The annual Mecca is over. Like a good natural disaster, Siggraph97 has come and gone with its share of whirlwind marketing forces.What’s Siggraph, you say? It’s big. It’s an eclectic bag of mixed media. Foremost, it’s an organization, a bunch of people. Siggraph’s constituents include graphics professionals who use computers to aid their work. Scientists, multimedia producers, architects, computer animators, film/video compositors, engineers, visual effects artists, students, and teachers populate its varied ranks. Each year they hold an annual Siggraph convention that draws attendees from all over the globe. Appropriately it is dubbed the 24th international Siggraph conference.
This is a one-point perspective of this year’s Siggraph97 conference, which ran from August 3rd to the 8th at the LA Convention Center. No one person can really see or do all at Siggraph. It’s just too vast. Cosmic, even.
ELECTRONIC THEATER
The entertainment industry has been one of the driving forces behind’s Siggraph success. The dam probably broke right after Jurassic Park, it’s difficult nowadays to imagine a film not touched by a computer. We found a good reflection in this trend at the Electronic Theater.For a paltry forty dollars, attendees could watch clips from the year’s best in computer graphics. CG isn’t just for scientists anymore! Hollywood fare ranged from Fifth Element’s cloning sequences and Titanic’s CG extras, Hercules’ Hydra, Lost World’s dinosaurs, Santa Barbara Studio’s furry work on Werewolf in Paris, Contact, Men in Black see what I mean? Pixar had a handful of very refreshing Toy Story shorts, and let’s not forget the commercials! ILM’s EV1 ad and Digital Domain’s Chevy Baby met with applause, while Barbie’s Rapunzel commercial won some feminist hisses. Everyone’s a critic.
What better place to enjoy the Electronic Theater than the Shrine Auditorium, now and again home of Academy Award night? For the lucky few of us who attended the free preview on Monday, Joan Collins from Sony Pictures Imageworks gave the grand tour behind the scenes, and a look at the special AV equipment they dragged in from Boston to show the films. Most problematic to project on-screen was Rhythm & Hues’ "Star Trek: Experience" 65mm theme park/ride film for the Las Vegas Hilton. Though after seeing the beautiful sci-fi imagery, we had to commend the special effort to include it in the billing. Other favorites included some experimental pieces ("Mass Manipulator" "The Tapir") and some very, very short shorts (Tim Cheung’s "Gabola the Great" wonderful, wonderful). Admittedly each year Siggraph’s Electronic Theater pieces get better. Who knows what’s on the horizon?
Not everything is entertainment, or even entertaining, for that matter. The general consensus was that many of the scientific, architectural, or experimental art pieces dragged on just a hair too long. After all, his is an audience weaned on breathtaking feature film visuals.
Of course, not everything can get into the two hour presentation of select works. Many works that couldn’t fit into the Electronic Theater still got shown on smaller screens around the convention hall. Fortunately for the more thrifty Siggraph goers, three video screening rooms were provided free upstairs. Films were categorized (rides, commercials, film, architecture, yadda yadda yadda) and played continuously on all three screens.
RECRUITERS
A feeding frenzy took the news media by storm a couple years ago when CNN and its hellspwn reported record salaries for computer animators. Studios had begun populating their new CG animation departments, and kids were getting whisked away from art and animation schools with the promise of six-figure salaries. Of course, that was a couple years ago.Recruitment at this year’s Siggraph was not surprisingly tepid. Just about every animation and effects house was accepting demo reels and resumes, but the number of animator-wannabes still far outweighed the experienced and qualified candidates these studios wanted to snap up. Prospective artists waited up to three hours in line for mid-week’s Job Fair, where recruiters spoke to hopeful CG artists. Boxes and boxes of demo reels later, recruiters would sift through the rubble and pluck away the few gems.
Below at Siggraph’s career center, resumes wallpapered literally aisles and aisles of bulletin boards. There were a few posted from ex-members of Warner Digital, which just closed doors in July. Ill tidings for the effects industry? Maybe. Everyone still had hope though, crowding around the want ads and badgering with company reps. Most company interviews spilled over offsite into the surrounding hotels. Imagine: Siggraph is too big to be held within the confines of one convention center!
ELECTRIC GARDEN
On a more avant garde note, the Electric Garden sought to fill the gap between human interaction and computers. This seemed more of an Andy Warhol-ish experiment in computer science than anything. Driving and flight simulators (with some nice touches), sword fighting by motion sensors, hands-on manipulation of 3d on-screen objects, these were some of the touted installation pieces. None of them looked like the next technological trend to sweep the nation, but it’s good to know that somebody’s trying. Most demonstrations showed shortcomings of experimental virtual reality. The wide-view cockpit style flight simulators appeared the most successful but then again, we already have those commercially available. How cutting edge is that? The hands-on computer interface- just reach out and grab on-screen objects, scaling and rotating them with hand movements had a great idea in interface design but just performed too sluggishly to be really impressive. Though oh what a cure for RSI it would be!PAPERS, PANELS, SKETCHES
Missed ‘em. My badge couldn’t get me into all the events. However, the Siggraph bookstore was selling the Course notes to hardcore conference attendees. The papers, of course, were scientific papers, formally presented and prepared.Let’s not forget that graphic professionals take their work very seriously., seriously enough to release hundreds of pages of writings on technique, from simulating human behavior to modeling NURBS surfaces to warping and morphing of graphical objects (always a mouthful). Most of these hardcore scientific papers spanned all-day presentations, with notable courses on OpenGL, motion capture, Java3d, fur/hair shading, and many more geared toward the Web and VRML. Who says Siggraph isn’t cutting edge? You can bet that most technologies featured this year will work themselves into a commercial software package a few years down the road. If you can wait that long.
