I’ve given several presentations at SIGGRAPH, and have spoken to many other game developers who have done the same. We have all found it to be an amazing experience; fun, career-enhancing, educational, and somehow simultaneously ego-boosting and humbling.

While there are many other conferences (GDC being uppermost in many game developer’s minds) SIGGRAPH holds a special place for anyone whose work involves computer generated visuals. For almost 40 years, SIGGRAPH has united the many disparate communities working in computer graphics, including academic research, CAD, fine arts, architecture, medical and scientific visualization, games, CG animation, and VFX. Each year the conference attracts the top technical and creative minds of the field for a week-long pressure cooker of learning, discussing, presenting, arguing, networking, and brainstorming about everything to do with computer graphics.

SIGGRAPH 2012 will take place in Los Angeles this August. There is a great opportunity for game developers to present at this year’s conference, but time is short since one of the most important deadlines is less than two weeks away.

Presenting at SIGGRAPH is a lot easier than most people think. While it is true that the quality bar is high, there are several programs that are seeking exactly the kind of practical, real-world advances and innovations that happen all the time in game development. Of these, the SIGGRAPH talk program is the most friendly to game developers; proposals for these 20-minute talks are easy to prepare and the topics covered vary from rendering and shading techniques through tool and workflow improvements to specific look development and production case studies. As a general rule of thumb, If it’s high-quality work and the kind of thing a graphics programmer or technical artist would do, chances are it would make a good SIGGRAPH talk proposal.

The general submission deadline for talks is in just under two weeks, on February 21. That isn’t a lot of time, but fortunately talk submissions only require preparing a one-page PDF abstract and filling out some web forms (additional materials can help if you have them – more details can be found on the talk submission page). Still, getting approval from management typically takes time, so you shouldn’t delay if you are interested. To get an idea of the level of detail expected in the abstract, and of the variety of possible talks, here are some film and game Talk abstracts from recent years: Making Faces – Eve Online’s New Portrait Rendering, MotorStorm Apocalypse: Creating Explosive and Dynamic Urban Off Road Racing, It’s Good to Be Alpha, Kami Geometry Instancer: putting the “smurfy” in Smurf Village, Practical Occlusion Culling in Killzone 3, and High Quality Previewing of Shading and Lighting for Killzone3.

If you are reading this, please consider submitting the coolest thing you’ve done last year as a Talk; the small time investment will repay itself many times over.

Good luck with your submissions!

To:  Office of Science and Technology Policy
Executive Office of the President
725 17th Street Room 5228
Washington, DC 2050

From: Nathaniel Hoffman

Re: Response to the White House RFI on OA publications

I am a videogame developer who makes frequent use of government-funded research in my work. I am also active in my professional organization, the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), including volunteering for publication-related activities such as journal paper review and conference organization.

Overall, I largely agree with Harvard’s position on this issue (http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/stp-rfi-response-january-2012). My strongly-held opinion is that every federal agency funding non-classified research should require immediate free online access to the full-text, peer-reviewed results of that research, without any time delay. The government should also provide the means (e.g. web-accessible database archive) to provide this access, as it does with PubMed Central. Furthermore, these means should be made available to the copyright holders of any properly peer-reviewed non-government-funded research publication on an elective basis. This is the minimum that US taxpayers deserve – full and immediate access to the research they have paid for.

The US government should also encourage other government funding bodies (e.g. the European Union) to incorporate similar mandates, and should strive for mutual agreements to automatically make the publications from each government’s archive available in the others, or possibly even set up a shared archive. To reduce inconvenience to researchers, ideally such agreements would also state that submitting the work to one of these archives counts as fulfilling the mandates for all the governments in the agreement.

Given that the vast majority of peer-reviewed research is funded by some government or other, my expectation is that even the few papers not covered by this mandate would eventually be submitted to these archives, making them complete repositories of all mankind’s research. This would result from pressure by the authors of this research, who would wish to maximize the availability (and thus impact) of their papers. The end result would be universal open access.

