Lee Lanier’s Beezle Blog

Checking In

This morning, I drove down to the gleaming white Convention Center on the ocean’s edge. I quickly stepped through self-service check-in. The SIGGRAPH folk know how to make the credential process smooth. With a thick shedule in hand, I tackled the following events and places…

Gaslight District and Convention Center

“Anyone Can Cook - Inside Ratatouille’s Kitchen”

This course covered specialized techniques used to create kitchen and cooking effects in the Pixar film. Aside from complex, physically-based, fluid dynamic recreations of soup, they managed to automate vegetable chopping, puffs of steam, stove fire, and hoards of cooking rats. Apurva Shah was the organizing speaker. Back during the days of “Antz” and “Shrek” at PDI, Apurva served as a lighting supervisor for one of my lighting groups. Good guy.

Technically, photographs are not allowed at SIGGRAPH.
Hence, no flash. Hence, Mr. Shah is very, very blurry.

Animation Theater - “Madness”

This year, the Animation Theater is divided into 7 blocks that play continuously. Each block is based on a theme and “Madness” was first up. It included my own film, “13 Ways to Die at Home.” Of the bunch, there were several good-natured, super-slick student projects from the Ringling School of Art and Design. The most memorable, however, was “Kinski Revisited.” In the trailer, they used a virtual copy of deceased German actor Kinski as a type of virtual 3D make-up for live-action scenes. The virtual Kinski “actor” was extremely convincing.

Animation Theater schedule. A rainbow of color.

eTech

The Emerging Technologies room. Think mad scientist lab with rave lighting and Burning Man audio drifting here and there. Some of the presentations gave glimpse to amazing new technology - such as Holovizio’s impressive holographic no-glasses-needed flat screen TV. Some of the presentations seemed to defy logical applications, other than they were just neato. Microsoft was there, in a little corner, mobbed by people trying to see their Surface demo (tabletop touch operating system).

eTech. Feel the love, baby.

Delicious Yet Deadly

The most impressive part of eTech was the work of a young woman named Caitlin Berrigan. She created an accurate reproduction of a Hepititus C virus in chocolate. Accurately, no less, by using molecular 3D maps and a solid printer (more on solid printers later). Why, you may ask. To raise awareness to the fact that Hep C kills 20,000 people in the US each year… ‘Nuff said.

Accurate recreation of Hep C lipid layer with 72% Belgian cocoa.

“From Shrek to Shrek the Third”

This course made interesting comparisons between each of the three Shreks and how each film brought a leap in lighting, rendering, hair, cloth simulation, etc. I was most impressed by the cloth in II and III and the fact that they standardized global illumination for III. It was worth the effort since Shrek III is definitely the best lit of the series. Although, I have to say, all the eyes in II and III are flat and dead. I’m not sure where they went wrong after I. Neverthless, it was great to see all the old PDI co-workers who have moved up the ranks (David Doepp, Scott Peterson, Bill Seneshen, and others). Bit of trivia - me and Bill Seneshen, now head of character effects, started at PDI on the same day in 1996. Oh man, I gettin’ old…

“Siggraph Village.” Buy a T-shirt. Grab some lunch.
Use that 10 lb. laptop you’ve been dragging around.