TheBigPixel

SIGGRAPH - Day 4.1

The Matrix sketches session was AWESOME!! The level of effort put forth to digitally double actors in the movie is incredible. People actually gave a damn and pushed to do "the right thing" and the result is nothing short of incredible.

First off the production house, ESC teamed up with Surface Optics in San Diego to measure the BDRF of the clothes tht the actors wore. They used a $200K scanner developed for the military for designing the radar absorbing coatings of various stealth fighters. And why did ESC get the hook up? Because the scientists kids loved the Matrix. Who'd guessed. :-)

They used nothing but textures to capture the actors expressions. No 3D animation was harmed in the making of the faces. They shot the actors with hi-res Sony HD cams and use lightflow techniques to build animated textures for each actors expression.

Next they uses a Arius 3D scanner to get the a 100 micron scan of the actors faces to get pore and wrinkle detail. Map that to the animated face textures. Do a little lighting magic with a perfect grey sphere and some HDRI mapping in mental ray -- voila! Instant Burly Brawl. Piece of Cake :-)

SIGGRAPH - Day 4

Today is Sketches and Applications day. I went to the Weta and Hulk sketches. We got to see how Weta lit all the important people in LOTR:TTT and how they did Treebeard. I thought they had only used iniatures in the flood scene. Turns out they had a animatronic Treebeard, they used in various shots and had to recreate his beard, which turned out to be harder than it seems.

Wedged inbetwen WETA and Hulk was a presentation by Digital Domain on the old vs young Micheal Jordan, Nike commercial. The coolest thing in it was the vertex to UV mapping piece. They mapped UV textures to model space and it allowed them to wiggle and stretch the skin under artistic control.

After lunch... The Matrix's secrets revealed!!

SIGGRAPH - Day 3

Today was a moderately serene day. I went to the "Simulating Nature" course and the "Large Displays for Commodity HW". But their definition of commodity started at about $100K. I feel cheated. The simulation coures was nice, Jos Stam is always doing impossible things, Ebert and Muscgrave are simply legends in the "making things look natural" field. So the morning course was very good.

After leaving the Large Display course I returned to the Exhibit floor, scored much cool swag and got to see lots of interesting tech. Pixar was showing off Renderman (just PRMAN) running on a G5 (one of only 2 on the floor). Saw a great demo from a company called Allegorithmic that has software that lets normal artists build procedural texture maps, edit them artistically and they remain procedural. Nice

Web based 3D has boomeranged with a vengence. ManyOne, SecondLife and others were out on the floor. Mark Pesce has been reduced to writing books about DirectX video..... geez. As an early adopter of VRML and a beta tester for the late great Cosmo Worlds, all i can say is it is about friggin' time.

Other cool things: 3D printers were thick as thieves on the floor and they were priced below H2's. On demand fabrication here we come! A company that projects video on a piece of glass that was brighter than a normal rear projector ala Minority Report ads.

Later that evening we went to the Electronic Theatre to check out the cream of the crop in computer animation. This years theatre was a lot more sedate than 2002. The years best of show was "Eternal Gaze" by Sam Chen. It is based on a quote by the 20th century sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who said - "The difference between the living and the dead is the gaze...". It was both creeoy on poignant at the same time. I guess the good art whacks you in the stomach at least once while viewing it, Sam succeeded.

The other memorable animation was about DNA. How it folds in upon itself to form a double helix (there three previous sub-twistings before you get to the helix part) and an animation of DNA getting replicated. I have read about this many times, but to actually see it animated remined me of all the important things computer animation can do besides bringing Tolkien to life. Mankind''s ability to use tools to further civilization makes the transhumanist in me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

All in all a very cool day.

Tomorrow: Treebeard, The Hulk, Emerging Tech, The Matrix and the Renderman User Group Meeting!

SIGGRAPH - Day 2.2 (Party!!)

All I have to say is that the Chapters party was incredible. The comimitee that planned this one knows what makes a great party. There was dancing, plenty of libations and much fun to be had by all. Never having been to the Chapters party, it was a great beginning.

The club we were at had a unique background -- On Broadway's building used to be a bank. So down in the basement there was a vault, an honest to god, walk inside hunk of steel. It was one of those cool round ones with see through locking mechanisms and the bolts eminating from the edges of the door. The inside was a large pool room with couches and plenty places to snuggle and talk. There many other themed rooms, one was an Indian themed room with a large multi-armed woman in tiles in the floor. I even have photographic proof that geeks can dance!

We left about 12:30, but my friends, Brandon and Marshall said it went on until last call at 2AM. If you ever come to SIGGRAPH and like to party, the Chapters one is a definite must attend!

Tomorrow: Simulating Nature, Large Scale Commodity Displays and the all important Electronic Threatre.

SIGGRAPH - Day 2.1

Just got back from the ILM special session. Most groovy! We had four animators / animation directors tell us what made them passionate about animation. A common thread was the fact they did things when they were kids. Either stop motion with a Super-8 camera or real mini movies. It made me remember that technology is only part of good movie making.

The coolest thing we got to see (outside af Dan Taylor's home movies) was Ang Lee doing mo-cap for the Hulk. He did several *emoting* scenes and the smashing of the tank. I guess there is now no excuse for a performance not being exactly what the director wants, since we can just mocap the director.

I am off to the SIGGRAPH Chapters party... Hopefully much partying will be had for all!