It is hard to overstate the benefits of universal open access. The reduction in costs to educational institutions (who now spend huge amounts on journal subscriptions) would be, although large, one of the least significant benefits. Far more important would be the reduction in research friction – any researcher, practitioner, student or hobbyist could immediately access any research results. Even researchers in large institutions and industry practitioners in relatively deep-pocketed companies do not currently have access to all research, since there are many publishers and professional societies, each with their own paywalls and separate non-open archives. For example, I work at a very large game company and have access to three different paid archives, and I still regularly encounter papers I do not have access to. Since the additional cost of each such paper is not negligible, I then need to weigh carefully whether the value of the paper exceeds its cost – something that is often hard to determine without reading the paper in question! This introduces a huge amount of friction and limits my productivity when doing research and development work. How much worse must it be for small companies, self-employed people, people working in third-world countries, etc.? This problem is especially bad for anyone doing cross-disciplinary work (for example, my own specialty, computer graphics, involves elements of computer science, optics, perception, and others) since each discipline typically has its own set of archives. Some publishers (like the ACM) allow authors to post “preprints” (trivially different than the official published version of the paper) on their own websites, and this is indeed preferable to not allowing such. However, this is not enough; although most authors post preprints (to maximize availability and impact of their papers), there are always a few who do not.

Since a disproportionate number of technology-driven businesses are based in the USA, the US would benefit from universal open access more than other countries. However, even if this were not the case it would still be highly beneficial to the USA to institute such policies. Research is not a “zero sum game” where every benefit to one party implies a corresponding loss to another. Improvements in technology will increase productivity and economic output worldwide, benefiting the USA as it benefits other countries.

There will be scientific publishers which will claim, in response to this RFI, that such open access mandates are unfair, that they will cause economic hardship to them and result in job loss. This claim should be disregarded.

Through a series of historical accidents, scientific publishers found themselves in a position where they extract all the value from peer-reviewed scholarly publications while contributing a negligible amount to their creation. I know full well (from personal experience as well as that of many of my colleagues) that besides the research itself (which is typically funded by government bodies and for which in any case the publishers can not credibly take any credit), all significant parts of the process of creating a peer-reviewed paper are performed by unpaid volunteers; researchers and members of the scholarly community performing a type of community service for largely altruistic reasons. Paper reviews, organizing paper reviews, final decisions on acceptance, are all done by unpaid volunteers. There was a time when the scientific publishers would add some value in typesetting, printing and distribution. However now electronic distribution via the Internet is the rule and most of the typesetting is done on computer by the paper authors (as can be seen by anyone comparing an “author preprint” to the final paper – the differences are negligible). The benefits of universal open access to all sectors of the US economy, to the advancement of science and technology, indeed to the betterment of all mankind far outweigh any possible financial consequence to a small group of companies which once served a valuable purpose but do so no longer. If they manage to find some significant value that they can add to the scientific process, they will survive and even flourish despite no longer being able to continue their current rent-seeking behavior. If they do not find some way to provide significant value, then their fate need be of no concern.

Some professional organizations (like my own, the ACM) also serve as scientific publishers, in addition to their other activities. These non-profit organizations were created, and continue to exist, only to advance the science and practice of a given field of human endeavor (computing, in the case of the ACM). Unfortunately, many of them (sadly, including the ACM) have management that has grown accustomed to the revenue streams attendant upon their publishing operations, to the point that they oppose open access despite its obvious benefits. As a member, I strongly feel that this position – which values publishing revenue over the advancement of the computing field, which is the very purpose of the ACM’s existence – is proof that the ACM’s management has been sadly corrupted by reliance on publishing revenue streams. If these revenue streams were to disappear as a consequence of open access mandates, the ACM would be a better organization for it; more responsive to the desires of its members and the advancement of the computing field. I expect officers of the ACM to respond to this RFI with claims that open access mandates cause the ACM damage, and that if they were extended the damage could very well render the ACM unable to continue its various beneficial activities. I have two answers to those claims – that they are almost certainly untrue, and that even if they were true it would not matter. The claims are almost certainly untrue because some combination of other revenue sources would most likely be found to make up any shortfall in publishing income. The claims do not matter because all the good that the ACM (or any other professional society, or all of them put together) do pales in comparison to the benefits of universal open access to scholarly research.

Here are my answers to the specific questions asked in this RFI:

(1) Are there steps that agencies could take to grow existing and new markets related to the access and analysis of peer-reviewed publications that result from federally funded scientific research? How can policies for archiving publications and making them publicly accessible be used to grow the economy and improve the productivity of the scientific enterprise? What are the relative costs and benefits of such policies? What type of access to these publications is required to maximize U.S. economic growth and improve the productivity of the American scientific enterprise?

Answer: A full and immediate open access funding mandate by the US government, combined with encouragement of other governments to follow suit, will lead to universal open access and greatly increase the productivity of the scientific enterprise. The costs are negligible, and the benefits are immense. A model similar to PubMed Central, but covering all federally-funded research and without the 12-month delay, is the best policy.

(2) What specific steps can be taken to protect the intellectual property interests of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders involved with the publication and dissemination of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded scientific research? Conversely, are there policies that should not be adopted with respect to public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications so as not to undermine any intellectual property rights of publishers, scientists, Federal agencies, and other stakeholders?

