SIGGRAPH

A partial, early list of SIGGRAPH 2011 courses has recently been published. SIGGRAPH has published such preliminary lists in previous years, typically representing around half to a third of the final course list.

The list includes six very promising courses:

1. Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games: Part I – this is the next iteration in a course series, organized by Natalya Tatarchuk, that has been presented at SIGGRAPH every year (with new content) since 2006. This course has been a highlight of every SIGGRAPH it has appeared in and I’m pleased to see it coming back. The instructors are not yet listed, but Natasha has always been able to round up a top-notch speaker roster, and I am confident she will do so again this year. ”Advances…” has always been a full-day course, though since 2008 (when SIGGRAPH canceled the full-day course format) it’s been divided into two half-day courses. Only one of the two halves appears on this list; hopefully this is a simple oversight and SIGGRAPH didn’t reject the other half of the course!
2. Character Rigging, Deformations, and Simulations in Film and Game Production – I’m always happy to see “X in film and games”-types courses. If well-organized and presented, such courses detail the current cutting-edge of actual production practice in both industries, emphasizing interesting differences and commonalities between the two. Such crossover content is an important feature of SIGGRAPH not found in industry-specific conferences like GDC. The topic is important; many games don’t put enough of an emphasis on animation quality. The speaker list is strong, including Tim McLaughlin (a graphics researcher at Texas A&M University who also has a nice body of film VFX work he did at ILM), Larry Cutler (a character technical director at Dreamworks Animation, formerly at Pixar), and David Coleman (a Senior CG Supervisor at Electronic Arts Canada, where he leads the EA Sports rigging team).
3. Cinematography: The Visuals & the Story – I’m very happy to see this course on the list. I have become  increasingly fascinated with cinematography over the last few years; there is a lot that video games can learn from cinematography, from creative topics like lighting and composition to technical ones such as depth of field and tone mapping. This course is taught by Bruce Block, a film producer and visual consultant who wrote a very well-regarded and influential book called The Visual Story, about how visual structure is used to present story in film. I’m trying to get a course put together for next year which would cover the topic from a different angle, as presented by working film cinematographers; the two courses should make a nicely complementary pair.
4. Destruction and Dynamics for Film and Game Production – Another “X in film and games” course on a key topic, organized by Erwin Coumans (AMD; formerly at SCEA R&D, Havok and Guerrilla Games). Erwin is the creator of the open-source Bullet Physics engine, which has been used in many films and games. Other speakers include Takahiro Harada (a GPU physics researcher at AMD, formerly Havok and the University of Tokyo), Nafees Bin Zafar (a senior production engineer at DreamWorks Animation who won an Academy Scientific & Engineering Award for his fluid simulation work at Digital Domain), Mark Carlson (an FX R&D programmer at DreamWorks Animation, formerly at Disney Animation), Brice Criswell (a senior software engineer at ILM), Michael Baker (no affiliation listed – I’m guessing it’s the Michael Baker who teaches at the Art Institute of Las Vegas and develops tools for the Dynamica Bullet Maya plugin), and Erin Catto (a principal software engineer at Blizzard who also developed the very widely used Box2D open source 2D physics engine).
5. PhysBAM: Physically Based Simulation – Another physics course, but with a different emphasis. It focuses on the the PhysBAM simulation library developed at Stanford University and used by ILM, Disney Animation, and Pixar. Parts of PhysBAM are already open source – since the course webpage refers to “the soon-to-be-released simulation library PhysBAM”, presumably the rest will be available soon. The course is presented by Craig Schroeder (a PhD student at Stanford).
6. Storytelling With Color – Anyone who saw my color course last year knows that I believe that getting the technical side of color right is important, for both film and games. But the reason it is important comes from the creative side – the way that a selection of colors can drive story or establish a mood. This course covers that topic, and should be of great interest to many game developers. It will be presented by Kathy Altieri (a production designer at DreamWorks Animation who worked on filmsm including The Prince of Egypt, Over the Hedge, and How to Train Your Dragon, and previously at Disney Animation on The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, and The Lion King).

If the rest of the content will be nearly as good as this preliminary set of courses appears to be, SIGGRAPH 2011 will be a conference to remember!