EXHIBITS AND MARKETING VICTIMS
Think of the exhibit floor like an electronic version of the Ripley’s Believe It nor Not museum. It’s gaudy and bright, with software vendors hawking their wares, promising snake oil solutions to your rendering problems. Hmmm.. Maybe it’s more like a more cerebral Las Vegas under one rooftop.A tradeshow is a tradeshow is a tradeshow. Where Siggraph excels, however, is in size. The LA Convention Center was filled to the brim with activity. Everyone was giving away freebies: Playstation games, T shirts, sunglasses, lots and lots of colorful brochures (many of which now wallpaper my kitchen).
The two big guns of commercial 3d animation, Alias Wavefront and Softimage, anticipated the next generation versions of their animation software. On Sunday, A|W announced at the Alias Wavefront Glober Users Association (held downtown) that the next generation software, Maya, would incorporate better tools for both character animation and dynamics, as well as an even better interface to the current Poweranimator software. Even better received was the latest real-time terraforming software, which simulated water and land interactively; standing ovations were also in order for A|W’s announcement to move Maya to Windows NT. Softimage had a similar meeting for their Twister and Sumatra products, with even more character tools for the industry’s leading character animation package.
Both Alias Wavefront and Softimage booths featured guest speakers to talk about professional uses of the software in entertainment. ILM and DreamQuest praised Alias’ deformation controls and strong dynamics used in Spawn, George of the Jungle, and Lost World. Santa Barbara Studios had the most impressive demo of fur (proprietary) rendered in Mental Ray (Softimage). Other speakers included Sega (VF3) and RGA (commercials). As the competing software packages progress, however, it’s interesting to note how similar they become to each other with each upgrade. To twist a proverbial saying, the more things change, the more they become the same.
As always, there were younger upstarts. Side Effects had an impressive demo of their very flexible Houdini software, and Newtek and Kinetix were battling out the lower end market with upgrades to Lightwave and 3d Studio Max. Newtek’s low-end video production tool, the Video Toaster, may be losing that market to the impressive Trinity Play system, which delivers broadcast quality video production for just under six grand. Various animation and effects houses (ILM, Pixar, Rhythn&Hues, Digital Domain, and others) were passing out T-shirts and gift items and snagging demo reels (funny though – at Siggraph, it feels like wearing gang colors).
The list of vendors went on and on. Siggraph attendees ARE marketing victims after all. A bag of goodies in hand, we waddled from booth to booth, catching the sights and the sounds. It’s electronic Halloween. Trick or treat!
SPECIAL INTEREST GROUPS AND THE CG-CHAR MEETING
More than a marketing blitz, Siggraph serves to unite a lot of folks together. A few people even go so far to organize their own private special interest group meetings altogether separate from the Siggraph conference in the outlying hotels. Though I managed to miss the Large Model Visualization Consortium (drat!), I did catch the CG-CHAR Computer Graphics Character Animation meeting. The CG-CHAR mailing list on the Internet, for those not in the know, is an electronic mailing list maintained by freelance animator Rick May, who also organized this year’s gathering in the Hyatt Regency. Rick May can be reached at rickmay@cinenet.net.Odd that the best Siggraph event wasn’t officially sponsored by Siggraph! The meeting had about 300 people, all of them interested in CG character animation, the hot trend in computer graphics these days. A pre-meeting social hour treated us also to Presenters from PDI (Homer 3d), Will Vinton Studios (M&M commercials), the Moving Picture Company, Blue Sky (Joe’s Apartment), and Tippett Studios (Starship Troopers) gave informal talks on their production companies.
From PDI, animation director Larry Bafia discussed PDI’s application of traditional character animation techniques to 3d. Homer3d was still as entertaining now as it was when it first premiered. PDI also did some 3d work for Batman&Robin and A Simple Wish, a good case of the special effects being better the film. Next year, they promise clips from "Ants," a full CG feature film now in production.
Jim Bresnahan and Steve Talkowski gave an excellent technical demonstration of their work on the upcoming ‘Alien Resurrection’ for Fox. In particular, they detailed the Softimage controls for the alien, which was a huge highly detailed model. Two months to model and 200MB of textures! Truly it was impressive.
Paul Franklin and Martin Costello from a prominent British animation company (The Moving Picture Company) spoke about the differences between their British facility (where they have creative input into their projects and tighter budgets) and American counterparts. Their animations was enjoyable, though their clients’ choice of music was not. Representatives from Will Vinton were far less technical and spoke more of their creative office environment than their work. They did show their Nissan barbie doll ad and a hilarious parody of it.
Jeremy Cantor from Tippett Studios raised some eyebrows with their work on the upcoming ‘Starship Troopers’ (loosely, very loosely, adapted from Robert Heinlein’s novel). In one scene, 900 alien creatures were featured on-screen. Rendering time rose up to 40 hours per frame. Now that’s impressive. Much of the creature feature looked great in its interaction between the actors and the CG characters; an excellent scene shows the alien bugs tearing the legs off a starship trooper. It’ll butt heads with ‘Alien Resurrection’ in November.
Hats off to Rick May and the CG CHAR participants for giving us the best event of the week. These presentations gave rare glimpses at parts of the production process that most folks will never see.
POST-GAME WRAP UP
That’s a single-point perspective of Siggraph97. Remember that what you get out of Siggraph is what you put into it. See as much as you can. Network with Siggraph members and volunteer at your local Siggraph chapter if there’s one available. Until then, I’d say Siggraph97 was a success. Next year it moves from sunny California to sunny Orlando, Florida. Catch you on the beach next summer. It’s all the same stuff (silicon) anyway.