Was good to head back to SIGGRAPH after missing last year’s action. Checking out the latest technical research, getting a glimpse into big Hollywood animation productions and just generally connecting with interesting folks always makes the trip worthwhile.

The dedicated game “pre” event, Sandbox, was a bit of a let down this year. Having built momentum over the past couple of years, it was sad to see things hit a lull - especially given the event was in Los Angeles, home of many vibrant game industry folks. Regardless, I’m very excited for next year, as the Sandbox elements will be more properly integrated with SIGGRAPH itself. They’ve already got their 2009 call for participation up!

As for the main event, well, there is really just way too much to see and do. SIGGRAPH is a big event, with lots of stuff going on. The new/emerging tech area is always a curious space, and contrasts nicely with the commercial expo floor. Ditto for the hands-on nature of the “Studio”, where folks can play with the latest tools and tech.

In terms of contribution, I had the honor of participating in three session:

  1. An “in the trenches” panel within Sandbox
  2. A “birds of a feather” session, where I basically rehashed my “reason’s why the industry doesn’t suck” article
  3. A “special event” panel session in the monster 3000 person keynote auditorium on user-generated content (admittedly, we didn’t come close to filling it up :(

In an attempt to experiment in the user-generated content panel, I got a volunteer from the audience to serve as a fellow panelist, as well as asking for volunteers to “graphically record” our discussion up on stage. While the volunteer panelist from the MS Flight Sim team was a major boost, the artists were not quite as talented as I was hoping for (given the SIGGRAPH art crowd). Here’s what was produced:

Anyway, here are some quick shots from the trip.


Katie Salen delivers an inspiring closing keynote to Sandbox.


A somewhat subdued demo zone during the closing reception for Sandbox.


Drew Davidson (CMU ETC) and Katie Salen checking out some of the game demos.


Ken Perlin (NYU) honored with the much deserved Computer Graphics Achievement Award.


Worth the price of entry: Ed Catmull gives an awesomely transparent talk on how animated movies are made at Pixar - mainly from a team process and company culture point of view.


New Tech Demo: Cool robot stuff in the tech demo area.


New Tech Demo: No clue what this is, but captivating just the same.


New Tech Demo: An interactive pillow display thing.


New Tech Demo: An interactive tabletop display ecosystem thing.


New Tech Demo: Funky digital art.


New Tech Demo: Uh, gotta interact with this to make any sense of it…


The Studio area was always bustling with action.


Chris Hecker (Maxis) gives a sneak peak of his Spore procedural animation lecture during the Papers Fast Forward preview session.


Concept artists drawing live during the Autodesk party.


Seat of truth! Or, some kind of advanced facial mo-cap system.


Catherine Owens gave an inspiring look into the production of U2 3D. Stereoscopic display being one of the major themes of this year’s conference.

 


Appropriately, all the “3D” content in the pipe requires a nice of array of glasses to match.

 


Vanilla Ice performs at the Softimage ICE launch party.

 


The Computer Animation Festival ran all week at the massive Nokia Theater.

 


Star Wars: The Clone Wars director, Dave Filoni, and ILM visual effects supervisor, John Knoll, came out (along with their storm trooper entourage) to chat about the making of the movie prior to its advance screening for the SIGGRAPH crowd.