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SIGGRAPH 2001
Morgan McGuire writes "SIGGRAPH 2001, the graphics industry's main scientific conference and gathering for artists, film producers, researchers, and game developers, just ended.
I wrote up my experiences as a game developer/researcher at the conference for flipcode." Lots of stuff for those of us who wish we could go every year and see the pretty pictures. Hits on Shrek, Monsters, Inc. and a variety of new techniques floating around.
Maybe it's intentional.
Let all the FPs get got well in advance and easily, and you take all the challenge and fun out of getting FP.
A little applied psychology at work.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
No mention of Game Programming Gems 2 which was supposed to debut at the show...
[o]_O
Is it just me, or is the new slashcode buggy as a MoFo? I'm getting missing titles on stories, internal server errors, and all sorts of silly things. Something tells me the newest slashcode was not ready for prime time yet.
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
I keep finding out about these really cool events that I just can't afford to get to.
Ah to be stinking rich and reasonably idle.
BlackNova Traders
I'm finding it similarly bad. Be patient, though. They're fixing it as fast as they can. We're testing it in ways that they never anticipated, and at a faster rate.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Not a mention of that piece of garbage Lunix anywhere.
This year there were signs posted here and there in the conference center saying that all the paper presentations, some panels and courses would be put online. They had their video crew recording them.
The address is http://online.siggraph.org
This is the first i've heard of this movie, and the main character looks like he'll be coo-razy to render.
In addition to the wealth of knowledge you can get from the conference, the contacts you can make in the industry are worth the price of admission. Where else can you get a class taught by Jim Blinn?
Where are we going and why am I in this handbasket?
In re: the "panel" (which was not) between gamers and scientists... I work with visualization (*yawn*) and other "scientific" apps... though I was the first to bring 7 megapixel (150" diagonal) quake3 to our lab ;). The truth is, the annoying thing from a research perspective is that there _have_ been huge strides made in the last 5 years or so, thanks to the gaming market (which in terms of people is probably 4 or 5 orders of magnitiude larger, while monetarily "only" 3-4). The agravating part is that despite these leaps, they're not completely focused on the things that "matter" in research. E.g... your average quake3 map requires rendering less than 100 polygons (for the background, at least... throw in another 1000 max for characters) with huge textures... aka... fill rate. Your average scientific display requires 100,000 polygons (minimum... most of the data I see is between 300,000 - 5,000,000 (that's million, not thousand), but with no texturing at all. The difference in a consumer card (Geforce 2, say) and a so-called "professional" card (Quadro 2) is now only a few hundred (ok, maybe 500) dollars... nowhere near the few thousand it used to be. But it's still there, and it doesn't look like it's getting any closer. Still, that's a huge improvement over even a year or two ago. My boss has a FireGL card in one of his machines... it can do 10 - 20 times the number of polygons per second of a Geforce 2 GTS... but in UT, at 1024x768... it only gets about 30 fps. But that card was 1500 dollars just a year ago... and three years ago, it would've required an SGI for 10K+ to beat a consumer card like that in polygons.
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
What I find really sad is the fact that now the internet is mainstream, web and video technologies are available to anyone that wants to play with them, and now we're talking about THE graphics show and multimedia experience, and there's still no webcasting of events or a centralized press release/video depository of events.
:) ) might need just that little boost.
/web technician and voala... if Newtek pulled it off for their booth (and I am sure they aren't the only company who did that), why can't siggraph itself do something like that? Just an Idea.
You have to go to EACH companies's siggraph website (that's when they take or have the time/staff to do so and not everybody running around fixing last minute issues).
I was locked on Newtek's streaming event for a while and was thinking to myself "god, that would have been so cool having a reporter on the floor going from companies to companies, webcasting all day, and a place with different archived video of reports for me to check, by companies" you know, something SIMPLE compared to the whole organisation needed to make such a show a reality.
Don't get me wrong, this isn't a siggraph bashing, I'd LOVE to attend the show once in my life, but also, since it's so BIG and all the major announcements for the next 6 months are happening there, and the fact that industries that pushes visual technologies are represented there in an "international show", I don't understand why in 2001 we still don't have that simple technology available to make this event even bigger.
