SIGGRAPH Dailies!

The Studio

Also returning to SIGGRAPH this year, bigger and better than ever is The Studio, once known as the 'Gorilla Studio.' The Studio, the Art Gallery – which features haptics devices this year – and Emerging Technologies, are all in one large open space. “We got the chairs of these three hand-on areas together to create an integrated experience,” Masson says. “They are all doing fantastic things.”

In the Studio alone, people with a Basic or Full conference ticked can take any of the 13 workshops in the new 15-person classroom. The workshops include animation, rendering, modeling with ZBrush. Studio presentations in The Studio range from descriptions of robots that touch; an introduction to Rhino; stop motion animation with Tom Gasek, formerly with Aardman and now in his own studio OOH, Inc.; DIY motion control and more. And, in the Studio’s Digital Artistry sessions, you can learn about camera calibration, a photo-imaging workflow, digital SLRs, video editing, 3D sculpting, printmaking – in fact, you could spend the entire show in The Studio. (Check the website for specific workshop, presentation and artistry session times.) But, if you did, you’d miss Emerging Technologies right next door.

“It’s pretty awesome,” says chair Mk Haley of the Emerging Technologies. “It’s something you need to experience. We have a display that uses bubbles as pixels. I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s super low res, but it’s totally fun. We also have an eyeball that’s electromagnetically driven. It’s intended for use in animatronic exhibits; you can project video through the eye.” The latest hologram – a 360-degree autostereoscopic display in full color allows views from all angles. You don’t need 3D glasses to see this 3D image. Of the 120 submissions, the jury accepted 20-plus including robots, a variety of unusual human-computer interfaces – air typing on mobile devices, fluid-based haptics, and more, and a head-mounted, photometric stereo device for facial capture.

“The submissions came from industry, individuals, universities, and from all over the world,” Haley says. “The trend, though, is that things are being created with consumer-grade products. There’s a real science fair feeling. But, because of that, you could see some of these things on the market within a year or two.”

DAILIES!!!
Despite all the great sessions, courses, talks, screenings, papers, studio and more than SIGGRAPH offers, to Polson, a supervising technical director at Pixar, something has been missing. “A lot of people don’t have any place they can show off their work at SIGGRAPH,” he says. “If you’re an amazing shot lighter, you do awesome work, but how can you show that at SIGGRAPH? Your studio might have a ‘best of’ reel in the Electronic Theater, but you don’t get credited individually or have an opportunity to talk about your work.”
Last year, during dinner in New Orleans with Masson and animator Dana Boadway, he pitched the idea of giving animators or modelers or whomever a venue for a quick presentation. “You need only a minute or two to show an amazing model,” Polson says. “Dana said, ‘This sounds like dailies where someone brings a shot to the director, shows it quickly, gets notes and moves on.’ We all looked at each other and immediately said, ‘This is SIGGRAPH Dailies!’”       

So, with that idea in mind, and using the Technical Papers Fast Forward session as a model, he crafted a call for submissions and received 100 entries, which the jury whittled down to 38. Each person presenting has about 90 seconds to tell their story and show their shot.

“We found that when we had an interesting personal story to go with the shot – something going on in the person’s life, something going on in the movie, something not obvious, the presentations just sang,” Polson says. 

SIGGRAPH scheduled the Dailies without conflict, so you can see them without worrying about what else you might be missing. Any pass gets you into the show – Tuesday or Wednesday, 6:00 to 7:30. Just pick the night that you aren’t seeing the Electronic Theater.

For Polson, Dailies are just the first step in making SIGGRAPH more relevant to the production community. Look for an announcement sometime soon about something called “implementation papers.” “I received a proposal for a new track of technical papers called implementation papers,” Polson says. “If you look around here [Pixar], there are half a dozen serious researchers and then another 20 or 25 in the tools group or production who take their work and make it production-ready. They don’t have any place to present their work.” Implementation papers could make that possible.        

“We’re just in the beginning stage of planning, but it could be the kind of things you could download, put into a code tree, and use in production,” Polson says. “They would have the bits and bobs and hooks to make something stand up and sing.”


Related links:
SIGGRAPH 2010
Emerging Technologies
Dailies