There were a lot of interesting talks including Stylized Rendering and real-time shaders for hair, indirect lighting and deferred rendering techniques. The big wins for me were based on asset management and pipelines. I thoroughly enjoyed talks presented by the guys from Weta Digital (asset management and tricks for handling the many jungle shots for Avatar, and their rather clever muscle system that didn't use joints or constraints), MPC's Furtility (for Wolfman, presented by my good friend Damien) and feathers (for Clash of the Titan's Pegasus) and asset management for Prince of Persia's vast city of Amalut; and the presentation by the Tippet guys for Cat's and Dogs 2's fur plus Disney Animation Studio's tree pipeline for their new feature, Untangled. Also worth mentioning is the great work presented by the Black Rock guys on Split Second, specifically Screen Space Classification and Motion Blur for deferred rendering - astounding considering they're running at 30fps. I also attended a production focus of Borderlands, an XBLA title called Monday Night Combat, and Prince Of Persia 2008, Mirror's Edge's unique look, an overview on God of War 3 presented by Sony Santa Monica and the visuals to the film How to Train Your Dragon. There was a great session on Colour Enhancement in film and games (Tri-Ace presented a film stock emulation process). Sadly I missed the 8 minute preview during the Tron:Legacy session and Pixar's making of Day and Night (though a bit of it was presented during the asset management and pipeline session earlier in the week). I was fortunate to attend a conversational talk with Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang though. Richard was interviewing Ed Catmull and stated he'd recorded some of the lectures presented by Ed regarding graphics programming and how they met plus some insights to Pixar and Dreamwork's formative years. Both confirmed to the audience the lectures will be made available online at some stage. Ed also mentioned how his early years lecturing and encounters with the guys now at Dreamwork's has in effect made them Pixar's main competitor. :)
The week included a VIP after-party with ILM (I missed the deadline to pick up my Autodesk ticket) where I had a blast. I feel honored to have shook hands with Dennis Muren and spoke to one of the presenters from Weta Digital. There was also a networking party held by Siggraph at the Bonaventure Hotel (itself a Blade Runner filming location) where I got to meet and chat to some film professionals and students who, like me were attending Siggraph for the first time. Note to self: make sure to bring more business cards with me next time!
The exhibition hall was vast! In attendance were Autodesk, Pixologic (where's ZBrush 4?!) and many hardware vendors and schools. Newtek's stand was unique though as on Wednesday afternoon they had... William Shatner and Dick Van Dyke sitting in front of a green screen and on an LCD screen above them they were matted into scenes featuring the Enterpise bridge and scenes from Mary Poppins. Simply brilliant! Pixar's booth was in the middle and on that note, I had the good fortune to pick up two Renderman wind-up teapots. The queues for both were insanely long and everyone who walked by couldn't believe people were queuing up for a piece of plastic!
The Emergent Technology hall was full of new ideas and conceptual pieces. I saw Sony's Autostereoscopic display (it was running a variant of Break-Out/Arkanoid, a 360 display of some female models, melons and dogs) and a sound controlled hologram display (the vendors were working with Disney, so sepculate away!) and interesting uses for optic-fibre.
I have one last thing to add to my Siggraph entry: I was rather disappointed with the game papers presented. It covered three 1.5 hour sessions and after 10 papers I came away wondering if there was too much academic focus and the need to provide quantitative data for the project no matter how tenuousness it was to "games". The areas studied had little relevance to the games industry and appeared to extended to every day activites through a game framework: competitive jogging with two people over a great distance, for example, Europe and Australia; a variant on Bust'a'Move to improve people's muscle control who suffer from "foot drop", a neuro-logical condition after say, a stroke (the speaker found the current systems in place weren't engaging enough); or simply attaching 4 WiiMotes on a person's limbs to get vibration and sound feeback in a visual-less environment. Only three papers had any real connection to the games industry: , PADS: Enhancing Gaming Experience Using Profile-Based Adaptive Difficulty System and Designing Entertaining Educational Games Using Procedural Rhetoric: A Case Study.
PADS appeared to be a variant of Valve's AI Director so it would be interesting to see if anyone uses the approaches from that paper. Design Patterns' case studies looked at many games though one was centered on Assassin's Creed 2. To be perfectly honest, all of the data gathered from the study could have been gleaned from Eurogamer's 6 page analysis of Assassin's Creed 2 that provided a wealth of information that was certainly qualitative and quantitative (story, design choices based on playtest "heatmaps", etc)! For Designing Entertaining Educational Games the speakers took to designing a game centred around management of the Earth's natural resources in an RTS framework, "Super Energy Apocalypse". They threw zombies into the mix as they eat the pollutants of the city and thus generate more pollution. Meanwhile, the player needs to gather resources to build and power homes and weapons to defend against the zombies which also add pollution to the atmosphere. While players certainly enjoyed the game (it scored #126 out of 19,000 games) it did highlight an educational aspect with one player stating they didn't realise solar-powered devices didn't work at night.
The moderator called for submissions though I must say that based on the papers presented this year, Siggraph will have to do harder to engage the games industry rather than pander to universities. Maybe they should contact gaming websites for submissions!
As I said at the start of this entry, the experience was rewarding on many levels. Now all I have to do is collate our findings and write up a report and whip up a presentation. Aside from that, the next week will be back to R&D and tools development.
