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SIGGRAPH 2014 Day 1 Report

The first day of the convention started under the traditional haze of beers downed catching up with friends from the night before...

I arrived in stunning Vancouver a day early to wonderously warm weather and so wanted to scout out the Convention Center where Siggraph 2014 was to be held. I was advised to walk around Stanley Park to get a sense of the area and actually stumbled across a cricket game that made me feel right at home.

The first day of the convention started under the traditional haze of beers downed catching up with friends from the night before, but things started off in a grand way. A lecture on fractal rendering in the nebulae sequence from the film Lucy showed how serious optimization techniques were used by ILM to render the natural but extremely heavy data sets. Also as part of this lecture, Dreamworks showed off "Premo," their fantastic, artist friendly animation toolset, which seemed to make a lot of animators jealous.

After consuming over-priced, pre-packaged sandwiches, the afternoon sessions kept the pace going. A lecture on how frost was generated in Disney's Frozen showed how refraction could be tweaked in the compositing stage rather than being locked in at render time. It then seemed that every single attendee wanted to see how Animal Logic created Lego: The Movie as a brilliant demonstration of how a character with nine points of articulation brought audiences such joy. Plus how they used the (freely available) "Lego Digital Designer" to build many set models in the movie also impressed; they wanted everything in the movie to be completely true to what could be built in the real world with Lego available in the shops.

A great start to the conference with much more to come!

--

Stephen Parish
CG Supervisor
Nice Shoes Creative Studio

 

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