SIGGRAPH - Day 2

This morning I went to the IMAX theatre in Balboa Park. There was a course on Visualization for Large Spaces. I got to see many cool examples of IMAX style shows for various theatres arounf the US. We also got a presentation from Sky-Skan, one of the grandfathers of planetarium projection. They were showing off their realtime sky visualization software, running at QXGA resolution on a laptop. Very cool. Evans and Sutherland also showed off their realtime system for replacing the laser light shows. The first clip had Pink Floyd's "The Wall", goose-stepping hammers. So much for revolutionizing the laser light show :-)

The last presentation was from the people at the Hayden Planetarium, in NY. They had a piece of their "Are We Alone" show. There were simulations of planetary phenomemnon from people all over the world, seamlessly blended together for an awsome presentation. According to the presenter this was stuff that took days to render on 1000 processor systems.

It seems that planetariums are emerging as a new entertainment center. I hope we can squeeze in a bit of science while we are at it.

I am off to the "Building Interactive Spaces" course. Augmented reality here I come!!!

SIGGRAPH - Day 1.1

Just got back from the @Alias party and once again Duncan was a "Maya tease". All cool, realtime manipulation fetures that may never make it into the product. (I stilll want my Design Tape) This was their 20th anniversary and we got a t-shirt with all the movies Maya has been used in.

The only other thing I went to this evening was the Games Deconstructed 2002 - Special Session. They profiled 3 hit games of 2002 and the challenges they faced . They profiled Neverwinter Nights, Splinter Cell and Sly Cooper and the Thevius Racoonus. It was a most excellent panel on the real world problems that face games developers in making a great title.

The other cool thing I found out is that SIGGRAPH will be producing a DVD of most of the sessions in certain rooms that contains full motion video and synchronized slides!!! This is GREAT. SIGGRAPH has rolled tape on many cool sessions and has never made them available to the members (modulo copyright concerns of course) for any amount of money. I am glad the worry of me missing a really cool Course, Paper or Tutorial has been lessened a bit. I hope it is a success and they keep it going.

Thats it for Sunday. Tomorrow - IMAX, ILM and Chapters Party -- Oh my!

SIGGRAPH - Day 1

This is the first official day of SIGGRAPH 2003. My plans were to get camera passes for the Dallas chapter and Troy (since is playing newbie). Then off to a meeting with Alias Wavefront.. uh.... @Alias for the executive board of AGUA (Alias Global Users Association). We had lunch and discused having another meeting (arrrrrg... meetings!!) with Nathania Bolt at @Alias to decide on a direction for the users groups.

After that I got to do something fun...... Go to the Renderman course. This year would be especially tasty since Pixar is "tripping the lights fantastic" with "Finding Nemo". The amount of light play in that movie was incredible. From the caustics in the interplay of the water to the iridesence of the coral reef.

When I got there the next topic was very interesing -- "Fish Guts". I thought to myself "What the heck are they going to talk about?". Well it turns out that lots of fish are translucent and you can see their "gut bag". This was an artistic detail lost on me.

"Would not rendering the fish guts hurt sales of Disney toys?" "Do we really need that level of realism?" "Would the kids notice?"

Well, I guess thats why I am a programmer and not an artist.

SIGGRAPH - Day 0

Saturday was a big Chapters workshop. Marshall, Brandon and I are going to try and re-invigorate to Dallas chapter so we figured we should go.

I was a very cool meeting. We got to talk to people from around the world and talk about how Chapters can help promote the conference. Another good presentation was about how to reduce the load for webmaster producing content. For chapters like the LA one, with over 1000 members, the website is a lot of work. The presenter was from the Montreal chapter which publishes their site in English and French!! So it is doubly hard for them. The solution they suggested was Plone . Plone is an open source CMS written mainly in Python. (One way or another, I'm gonna have to learn it) It has a huge community and has dozens of modules available for it. I believe we will be trying it out for Dallas SIGGRAPH.

There was also the announcement that ACM SIGGRAPH would be homoginizing their logo due to the cost of having radically different designs each year. This generated a lot of comments during the meeting. Most were along the lines of "there are a bunch of graphic artists in SIGGRAPH, we should be able to do a 'low cost' logo". At first I agreed, then I realized all the signage and paperage at the convention and the cost that must generate each year. So I hope we can have a member contest each year for the t-shirt and pins so we dont become too boring an organization.

Toward the end we got a tour of the convention center and a cool t-shirt. I am looking forward to the Chapters party Monday night. Whew! All day meetings.... I thought I got out of those when I left work to go to this convention.

Tomorrow: Media passes and Renderman. Woo Hoo!

Life is Good

On the way back from Austin last weekend, I was listening to the Talking Heads song "Once In A Lifetime" and thinking -- this is so like my life right now. Lots of things happening to me that I wasnt expecting, but all working out in the end. Compared to a lot of folks I have a positively mundane existance (nothing like AccordionGuy's life.

I have a beautiful house, a dog, a picket fence and a wonderful spouse. But right now my life is in a bit of flux. Some of it is because of work, some due to this crazy group of guys and lot to due with #joiito. In the relative scale of my life they are rather large changes, so I have been approaching them carefully. Joey daVilla has a great metaphor for life, involving trucks, crazy men and fathers Its about time I grabbed the wheel and did some Indiana Jones stuff..... But still keep in mind that right now -- life is good.