AWN and VFXWorld’s booth at SIGGRAPH 2004. We had the good candy. All images courtesy of AWN.

One exhibitor put it best when observing the turnout for SIGGRAPH 2004 in Los Angeles on Aug. 9-12: "You don't have the people who come to swipe their cards, but those who really need to be here." Actually, the crowd was better than expected at the Los Angeles Convention Center, with more than 28,000, including a large contingent of students. That's an increase of 4,000 from last year in San Diego.

Indeed, while the majority of the booths were small, the floor wasn't overly crowded, and it was very easy to get from one place to another. As was the case last year, the wow factor was pretty minimal, as the industry continues to cut back, consolidate and prioritize in pragmatic ways. The big news, of course, was the surprise announcement that Alias had purchased Kaydara. That overshadowed everything, including Discreet's unveiling of 3ds max 7, Houdini's announcement about Houdini 7 in public beta, the new Vicon MX MoCap cameras and Softimage's price slashing of XSI. Not surprisingly, a number of artists beamed that the MoCap capabilities of Motionbuilder will make Maya even stronger as a character animation tool.

As for celebs at the AWN/VFXWorld booth, Ryan director Chris Landreth stopped by to say hi.

Then there was the New Zealand presence in the post-Lord of the Rings vfx landscape. First, Massive Software founder Stephen Regelous was poised to promote the launch of Massive 2.0, the artificial-intelligent driven 3D crowd animation technology with its realtime animation capabilities and responsive digital stunt agents. Plus there was the preview of CATMuscle from Character Animation Technologies, the invaluable muscle deformation system. Meanwhile, New Zealand effects house Albedo had interesting news: it was tapped to contribute 3D digital environments and matte paintings to the forthcoming vampire flick, Perfect Creature, produced by Darclight Films and The New Zealand Film Commission.

But that wasn't all. I found myself having lunch at a little Mexican haunt with Bay Raitt, the famed creature facial lead on The Lord of the Rings movies, and Pixar co-founder and RenderMan guru Dr. Steve Upstill. It seems the two have formed a new 3D studio, Box Rocket Animation, with Upstill based in Wellington and Raitt in Seattle. They are just getting started and are very excited, but have nothing to report at the moment. However, Raitt observed that it's interesting to see who's up and who's down after being away for so long in New Zealand, and suggested that the coming of the CG auteur should shake things up before we know it.

Speaking of celebrity sightings, I also ran into Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow director Kerry Conran. He was not only there to help tout SensAble's haptic tools for simple touch-enabled 3D modeling, but was also scouting some of the latest software to improve his previs capabilities, as he goes into preproduction on A Princess of Mars. It was nice of both Kerry and Chris Landreth (Ryan) to stop by our booth to say hi.