To get the most attendee possible without people thinking "I'll stay home and watch the show"? I don't think it would cut in the attendance, because people that WANT and can afford to go there won't be satisfied with a webcast, but people who WISHED they were there at least will have a glimpse...Probably even potential people that might want to go the year after because they can feel the atmosphere (with good reporting
Cost? That also I wouldn't agree, one word: Advertising... want traffic? tell me that wouldn't bring any traffic to their site? They could get their extra troubles easily refunded with that, plus even generating more money. The siggraph.org web site looks so.... dunno... dull maybe? Pictues/companies PRs/video would give it more life.
Anyways I'm sure they could have pulled this off easily, one webcasting server, 1 camera man, one reporter and one video editing/archiving
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Mechanical trick? Alien virus? Nope, the black oil is a ferrofluid, a suspension of regular oil and magnetic micropowder.
A quick glance at the site was rather informative. Hey! Do an article on ferrofluids or something. They look like they'd be incredibly fun to play with.
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
that I've seen at SIGGRAPH is this one (stolen from today's memepool).
Some startlingly beautiful images are obtained by mixing a magnetic fluid suspension and some electromagnets. It's pretty damn neat, IMHO.
Brant
Argle. Bargle.
Was just me, or was Siggraph much smaller this year? I've been going for over 10 years, and just seemed as though there weren't as many people and vendors. Side Effects (Houdini) wasn't there, and Disney also pulled out at the last minute. I think everyone I ran into mentioned it was a much calmer show than previous years.
Also - the level of technical advancement seems to be leveling off. In the past, my jaw always dropped at least once during the show. The NVidia/Square realtime Final Fantasy was cool, and there was a nice IBM 600dpi monitor, but that was about it. Outside of a few things (ExLuna, for one) no huge software releases, either. Mostly incremental improvements.
Perhaps it's to the point where the technology is getting "good enough" (relative term, I know...) The only things that really made my jaw drop was the content itself. In the Electronic Theater, I'd see a really good film, then the credits would list just one person... Jaw drop. Pretty amazing how far it's all come.
Even though this years Siggraph was smaller than previous ones, the science was pretty impressive. There were some cool demos of a variety of items, but one of the best ones was the haptic interface demonstrated by a bunch of graduate students. They had a salt water layer on top of oil (immiscible liquids you know) and the haptic device would let you go through the water but not the oil. You could in fact write you name on the oil but not go through. Very cool with lots of applications in surgery and other environments along with virtual representations of those environments. However the most impressive technology was a project with Intel and Stanford where they addressed the graphics bottleneck issue in distributed computing by utilizing the resident graphics boards in each of the parallel systems and they got them to asynchronously process and output the graphics data thus achieving good graphics throughput on low cost distributed systems. The folks at SGI have got to be scared silly.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Well, the SIGGRAPH 2001 website has already posted some pictures from some of the venues here:
SIGGRAPH 2001 photosSIGGRAPH also had a TV camera crew walking around the Convention Center so probably in the near future they will put up some clips up. I also took quite a bit of pics for a website, ilmfan.com, but since I use "analog" 35mm it'll take me some time to put up a report ;-)
I can't believe that the Slashdot geeks are tarnishing their name so much.. no one has mentioned the "2001 in 2001: How a Film Inspired Our Future" session on Friday.
We had Robert Abel, the inventer of slit scanning (remember the 4th Doctor Who opening?) who produced the graphics for the final 1/3 of the movie (the Jupiter sequence). There was Syd Mead, the person who designed the look of Blade Runner and 2010. There was also Peter Hyams, director and photographer of 2010 and other (crap) films (End of Days), and Dennis Muren of ILM that helped create some of the real time compositing stuff for A.I.
They talked about Kubrick a lot, but had some problems staying on topic. Syd Mead gave a great little intro to his vast array of work (including the design of cars and plane), and Bob Abel actually gave some major explainations of how different parts of the movie were done. It was my favorite thing there this year.
I'm not a graphics guy (I am a Linux admin that works for a department that teaches Maya and 3DM, so I get a free ride, it's in the budget), so SIGGRAPH isn't my major conference (that would be OSCON), but I did enjoy it.
