Siggraph
On Tuesday I took my half-day off and went to Siggraph. Unlike previous years I didn't get the Full Conference since my employer wouldn't let me attend more than four hours of the world's most work-related conference at my own expense.
The trade show floor was the trade show floor, what can I say. The big hit was the BrightSide High Dynamic Range display. Last year it was in Emerging Technologies and was a big hit. This year they had a nice spread on the main floor and their product seems to be maturing nicely. Unfortunately their demos were mostly 8 bit linear images with very nice contrast levels, not actual HDR images. I also never got a straight answer from them about whether their graphics card drivers can actually send HDR data to the display, or whether they're faux-encoding HDR in an 8bit signal.
As occlupanid already mentioned in esc-ape, the coolest thing this year was Parasitic Humanoid, which applies electricity to your brainstem to control your balance. buttercup666 and I steered each other around with the remote control and it kicked much ass. I also got to see Andy Lomas's organic aggregation images, and he seemed pretty proud about their inclusion in this year's art gallery. I also ran into the old Tippett Studio crowd, who seemed happy to see me and brought me up on all the news. Tuesday evening I went to an ILM meet-and-greet and ended up having a very long and productive chat with a few very good people. I even spent about 10 minutes talking with Dennis Muren, who was a startlingly nice guy.
On Wednesday I came back to deliver my talk for Stupid Renderman Tricks. Here's the PDF of my slides. I ended up talking pretty fast because I was nervous, but other than that I think I did OK. I was completely outclassed at the end by a guy who wrote an interactive 3D viewer using Renderman as its front end. You could move the camera and lights, adjust shading parameters, and the buckets would refine themselves to higher levels of detail favoring the buckets with the most contrast so that the most important parts would move first. You could also change shader parameters although you couldn't reassign shaders on the fly. He demonstrated using Henson's 180 node renderfarm to interactively render ambient occlusion in close to real time. Jaws were hitting the floor all over the place.
The trade show floor was the trade show floor, what can I say. The big hit was the BrightSide High Dynamic Range display. Last year it was in Emerging Technologies and was a big hit. This year they had a nice spread on the main floor and their product seems to be maturing nicely. Unfortunately their demos were mostly 8 bit linear images with very nice contrast levels, not actual HDR images. I also never got a straight answer from them about whether their graphics card drivers can actually send HDR data to the display, or whether they're faux-encoding HDR in an 8bit signal.
As occlupanid already mentioned in esc-ape, the coolest thing this year was Parasitic Humanoid, which applies electricity to your brainstem to control your balance. buttercup666 and I steered each other around with the remote control and it kicked much ass. I also got to see Andy Lomas's organic aggregation images, and he seemed pretty proud about their inclusion in this year's art gallery. I also ran into the old Tippett Studio crowd, who seemed happy to see me and brought me up on all the news. Tuesday evening I went to an ILM meet-and-greet and ended up having a very long and productive chat with a few very good people. I even spent about 10 minutes talking with Dennis Muren, who was a startlingly nice guy.
On Wednesday I came back to deliver my talk for Stupid Renderman Tricks. Here's the PDF of my slides. I ended up talking pretty fast because I was nervous, but other than that I think I did OK. I was completely outclassed at the end by a guy who wrote an interactive 3D viewer using Renderman as its front end. You could move the camera and lights, adjust shading parameters, and the buckets would refine themselves to higher levels of detail favoring the buckets with the most contrast so that the most important parts would move first. You could also change shader parameters although you couldn't reassign shaders on the fly. He demonstrated using Henson's 180 node renderfarm to interactively render ambient occlusion in close to real time. Jaws were hitting the floor all over the place.