SIGGRAPH 2005

Yesterday, I lost my "SIGGRAPH virginity," as the computer geeks say. It was my first trip to the conference of conferences in the computer graphics world. Well, hardly a trip I suppose, being that I am in Los Angeles these days. Although, the insanity on the Los Angeles freeways traveling between the tranquil confines of Marina Del Rey to the ugly core of the city has got to count for something! 10 lanes of freedom baby! I had the afternoon off from production on "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" to head to the Los Angeles Convention Center to check out all the latest whizzle shnizzle from both the software vendors and the companies represented at the conference. All in all, not a bad way to spend the afternoon. However, I have to say if I heard the phrase "and all these eye-popping fantastic bug-free features for only 795 US doh-lairs!" one more time I think my head would have exploded. I suppose that if you go to your first SIGGRAPH conference after 9 years of experience working in computer graphics, the latest of the latest of the button pushing doesn't quite grab you in a way it once did! Of course, there were a ton of impressive innovations. So, I suppose I should mention a couple.

I was really impressed with a demo of the camera and 3D mapping tools in Digital Fusion compositing software by Eyeon Software Inc. The ease of creating a pseudo 3D environment from stills with which you could create realistic, believable camera moves was a pleasure to see from an artist's standpoint. Not at all a complex "wow, look at that!" type of feature, just a truly useful and direct way to make images. What a great tool for ease of creating matte paintings! When I was at The Moving Picture Company we had a nifty MEL script that exported simple geometry in a script file that could be read into Shake to allow mapping of images on "3D planes." But, it was a bit clumsy and took a lot of fiddling in a non-artistic way to get the results. The Digital Fusion system seemed really direct and easy to set up some complex multi-planing images. Still, I am not a Digital Fusion user, so I could have just been impressed by all the flashy-flashy of the demo.

The other software I thought looked useful and impressive was ZBrush by Pixologic. I guess this is new to me being that I am not a real modeler, but still it seems to be another tool that was pushing the "intuitive envelope." Direct artistic access being the theme. Although it looked like the results were somewhat "impractical" from a production standpoint, in that they were invariably massively dense, there relative ease of creating detail and quickly fleshing out a model seemed extraordinary. I got the impression that a lot of folks were using this tool as a way to make high resolution models for illustration or concept art. Pretty nifty!

And, of course, it was cool to see the latest that the Massive Software people were developing. I will have to get my hands on a copy of Massive to learn a bit more about it. It was also funny to be sitting at the Massive booth watching a 10 meter tall floating head of Jordi Bares talking about how great the software was... Jordi is omnipresent! Being able to realistically manufacture and orchestrate crowd animation is such a huge component of computer graphics work both large and small these days that the contribution Massive has made to the medium can not be underestimated.

I suppose that the best thing about going to the exhibits was running into people I have worked with in the past and not seen for a while. The craziest thing happened when I pulled out my phone to give my buddy Blake a quick call (he is setting up his own boutique studio in Los Angeles and I wanted to see how he was doing) and literally as I said hello he said "dude I am looking right at you!" So weird! And that was my first SIGGRAPH!