Answer: The interests of publishers should not be a concern – their unique contributions to the scientific process (typesetting, printing and physical distribution) are now all irrelevant. The scientific publishing enterprise can continue very well without them. The intellectual property interests of scientists are served by maximizing the distribution (and thus the impact) of their research. The intellectual property interests of Federal agencies and other stakeholders are also served by maximizing the distribution and minimizing the friction of access to research. Policies which prioritize publisher profit over scientific advancement should be avoided.

(3) What are the pros and cons of centralized and decentralized approaches to managing public access to peer-reviewed scholarly publications that result from federally funded research in terms of interoperability, search, development of analytic tools, and other scientific and commercial opportunities? Are there reasons why a Federal agency (or agencies) should maintain custody of all published content, and are there ways that the government can ensure long-term stewardship if content is distributed across multiple private sources?

Answer: The PubMed Central model is successful and proven. The US government should maintain its own archive with a copy of all research, easily accessible and searchable. This minimizes burdens on researchers, and maximizes long-term archiving stability as well as ease of use. However, there is no reason to prohibit additional repositories. Many authors will probably continue storing a copy of their work on their own institutional web pages – the difference being that they will no longer be forced to do so in order to keep their work accessible, as they are today. Ideally, there would eventually be multiple government archives (one for the US, one for the European Union, etc.), each of which has all the papers present in the others as well (automatically, via exchange agreements).

(4) Are there models or new ideas for public-private partnerships that take advantage of existing publisher archives and encourage innovation in accessibility and interoperability, while ensuring long-term stewardship of the results of federally funded research?

Explicit public-private partnerships are not needed – the government can handle archiving. Existing publisher archives can definitely continue to exist alongside if the publishers wish to keep them, but they would no longer be the sole source of research results.

(5) What steps can be taken by Federal agencies, publishers, and/or scholarly and professional societies to encourage interoperable search, discovery, and analysis capacity across disciplines and archives? What are the minimum core metadata for scholarly publications that must be made available to the public to allow such capabilities? How should Federal agencies make certain that such minimum core metadata associated with peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded scientific research are publicly available to ensure that these publications can be easily found and linked to Federal science funding?

I recommend to continue building upon the successful PubMed Central model in these matters. A centralized government archive, with similar metadata to that used currently in PubMed Central would be a great starting point.

(6) How can Federal agencies that fund science maximize the benefit of public access policies to U.S. taxpayers, and their investment in the peer-reviewed literature, while minimizing burden and costs for stakeholders, including awardee institutions, scientists, publishers, Federal agencies, and libraries?

Full and immediate open-access mandates maximally benefit all stakeholders except for the (now irrelevant) publishers.

(7) Besides scholarly journal articles, should other types of peer-reviewed publications resulting from federally funded research, such as book chapters and conference proceedings, be covered by these public access policies?

Yes, definitely.

(8) What is the appropriate embargo period after publication before the public is granted free access to the full content of peer-reviewed scholarly publications resulting from federally funded research? Please describe the empirical basis for the recommended embargo period. Analyses that weigh public and private benefits and account for external market factors, such as competition, price changes, library budgets, and other factors, will be particularly useful. Are there evidence-based arguments that can be made that the delay period should be different for specific disciplines or types of publications?

Zero – there should be no embargo period. Any embargo period is to the detriment of all stakeholders except the (now irrelevant) publishers.

So what’s up with graphics APIs? I’ve been working on a project for a fast 3D graphics system for Autodesk for about 4 years now; the base level (which hides the various flavors of DirectX and OpenGL) is used by Maya, Max, AutoCAD, Inventor, and other products. There are various higher-level optimizations we’ve added (and why Microsoft’s fxc effect compiler suddenly got a lot slower is a mystery), with some particularly nice work by one person here in the area of multithreading. Beyond these techniques, minimizing the raw number of calls to the API is the primary way to increase performance. Our rule of thumb is that you get about 1000-1500 calls a frame (CAD isn’t held to a 60 FPS rule, but we still need to be interactive). The usual tricks are to sort by state, and to shove as much geometry and processing as possible into a single draw call and so avoid the small batch problem. So, how silly is that? The best way to make your GPU run fast is to call it as little as possible? That’s an API with a problem.

This is old news, Tim Sweeney railed against API limitations 3 years ago (sadly, the article’s gone poof). I wrote about his ideas here and added my own two cents. So where are we since then? DirectX 11 has been out awhile, adding three more stages to the pipeline for efficient tessellation of higher-order surfaces. The pipeline’s feeling a bit unwieldy at this point, with a lot of (admittedly optional) stages. There are still some serious headaches for developers, like having to somehow manage to put lighting and material shading in the same pixel shader (one good argument for deferred lighting and similar techniques). Forget about optimization; the arcane API knowledge needed to get even a simple rendering on the screen is considerable.

