SIGGRAPH 2007: Day 2
Sun Cafe
Animators cannot survive on courses and papers alone, so they must eat now and then. There is a food court at the Convention Center, but it’s way over-priced and has an impossible line at peak times. You can’t really haul food around since you’re carrying too much stuff anyway. Luckily, there are dozens of restaurants within a few blocks. The Gaslight District is covered with them all the way up 5th Avenue. For breakfast, I found the Sun Cafe. This is your classic, greasy-spoon diner that has been around for most of the previous century. It retained most of its original fixtures, which all look tired but functional. The place was clean, but the crust between the cracks and crevices had layers that would excite a geologist. The whole place would make a texture painter faint from sheer joy.
The world can use more architecture like this.
100,000,000 Served
The conference is just plain enormous. Around 25,000 people attend from all over the world. It’s hard to relate the scope of the crowds through photographs. Some of the courses are held in rooms as large as football stadiums, if not larger. If you sat in the back, only a person with 20-20 vision could see the person speaking, and he or she would be a little-bitty speck (hence, they have large “jumbotron” style monitors in the rooms).
Siggraph entry tube. All hail the tube!
“Surf’s Up: The Making of an Animated Documentary”
This course covered all the groovy stuff from the penguin movie, from camerwork, to rigging, to water effects. They treated the entire movie as if it were really a surf documentary, complete with handheld cameras, multiple frame rates, and step-printing. Their pipeline was able to take normal animation and stretch or shrink it to hit 15 fps, 200 fps, etc. This course was in one of the “smaller” rooms and filled up quickly. The overflow room, with remote viewing, was also sold out.
Fjorg!
Where else can you see packs of Vikings walking about yelling in a strange tongue? Why, Fjorg, of course. Fjorg is a 32-hour competition between 3-person teams of non-professional animators. Within that time, they create a short film from scratch. Yes, scratch. Story, storyboard, animatic, modeling, rigging, animation, rendering, editing, and sound mix. I volunteered as a mentor and was allowed to wander amongst the teams in case they had technical questions. They were a sharp bunch and were cranking away rapidly.
(L to R) Lee Lanier, Arno Kroner (Walt Disney), Carey Richards (Westwood Online)
Sketches
There are numerous, short paper presentations that cover a wide range of technical computer graphics issues. The most impressive of the day was “Photo Clip Art” by Jean-Francois Lalonde and others. Here, holes in photos are automatically filled by appropriately hunting for similar photographs in a monster database. For example, you can erase out a car sitting on a road in a photo, and the algorthym searches through thousands of photos until it finds one that can provide pixels that logically fill in the hole in the road. Many times, the results were near perfect and the manipulation cannot be detected. Animation Theater Continued
I caught additional chunks of the theater whenever I had a few minutes. Hard to keep track of all the films. Neverthless, I was impressed by “Dreammaker” (great story), “Happiness Factory” (great imagination), and “La Marche Des Sans Nom” (nice style). My favorite for the year, however, is “El Manana” for the Gorillaz by Jamie Hewlett and Pete Candeland and the brilliant folk at Passion Pictures. Absolutely gorgeous 2D animation in a 3D environment. I don’t know how anyone can make a music video any better. (Well, maybe a few directors working for Beck). Autodesk Mega-User’s Group Meeting
Autodesk packed them into the Marriott for their annual uber-user’s group. Aside from tons of great demo reel material, they demonstrated new, cool stuff from Max 2008 and Maya 2008. Subtle but important changes to lighting and rigging left the audience cheering like only hard-core animators can. There was a cool presentation by Chrysler that demonstrated how they now use software to create virtual car fleets. The fleets are so realistic that they can be used in catalogues before the car is even built for real. Amazing. They also revealed the new Demon prototype. I’ll take two.
Yowza.
Autodesk also revealed that they had purchased Mudbox. Awesome. I hope is surplants ZBrush, which has the world’s most god-awful interface (but produces impressive work nonetheless). The most jaw-dropping bit was where ILM showed a Playblast of the helicopter Decepticon transforming. How cow. The ILM character modelers and riggers have just attained sainthood and will no doubt become the favored 3D animators of Good Lord Himself.
Autodesk Mega-Party
Autodesk rented an aircraft carrier for their shindig. Yes, that’s right - an entire friggin’ aircraft carrier. The Midway to be exact, complete with host of vintage fighters. It had to be a one of the largest machines built by mankind - there were that many people. 20-25% of the entire convention, perhaps? If I remember correctly, they had 20 bars with almost as much food plus a few DJs and flight simulators and fireworks and whatnot. At one point, the line to simply come aboard was around 4 or 5 city blocks long, with most of those attendees having marched en masse from the Convention Center. It was almost like a seasonal migration of the shy yet beautiful Geekus Laptopus. I found it strange that brave men fought and died on such craft, only to have their craft eventually turned into a floating rave for people worried that Optimus Prime would be justly represented in the latest blockbuster. Maybe the meek will inheret the Earth…
The few, the proud…
Electronic Theater Opening Night After Party
Autodesk stole the thunder from other parties that night, including this one at Augergine. It was a smallish club with maybe 4-dozen people locked in conversion or forelornly drinking a free beer. There was also the ACM Siggraph Chapters party at On Broadway, but I was too tuckered to get back there. In fact, a took a bicycle-cab to get back to where my car was parked. More tomorrow…
Um…does anybody know how to dance? No?
Okay, let’s just mill about this WWII ship thoughtfully…