I'd like to hold a general summation/discussion of the work presented at SIGGRAPH this year. I'll update this post as we go with links to the various papers and presentations, and you're all free to have an open discussion in the comments.

SIGGRAPH 2013 papers on the web - Ke-Sen Huang dutifully updates his page every single year with all of the papers presented at SIGGRAPH.

Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice - All slides/presentations from the 2013 Physically Based Shading course. This course is held yearly and IMO is some of the best material out there on physically based techniques and state of the art. Highly recommend looking up presentations from previous years as well if you haven't seen them.

Advances In Real-Time Rendering In Games - Not available yet.

Please let me know if anything in particular from the conference caught your eye and should be highlighted.

One of the papers that caught my eye this year in a bad way was the pre-computed cloth simulation. Essentially they took a (small) set of known character animations, put a cloak on the character, and precomputed every potential pose for the cloth and saved it in some kind of compressed 70 MB graph structure. Their proposal is that instead of trying to run cloth at runtime, you do it offline (4500 hours for this, if memory serves) and look up the results in the structure.

The paper tries to pitch this for upcoming gen real-time, which I find comical. The set of animations is small, the data is enormous to be traversing at runtime, and betting memory against compute power when GPU compute is coming fully into its own is tone-deaf at best -- if not completely insane. (Nevermind the implications to a production pipeline when the animation requires several thousand hours to regenerate.) While the technical aspects of the work may be well done, I really hate the core idea of this work and IMO it's a good example of bad academic work being pitched to industry.

One of the papers that caught my eye this year in a bad way was the pre-computed cloth simulation. Essentially they took a (small) set of known character animations, put a cloak on the character, and precomputed every potential pose for the cloth and saved it in some kind of compressed 70 MB graph structure. Their proposal is that instead of trying to run cloth at runtime, you do it offline (4500 hours for this, if memory serves) and look up the results in the structure.

The paper tries to pitch this for upcoming gen real-time, which I find comical. The set of animations is small, the data is enormous to be traversing at runtime, and betting memory against compute power when GPU compute is coming fully into its own is tone-deaf at best -- if not completely insane. (Nevermind the implications to a production pipeline when the animation requires several thousand hours to regenerate.) While the technical aspects of the work may be well done, I really hate the core idea of this work and IMO it's a good example of bad academic work being pitched to industry.

So it's keyframe animation given a fancy name? Yuck.

Highly Adaptive Liquid Simulations on Tetrahedral Meshes

Looks like a way of integrating SPH into arbitrary spaces, I guess? I'm not very familiar with fluid simulation work, but the simulation time for their demos is on the order of five hours. That's a bit out of reach Maybe if they'd precomputed it all and stored it in a giant compressed graph... :D :D

MeshGit: Diffing and merging meshes for polygonal modeling sounds pretty cool. Version control for asset creation tools has been on my mind for a while now.

Cool idea and work, though as usual for the university crowd they only look at the geometry and ignore all other vertex attributes. The paper includes a throwaway line claiming that including other attributes would be trivial, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Jeez, I'm really hating on people's work today.

If you guys have any questions about my talk (Crafting a Next-Gen Material Pipeline for The Order: 1886), feel free to ask. I can also see if I can get the other course presenters on here if you have questions for them.