Lee Lanier’s Beezle Blog

“Drat, More Rats!”

Another fine group of sketches by the “Ratatouille” group. New developments included an interactive character collision system that allowed animators to apply primitive deformers that would squish the character as if it were a soft body. The squishiness was controlled by weight maps. This allowed the rats’ bellies to lie realistically on […]

Motion Portrait

Silicon Studio presented a brand new piece of software that can convert a single digital photo into a rigged 2D facial animation system with a full range of expressions, eye movement, and fairly substantial head turns. They had me pose for a quick photo, and within seconds they had a photoreal avatar that was […]

Exhibition Hall

The exhibition hall opened today to a mad rush of attendees. Several hundred booths were filled with software companies, hardware vendors, studios, book sellers, and schools. The first task, of course, is to keep an eye out for swag. Swag - as in promotional giveaways, which can range from pens, to playing cards, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Las Vegas Strip during the day.

Hit the highway this morning. Drove straight down Interstate 15. Past Zzyzx Road. Zzyzx would make a great software name. As in “Have they ported Zzyzx to Linux yet?” But, don’t bother to check the actual road - at the end, there’s only an derelict health […]

I couldn’t resist starting up a blog with highend3d.com. I’ll be kicking it off with a week at SIGGRAPH - the most important conference in the known universe!

Luke Skywalker made a risky trip to SIGGRAPH 2005.