Oh, on a final note, there were several sessions about public policy. There was a lot of talk about Dimitri, DeCSS and other IP issues that everyone here would have been proud of. ACM and SIGGRAPH are solidly against the DMCA.
"Yes.. no matter what the culture, folk dancing is stupid." -MST3K
Well, you're ignoring the massively parallel raytracing roundtable I went to, where the big Word of the Day was ``Beowulf''.
Really. Gigahertz Athlons now qualify as ``hot iron'' simply because you can Beowulf them.
I suppose they just had to IMAGINE A BEOWULF CLUSTER OF GIGAHERTZ ATHLONS mwa ha ha.
It's actually on-topic, you morons. That's why it's funny.
I got Jim Blinn's autograph. Yes, I'm a fanboy.
You might want to try looking into the Student Volunteer program as well. You get go-anywhere passes, discounted merchandise (well, some of it is dicounted), meal vouchers and they put you in a very, very nice hotel. (Westin Bonaventure for me.)
(You probably remember the SVs. We were the people in the dorky red vests...)
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
People, that was NOT REALTIME RENDERING. Really. It was OpenGL previewing. Lit, shaded, high-poly-count previewing, yes. But just a very nice preview.
The final shots had an average of ten or so layers on each frame. Not to mention that they were antialiased in the first place.
Trust me, people, it's a LONG way from being realtime.
-grendel drago
Laws do not persuade just because they threaten. --Seneca
Heard at the show:
"I'm disappointed this year. Usually, Siggraph is as big as E3, but this year, E3 was three times as big."
I remember when I visited the show in 1997 that the whole upper floor was full. The lower floor was the "startup park. This year, there was a lot of empty space on the upper floor. The periphery was a dead zone. I remember when we first exhibited at Siggraph in 1999 in Los Angeles that there were a lot more exhibitors. I think one reason Siggraph will be in San Antonio in 2002 and San Diego in 2003 is that those two venues will be smaller and less expensive than Orlando or Los Angeles.
One type of exhibitor that is totally gone is the telecom provider with high-speed access. In the past, they helped provided the high-speed datalines for the production houses that needed to move a lot of data to be edited from one country to another (London, England to Los Angles, United States). Telecom has overbuilt for the moment, and the telecom houses have no need to come to the show.
There has been a lot of consolidation in the 3d card market, with Nvidia presently looking like the winner at the top of the heap. ATI also had a presence, but Nvidia has the products and the buzz. People used to pay thousands of dollars for a video card, but that market has really declined
Apple was not there at all this year. Sun had the largest spot. SGI had the second largest spot. I'm not sure what presence SGI will have next year. SGI has always been about proprietary CPU and graphics chips, but with the Intel, Microsoft and Linux juggernaut, SGI's future looks very shaky.
Discreet, Softimage, Maya, Newtek, Maxon, Hash. What type of presence will these 3D modeling and animation companies have 2 years from now? I miss the small 3D companies like Strata, Specular and Ray Dream. I think the people who used to dabble with the lower-priced 3d programs now buy Web development programs like Dreamweaver, GoLive and FrontPage. This reminds me of how the camera market went downhill in the 80's and 90's because all those gadget people into photography turned to computers instead. With digital video and photography, I think the camera companies that have good digital products (Nikon and Canon) will bounce back (I think Kodak has serious problems though). Maybe Shockwave 3d will create a resurgence in 3d applications. Maybe Carrara will have a chance.
IBM, Compaq, HP. AMD, Intel. Who's going to be there 2 years from now? I'm surprised AMD is still putting up a fight. How about IBM's and Motorola's PowerPC. MIPS and Alpha are gone. Sparc is SUN's chip.
I like Curious Labs. I hope they do well.
I think another reason for a decline in vendors is U.S. Department of Defense spending. Evans and Sutherland was one of the pioneers in 3d simulators for the DOD, but they weren't at Siggraph this year. In the 90's they tried to break into the consumer market, but they failed.
There was a serious lack of any spiffs or giveaways this year. What's amazing is that there were so many giveaways in New Orleans last year. I think the budgets for tradeshows are set months before so the economic downturn hadn't hit the tradeshow spiff budget yet. I think that this year is also worse than last year in terms of the economy and the need to trim costs. I was able to get Swedish candy cane candy from Cycore and a superball from Intel - woohoo!!!!
