TheBigPixel

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.