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.

Comments

Siggraph archive available online in september

[Fruny]

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

Yep... he's a gamer.

[mikeage]

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.