I note that there are still a lot of companies still trying to get 3d content on the Web. I think it's only a matter of time before it becomes more popular. I think the main issue right now is Bandwidth. The popularity of Quake and Half-life shows that 3d over the web is viable. We'll have to wait and see more business and consumer applications. Entertainment is definitely the way to go right now with 3d over the web - maybe that's why E3 is so much bigger right now.
I still don't believe there are so many motion capture companies. I think I saw about six of them at the show. It's funny that the bigger mocap companies have professional dancers while the newer ones have a putz like me trying to show off the technology. Do I really want to see a couch potato nerd with slumped shoulders wearing a skin tight bodysuit jumping around - I think not.
Sony Imageworks had a drawing class in front of our booth, and they had a 6' 3" really buff male model disrobe so that he was only wearing shorts. I was scared he would crush me when he walked by our booth (I was glad he put his shirt back on or I would have fainted) to stretch out. I was thankful that they had a female model replace him in the afternoon.
802.11, Airport, Wireless networking is so cool. I could just sit by the wireless node and access the Internet with our Airport enabled computers. Most of the wireless notebooks were Macintoshes. The best thing about Airport enabled Mac notebooks is that the Airport card is unobtrusive with the late model G3's and titanium notebooks.
I liked the fish motion plug-in from Japan for Maya.
"Do you have a bag?!" No bags this year at Siggraph. I overheard someone picking an AMD fabric bag and exclaiming, "This bag's made in India!"
Siggraph L.A. was always nice because Los Angeles is the entertainment capital of the world. Production people from the local area found it easy to take a day off to attend the show. I wonder how busy Siggraph San Diego will be.
- There seems to be a consensus that the audio-interactive magnetic fluid piece was the most interesting thing in the art show this year (previous winners include the wooden mirror, with the raining text coming in close behind, and the computer-driven sand table). The linked reviewer thought so, as did I, as did another person I asked at SIGGRAPH.
;-)
- There weren't many teapots in the papers this year, nor were as many bunnies as in previous years. David hasn't yet moved in to replace the bunny (I saw much less of David this year than I did at his debut last year). Instead, it looks like the mesh junkies are using various other non-bunny models from Stanford. One of these days I need to make a graph of the number of teapot, bunny, etc. figures in the proceedings over time.
- Yes, it did seem a bit smaller and quieter than previously. I'm not sure why. Maybe it's a side effect of dot-com funding drying up. Normally the LA conferences draw more film industry people, so one might expect it to be bigger this year than last.
BTW, almost all of the SIGGRAPH papers are available on-line.
The following is a list of links to the various papers:
http://www.cs.brown.edu/~tor/sig2001.html
Here's approximatively what's in.
1 General programming
Optimization
DLLs
Dynamic typing
Property & Factory classes
Debugging/Profiling facilities
Stack winding, self modifying code (in asm)
Resource files
Input recording & playback
Text parsing
A tweaking UI
Random numbers
Bloom filter (hashing for early rejection)
3DSMAX exporting
Using Webcams
2 Math
IEEE floating point tricks
Vector & plane tricks
3D segment intersection
Inverse trajectory determination
Camera & flythrough pathes
Fractals
3 AI
Strategies for optimization
Micro-threads for AI (asm stack tricks)
RTS command queuing
Tile-based LOS & search
Influence maps
Strategic assessment techniques
Path finding
Fuzzy logic, NNs
4 Geometry management
VIPM methods
LOD & terrain tiles
Sphere trees, AABBs, Quadrees
Fishtank effect
Print-res rendering
Decals on arbitrary surfaces
Skyboxes
Self-shadowing
"Mario 64" 3rd person control
5 Graphics Display
Cartoon rendering
Dynamic per-pixel lighting
Procedural clouds in hardware
Faster lens flare, shadows
Impostors (replacing geometry with pictures)
Hardware-accelerated procedural texture animation (NVidia texture shaders can do cool things)
6 Audio programming
Design patterns
Voice reuse in a sample-based synthetizer
Software-based DSP effects
Interactive DSP pipelining
Music sequencers
API
Compared to the first book, I think that a lot has moved from the book to the CD which I haven't looked in detail yet.