I haven’t heard anything of a DirectX 12 in the works (except maybe this breathless posting, which I feel obligated to link to since I’m in China this month), nor can I imagine what they’d add of any significance. I expect there will be some minor XBox 72o (or whatever it will be called) -related tweaks specific to that architecture, if and when it exists. With the various CPU+GPU-on-a-chip products coming out – AMD’s Fusion family, NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, and similar from other companies (I think I counted 5, all totaled) – some access costs between the two processors become much cheaper and so change the rules. However, the API still looks to be the bottleneck.

Marketwise, and this is based entirely upon my work in scapulimancy, I see things shifting to mobile. If that isn’t at least the 247th time you’ve heard that, you haven’t been wasting enough time on the internet. But, it has some implications: first, DirectX 12 becomes mostly irrelevant. The GPU pipeline is creaky and overburdened enough right now, PC games are an important niche but not the focus, and mobile (specifically, iPad and other tablets) is fine with the functionality defined thus far by existing APIs. OpenGL ES will continue to evolve, but I doubt we’ll see for a good long while any algorithmically (vs. data-slinging) new elements added to the API that the current OpenGL 4.x and DX11 APIs don’t offer.

Basically, API development feels stalled to me, and that’s how it should be: mobile’s more important, PCs are a (large but slowly evolving) niche, and the current API system feels warped from a programming standpoint, with peculiar constructs like feeding text strings to the API to specify GPU shader effects, and strange contortions performed to avoid calling the API in order to coax the GPU to run fast.

Is there a way out? I felt a glimmer while attending HPG 2011 this year. The paper “High-Performance Software Rasterization on GPUs” by Samuli Laine and Tero Karras was one of my (and many attendees’) favorites, talking about how to efficiently implement a basic rasterizer using CUDA (code’s open sourced). It’s not as fast as dedicated hardware (no surprise there), but it’s at least in the same ball-park, with hardware being anywhere from 1.5x to 8.1x faster for their test cases, median being 3.6x. What I find exciting is the idea that you could actually program the pipeline, vs. it being locked away. They discuss ideas for optimization such as loosening the “first in, first out” rule for triangles currently enforced by all APIs. With its “yet another language” dependency, I can’t say I hope GPGPU is the future (and certainly CUDA isn’t, since it cuts out non-NVIDIA hardware vendors, but from all reports it’s currently the best way to experiment with GPGPU). Still, it’s nice to see that the fixed-function bits of the GPU, while important, are not an insurmountable limit in considering more flexible and general interactive rasterization programming models. Or, ray tracing – always have to stick that in there.

So it’s “forward to the past”, looking at traditional algorithms like rasterization and ray tracing and how to gain efficiency (both in raw speed and in development time) on various modern architectures. That’s ultimately what it’s about for me, at least: spending lots of time fighting the API, gluing together strings to make shaders, and all the other craziness is a distraction and a time-waster. That said, there’s a cost/benefit calculation implicit in all of this. For example, using C# or Java is way more productive than C++, I’d say about 2x, mostly because you’re not tracking down memory problems like leaks and access uninitialized or non-existent values. But, there’s so much legacy C++ code around that it’s still the language of graphics, as previously discussed here. Which means I expect none of the API weirdness to change for a solid decade, at the minimum. Please do go ahead and prove me wrong – I’d be thrilled!

Oh, and acrobatics? Hover your cursor over the image. BTW, the ERA show in Shanghai is wonderful, unlike current APIs.

IEEE CGA special issue

Modeling and Rendering Material Appearance

Final submissions due: 1 July 2011
Publication date: March/April 2012

Modeling and rendering the appearance of materials is important in many computer graphics applications. Understanding material appearance draws on methods from diverse fields including the physics of light interaction with material (including models of BRDF, bidirectional reflectance distribution functions, and BSSRDF, bidirectional subsurface scattering reflection distribution functions), human perception of materials, and efficient data structures and algorithms.

This special issue will cover all aspects of material appearance in graphics, ranging from theory to application. Possible topics include (but are not limited to)

• first-principle models for BRDF and BSSRDF;
• procedural models of materials;
• modeling of mesoscale material features including bumps, ridges, and so on;
• measurement of material appearance including BRDF, BSSRDF, and BTF (bidirectional texture functions);
• numerical simulation of material appearance;
• new instruments for measuring appearance;
• material-appearance models from photo collections;
• new data structures for representing material appearance;
• efficient rendering of BTF and BSSRDF;
• new interfaces for designing material appearance;
• methods for printing hard copies of material appearance;
• psychophysics of material appearance with application to computer modeling;
• material-appearance applications in industry such as the design of paints and coatings; and
• nonphotorealistic rendering of material appearance.

