In This Article

Page 1: Siggraph Intro and Featured Speakers
Page 2: 2007 Autodesk User Group Meeting
Page 3: Interview with Softimage
Page 4: Allegorithmic Interview
Page 5: Animation Theaters and Electronic Theater
Page 6: Emerging Technologies
Page 7: Other Events
Page 8: Anecdote - The Tale of the Expired License

Siggraph Intro and Featured Speakers

On Tuesday, Joe Marks, the conference chair, welcomed everyone to the conference and spoke of some notable additions to this year’s events including the FJORG! Event and the week’s featured speakers.

He also spoke about the various committee’s intent to embellish the conference events by curating specific projects in order to increase the quality of the submissions and quoted, “Curate to be great” as a mantra for the various committee chairs.

Who will be the “Viking Animator?”

The FJORG! event is being called an “iron animator” competition, which pitted teams of animators to create and animate a scene in 32 hours. The animation needs to be based on a theme which was announced at the kick-off of the competition. At the conclusion of the competition, a jury will announce which team has earned the title of “Viking Animator” and award prizes from the sponsors: Dreamworks Animation, AMD and HP.

To drum up support for the competitors, teams of student volunteers run around the show halls shouting “FJORG” while wearing plastic Viking hats with horns sticking out of each side. Conference attendees can watch the animations as they are being created via video monitors that show both the animations and the animator's screens simultaneously.

Regarding the competition, Joe Marks commented that he received an emergency call at 4 AM in the morning crying that the FJORG teams had run out of coffee, a problem that was quickly remedied.

The Featured Speakers

Another big change for Siggraph 2007 was the replacement of a single keynote speaker with several featured speakers. Joe Marks mentioned that it was difficult to find a single speaker of interest to the entire Siggraph community since so many varied and distinct industries are represented.

Instead, three featured speakers would speak throughout the week to present industry specific coverage that was of more interest to the various represented groups. Featured speakers for this year’s conference were Glenn Entis, Senior VP for EA Games, for the commercial industries; Graphic novelist, Scott McCloud, was selected to present to the art community, and Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, Director of the Center for Brain and Cognition, was selected to address the academic contingency. Vilayanur S. Ramachandran’s presentation, however, had to be canceled due to a death in the family.

Video Game Challenges

The first of two featured speakers at Siggraph 2007 was Glenn Entis, Senior Vice President for EA Games. Glenn also is one of the founders of Pacific Data Images (PDI), an early pioneering studio in 3d animations. He spoke of the various thrills that he’s seen over the years of attending Siggraph. Throughout the years, there has always been one or two key films, technologies or demonstrations that provided a unique thrill to the attendees that seemed to dominate the conversations for the week such as raytracing and fractals, which amazed everyone when it was first introduced.

Creating these thrills is what drives us to do what we do and these thrills can come in the form of 1. Characters, 2. Worlds they inhabit, or 3. Tools used to create the characters and worlds.

There are 3 phases to the problems we face in computer graphics. The first phase is to ask what and how, represented by a question mark (?), the second phase is to determine what to do with it, represented by an exclamation point (!), and the third phase is to make money on the thrill through commoditization, represented by a dollar sign ($). During this final phase, some of the thrill tends to fade as we being doing the same thing over and over again.

As examples of these phases, he cited how PDI was paid thousands of dollars per second for broadcast graphics spots like flying logos. This enabled them to build the studio one job at a time. With 3 major networks vying for attention, this phase was easy, but as cable introduced 500+ channels, the work was commoditized and prices dropped aggressively forcing PDI to move on to commercials and music videos to find the new thrill. An example of the thrill found here was the morphing used to create Michael Jackson’s Black and White music video.

Morphing was an amazing technology when it was first introduced, but as everyone started to do it, it moved from amazing to interesting and finally to the commonplace, mass production problem.