This is also of interest to computer game players, as the techniques they have developed here will apply to NPC's nicely now that computer firepower is catching up to our ideas. WETA has been working on this software for 2+ years now, ever since they began work on LOTR.
Basically, each character on the battlefield has a node-based brain full of IF/THEN/OR type junctions. They began by showing a single human character wandering around a maze of walls and blocks. In one corner was a view of what the character was 'seeing' through it's eyes, head-bob, swaying and all. When the character got near a wall, it would stop, look around, turn and walk in another direction. All this was being done by seamlessly morphing between different sets of motion capture data. This in itself was a very nice thing, as it's usually very hard to do that completely automatically and have it look perfect.
The next step was collision detection. They put multiple characters in the maze, and they would all avoid each other, smoothly, not abruptly. After that, they put a guy on hilly terrain, and he seamlessly morphed between uphill walking and downhill walking as the terrain called for it. (heavy slow stepping uphill, shifting weight backwards downhill...)
This particular character had about 500 nodes in his 'brain'. The characters used in the movie have around 5,000 nodes. Why? Here's what else they do:
The characters can be programmed to charge at each other, and when two characters from opposing armies see each other close by, they run at each other and break out into motion capture sword fights! The sword fights are choreographed so that the mocap from one character matches the mocap from the other, so when one guy swings, the other blocks and it all works! And all of it blends together pretty damn smoothly, from one swing to another. Furthermore, each army has different mocap data. One army tends to fight with Eastern combat techniques, and another uses more European style swordplay, and they make all this work together, automatically.
On top of that, they have a randomizer. The characters will vary in size and attributes, with low and high limits being set, or in the case of shields and accesories, an on-off randomness that will determine if each instance wil have that configuration. Short characters walk faster to keep up with the taller ones, and there are several different walking datasets for more randomness. They showed an 'adventure party' of 6 Orc type characters, first without the randomizer and after with.
When I was working at Digital Domain, someone came up with a Who generator for The Grinch that made random Whoville citizens with different hats and shirts and sizes and whatnot. This is like the Who generator times 100. Really elegant stuff for in-house software. Also, it's very fast, and I believe at the show it was running under Linux. They had many characters each with a complex brain all running around at once, in realtime. Lots of characters morphing between mocap data, walking up and down hilly terrain and attacking each other, all automatically. And of course each character can be customized or scripted to do specific things to get more control in the foreground.
This demo was given at the SGI booth, the big one just as you come in. They had lots of demos from different companies throughout the day.
The second coolest thing was some new tracking, panorama and cleanup software from a company called (I think) 2d3 or some such thing. I'll mention it to the general crowd here because it has usefulness outside of my rarified industry. They had one piece of software that would take a recording of a video camera being panned around in a circle on a tripod, and turn that into a 360 panorama. Furthermore, you could tilt up and down and it would just get whatever you shot, by continuously tracking your motion to see where you're moving. on top of that, it would use many frames of video to assemble each section, so it would have an interpolative effect and you'd get a lot more resolution out of each section of the pano than you normally would have gotten in the camera, because it's assembling multiple samples of the same thing, grabbing detail that had fallen between the pixels in one frame from other frame while you were panning across the same area. Stuff that we've all dreamed about, but never thought anyone could actually pull off. Just set your shutter speed way up to avoid motion blur and have at.
Other than that, there were way too many crappy mocap booths and 3D printers. At least the 3D printing/rapid prototyping thing is becoming cheap(er) and more common. Soon I'll be able to print out props for costumes at reasonable cost, and then airbrush paint them.
On a semi-related note, if you were at the BLUR studios party, you can check out my pictures of the firedancers here: http://www.mikemassee.com/firedance/
--Mike
34,000 this year versus 45,000 in 1999.
(Alternates between CA and somewhere east.
Have to compare CA years.)
There were 30 job ads and 1200 resumes.
In 1997 when movie animation reached its peak
frenzy
there were three jobs ads per resume.
Disney had laid off a quarter of its animators.
Big layoffs at DW/PDI.
No studios on the exhibit floor.
Gone are the days of the splashy studio parties
in the evening.
appreciate it :)
[o]_O