As the dust settles and numbers turn into statistics (24.332 people from around 77 countries attended SIGGRAPH 2003, 240 companies exhibited at the show floor), here’s a final set of pictures from the Convention Center, along with a few links to animations and reports, and some comments on the show.
Pictures from SIGGRAPH: part of the Next Limit team in front of their booth (with guest appearances by Max programmer Gonzalo Rueda and Maxon’s product manager Marco Tillmann) – the demo of RealFlow 2.5 looked very impressive with a new dynamics engine, liquid-solid-liquid interaction and very realistic viscosity simulations (view image), Laurent Abecassis shows Hercules, the upcoming muscle deformation plugin from Di-O-Matic (view image), the SplutterFishes demo Brazil 1.2’s speed while rendering a film-res version of a Ferrari (view image), supervising animator Dylan Brown explains the nuances of fish motion at one of SIGGRAPH’s most eagerly awaited presentations: Pixar’s special session on Finding Nemo (view image), Edwin Braun shows new sub-surface scattering features in FinalRender Stage-1 at Discreet’s booth (view image), and showtime’s finally over: Discreet employees dismantle the SIGGRAPH stand a few minutes after the exhibition floor closed (view image).
Overall, SIGGRAPH was a thoroughly enjoyable experience (except for the food, maybe). On the Max side, release 6 incorporates some interesting and handy capabilities though they are far from the surprise we were expecting to see as referred to in Discreet’s invitation to their Evolve Event (“Discreet will surprise the industry with special 3D announcements”). No Linux port yet, no rewrite of the code; no big surprises, really. Looking in retrospective it seems as if Max, with this latest iteration, has finally managed to complete its feature set and replace most of its once problematic or even non-existing features: bone/skin deformation, reliable IK solver, advanced particles, dynamics, schematic view (remember Cuneyt Ozdas plugin?), etc. There is still one omission, which is an animation mixer, strangely absent from Max’s feature set (it *is* an animation program, after all) and already present in all of its (close) competitors’ toolsets. The inclusion of Mental Ray is an interesting change, and reminds of Softimage’s past experience with its own renderer. Discreet may not necessarily follow the same path, but the question remains.
For those who want to find out more about SIGGRAPH 2003 here are a few links:
VFXPro’s report
Reports from SIGGRAPH 2003
Borislav Petrov’s report @ Discreet’s Webboard
Guy Rabiller’s report
Jeremy Birn’s report
Some of the great animated shorts screened at the Electronic and Animation Theaters can be found online:
Tim Tom (Romain Segaud, Christel Pougeoise)
Respire (Jérôme Combe and Stéphane Hamache)
Poor Bogo (Thelvin Cabezas)
On The Sunny Side of the Street (Joachim Bub, Wilhelm Landt, Elmar Keweloh & Michael Meyer) – Look for Portfolio/Film
Gary’s Fall (Passion Pictures) – Look for Animation/Longer Format/Shorts
CGW has an article
on three great CG shorts presented at SIGGRAPH that explore character
animation and the difficult task of conveying facial emotions with 3D characters.
SIGGRAPH Conference Presentations DVD includes Papers, Sketches, Special Sessions, Courses, etc. can be ordered from:
http://www.acm.org/siggraphdvd2003
Animations presented at SIGGRAPH can be found at:
http://www.siggraph.org/publications/video-review/SVR.shtml – Issues 2K/Issues 2003