Questions?

Contact Holly Rushmeier (holly@acm.org) or  Pierre Poulin (poulin@iro.umontreal.ca)

Submission Guidelines

Articles should be no more than 8,000 words, with each figure counting as 200 words. Cite only the 12 most relevant references, and consider providing technical background in sidebars for nonexpert readers. Color images are preferable and should be limited to 10. Visit CG&A style and length guidelines at www.computer.org/cga/author.html.

Please submit your article using the online manuscript submission service at https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/cs-ieee. When uploading your article, select the appropriate special-issue title under the category “Manuscript Type.” Also include complete contact information for all authors. If you have any questions about submitting your article, contact the peer review coordinator at cga-ma@computer.org.

Here is the 2011 CFS text (a slightly more detailed version can be found here):

SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 sees the return of the Art Gallery and Emerging Technologies programs. Also calling for submissions are: Computer Animation Festival, Courses, Technical Papers, Technical Sketches & Posters.

Submit your research, theories, and innovations and you might be the next to have the valuable opportunity to present your work to audience-packed halls at SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 conference in Hong Kong this December.

• Art Gallery – Submission deadline is 09 June 2011 (23:59 UTC/GMT)
• Computer Animation Festival – Submission deadline is14 July 2011 (23:59 UTC/GMT)
• Courses – Submission deadline is 07 June 2011 (23:59 UTC/GMT)
• Emerging Technologies – Submission deadline is 07 June 2011 (23:59 UTC / GMT)
• Technical Sketches and Posters – Submission deadline is 30 August 2011 (23:59 UTC / GMT)
• Technical Papers – Submission deadline is 17 May 2011 (23:59 UTC /GMT)

For more information on SIGGRAPH Asia 2011, please visit www.siggraph.org/asia2011/.

SIGGRAPH has several programs at which game developers can show their work; I wanted to point out that two of the most important (Talks and Dailies) have deadlines on February 18th, less than two weeks away! Fortunately submitting a proposal to one of these programs doesn’t take much time. However, getting approval from your boss may take a while, so you don’t want to wait.

SIGGRAPH Talks are 20-minute long presentations which typically contain “nuggets” of novel film or game production tech. These can be rendering or shading techniques, tools for artists, enhancements done to support a tricky character design, etc. If it’s something a programmer or technical artist is proud of having done and it’s at least tangentially graphics-related, chances are it would make a good Talk submission. Submitting a talk only requires creating a one-page abstract; if the talk is accepted, you have until August to make 20 minutes worth of slides – not too bad. To get an idea of the level of detail expected in the abstract, and of the variety of possible talks, here are some film and game Talk abstracts from 2009 and 2010: Houdini in a Games Pipeline, Spore API: Accessing a Unique Database of Player Creativity, Radially-Symmetric Reflection Maps, Underground Cave Sequence for Land of the Lost, Hatching an Imaginary Bird, Fast Furry Ray Gathering, and NPR Gabor Noise for Coherent Stylization. If you are reading this, please consider submitted the coolest thing you’ve done last year as a Talk; the small time investment will repay itself many times over.

SIGGRAPH Dailies are relatively new (first introduced at SIGGRAPH 2010). These are very short (under two minutes!) presentations of individual art assets, such as models, animations, particle effects, shaders, etc. Unlike the rest of SIGGRAPH which emphasizes novel techniques, Dailies emphasize excellence in the result. Every good game or movie has many individual bits of excellence, each the result of an artist’s talent, imagination and sweat. These are often overlooked, or unknown outside the studio; Dailies aim to correct that. Dailies submissions are even easier than Talk submissions. All that is required is a short (60-90 second) video of the art asset, no audio, just something simple like an animation loop or model turntable. You will also need a short backstory; something that gives a feeling for the effort that went into the work, including any notable production frustrations, unlikely inspirations, sudden strokes of genius, etc. Don’t write too much – it should take about as long to say as the video length (60-90 seconds). To get a better idea of what a Dailies presentation looks like, here are two examples. The list of Dailies presented at SIGGRAPH 2010 can be found here: it runs the gamut from Pixar and Disney movies to student projects. I suspect not many artists read this blog, so any game programmers reading this, please forward it to the artists at your studio.

Good luck with your submissions!