Glenn then moved on to show how real-time graphics and games became the next area where you could find thrills. From the early days of Siggraph, real-time graphics was like a country cousin lacking the visual fidelity of the other technologies. This was evidently shown using some quick calculations. Games are shot at 60 fps or 216,000 frames per hour, and run off a $400 console, but films are rendered at 24 fps or 86,400 frames per hour on a $3000 renderfarm, so games require rendering 72,000 times faster than what is rendered for film and if you consider the price/performance difference of 540,000. This points to the fact that games are clearly a commodity problem or how can you get rendered pixels faster and cheaper.

This is evident showing a slide of content from 1982 that showed the visual difference between a live action corvette shot vs a CGI shot for Tron and a video game shot of Pacman. Clearly the visuals involved in video games was significantly inferior to other medias at the time.

All graphics benefit from Moore’s Law, which defines the rapidly increasing visual acuity from year to year. However, real-time graphics gets a second ride because the consoles get more powerful as well. This was shown using a video of the Need for Speed franchise from 1997 to 2006. The difference is incredible over not to many years.

Real-time graphics will never be as powerful or as polished as non-real-time graphics, but the gap is closing. As the visual gaps are closed, the new challenges emerge. One such problem is dealing with what a Japanese researcher calls the “Uncanny valley.” This problem states that if you plot emotional response to a character verses its realism, the graph increases linearly, but at a point where the characters approach realism, the emotional connection drops off dramatically. Another way to look at this is to plot motion fidelity vs. visual fidelity and any game that drops below the line loses its appeal. This line is called the “Zombie Line,” or the point where the characters lose their emotional connection to the audience.

As an example of this, the ghosts in Pacman weren’t realistic, but with their roving eyes, the game was engaging and we pumped thousands of quarters into the machine. Another example is the puppet Ernie from Sesame Street. Again, not very visually realistic, but when speaking by merely opening its mouth, an array of expressions could be created that create an emotional response. A third example is the characters in the Final Fantasy, the Spirits Within movie, who although they were very realistic with incredible motion and visual fidelity, many viewers rejected them because the visual appearance didn’t match the motion.

Adding more polygons to a character to improve its visual fidelity doesn’t make it work. If you ignore its motion fidelity, then more polygons actually makes the problem worse and keeps the character below the “Zombie Line.” The solution to this problem was to capture everything using 3-camera motion capture systems. By coupling characters with visual fidelity with near perfect motion, the characters came alive, but the new problem was that the characters lacked personality and interactive life. If a character continues to box after an atomic bomb has exploded, then the audience knows immediately that something is not right. The characters need to react to their environment and it turns out that “intelligence is better than motion.” Characters have to learn to respond and react. The illusion of interactive life is a whole new set of opportunities.

In addressing the problems of worlds, Glenn mentioned that early in computer graphics, it was a fight to get visual effects shots included in films. From the recent trends, we can now declare happily that “we won.” Visual effects are ubiquitous in film, but now it feels like drinking from a firehouse.

A good example of a world that deals with the need to respond and react is the Crysis game engine developed by CryTech. This engine includes multiple new environmental controls that respond by “putting nature in your hands.” The environment lets trees fall and impact with the world around them, oceans that causes surrounding objects to bob up and down on the waves, and bullets that can penetrate any scene object.

The tools arena is unique because while characters and worlds are for millions of users, the tools are for us, a specialized group. There are several games that address the idea of making tools as the game. A good example of this is The Sims, which is the world’s best selling game franchise. One of the reasons for its success is that Sims players love to make stuff. The game allows them to make content that they can then interact with. These tools keep the player engaged in the game.

Another good tool example is the Virtual Me character creation tool that lets players create, style, paint and output their character avatar. A final example is Spore, which includes powerful tools to morph and auto rig characters that interact within an environment where everything can be controlled. Although there is a game, it is the powerful tools that will keep the users engaged and coming back.

To conclude, Glenn mentioned that if people are not having fun creating games, then players won’t have fun playing them. People will want to create content themselves. Players really want characters that react and talk back, worlds that look beautiful and behave beautifully with real-time dynamics and tools that are not only for the professionals, but also for millions. This is a huge opportunity for new thrills.

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