section of the pano than you normally would have gotten in the camera, because it's assembling multiple samples of the same thing, grabbing detail that had fallen between the pixels in one frame from other frame while you were panning across the same area. Stuff that we've all dreamed about, but never thought anyone could actually pull off. Just set your shutter speed way up to avoid motion blur and have at.

    Other than that, there were way too many crappy mocap booths and 3D printers. At least the 3D printing/rapid prototyping thing is becoming cheap(er) and more common. Soon I'll be able to print out props for costumes at reasonable cost, and then airbrush paint them.

    On a semi-related note, if you were at the BLUR studios party, you can check out my pictures of the firedancers here: http://www.mikemassee.com/firedance/ [mikemassee.com]

    --Mike

  • There were 30 job ads and 1200 resumes.
    In 1997 when movie animation reached its peak
    frenzy
    there were three jobs ads per resume.
    Disney had laid off a quarter of its animators.
    Big layoffs at DW/PDI.
    No studios on the exhibit floor.
    Gone are the days of the splashy studio parties
    in the evening.

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