With less than two weeks until the conference, here’s my final pre-SIGGRAPH roundup of all the game development and real-time rendering content. This is to either to help convince people who are still on the fence about attending (unlikely at this late date) or to help people who are trying to decide which sessions to go to (more likely). If you won’t be able to attend SIGGRAPH this year, this might at least help you figure out which slides, videos, and papers to hunt for after the conference.

First of all, the SIGGRAPH online scheduler is invaluable for helping to sort out all the overlapping sessions (even if you just “download” the results into Eric’s lower-tech version). The iPhone app may show up before the conference, but given the vagaries of iTunes app store approval, I wouldn’t hold my breath.

The second resource is the Games Focus page, which summarizes the relevant content for game developers in one handy place. It makes a good starting point for building your schedule; the rest of this post goes into additional detail.

My previous posts about the panels and the talks, and several posts about the courses go into more detail on the content available in these programs.

Exhibitor Tech Talks are sponsored talks by various vendors, and are often quite good. Although the Games Focus page links to the Exhibitor Tech Talk page, for some reason that page has is no information about the AMD and NVIDIA tech talks (the Intel talk on Inspecting Complex Graphics Scenes in a Direct X Pipeline, about their Graphics Performance Analyzer tool, could be interesting). NVIDIA does have all the details on their tech talks at their SIGGRAPH 2010 page; the ones on OpenGL 4.0 for 2010, Parallel Nsight: GPU Computing and Graphics Development in Visual Studio, and Rapid GPU Ray Tracing Development with NVIDIA OptiX look particularly relevant. AMD has no such information available anywhere: FAIL.

One program not mentioned in the Games Focus page is a new one for this year: SIGGRAPH Dailies! where artists show a specific piece of artwork (animation, cutscene sequence, model, lighting setup, etc.) and discuss it for two minutes. This is a great program, giving artists a unique place to showcase the many bits of excellence that go into any good film or game. Although no game pieces got in this year, the show order includes great work from films such as Toy Story 3, Tangled, Percy Jackson, A Christmas Carol, The Princess and The Frog, Ratatouille, and Up. The show is repeated on Tuesday and Wednesday overlapping the Electronic Theater (which also should not be missed; note that it is shown on Monday evening as well).

One of my favorite things about SIGGRAPH is the opportunity for film and game people to talk to each other. As the Game-Film Synergy Chair, my primary responsibility was to promote content of interest to both. This year there are four such courses (two of which I am organizing and speaking in myself): Global Illumination Across Industries, Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production, Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production, and Beyond Programmable Shading I & II.

Besides the content specifically designed to appeal to both industries, a lot of the “pure film” content is also interesting to game developers. The Games Focus page describes one example (the precomputed SH occlusion used in Avatar), and hints at a lot more. But which?

My picks for “film production content most likely to be relevant to game developers”: the course Importance Sampling for Production Rendering, the talk sessions Avatar in Depth, Rendering Intangibles, All About Avatar, and Pipelines and Asset Management, the CAF production sessions Alice in Wonderland: Down the Rabbit Hole, Animation Blockbuster Breakdown, Iron Man 2: Bringing in the “Big Gun”, Making “Avatar”, The Making of TRON: LEGACY, and The Visual Style of How To Train Your Dragon, and the technical papers PantaRay: Fast Ray-Traced Occlusion Caching, An Artist-Friendly Hair Shading System, and Smoothed Local Histogram Filters. (unlike much of the other film production content, paper presentation videos are always recorded, so if a paper presentation conflicts with something else you can safely skip it).

Interesting, but more forward-looking film production stuff (volumetric effects and simulations that aren’t feasible for games now but might be in future): the course Volumetric Methods in Visual Effects, the talk sessions Elemental Training 101, Volumes and Precipitation, Simulation in Production, and Blowing $h!t Up, and the CAF production session The Last Airbender: Harnessing the Elements: Earth, Air, Water, and Fire.

Speaking of forward-looking content, SIGGRAPH papers written by academics (as opposed to film professionals) tend to fall in this category (in the best case; many of them are dead ends). I haven’t had time to look at the huge list of research papers in detail; I highly recommend attending the Technical Papers Fast-Forward to see which papers are worth paying closer attention to (it’s also pretty entertaining).

Some other random SIGGRAPH bits:

• Posters are of very mixed quality (they have the lowest acceptance bar of any SIGGRAPH content) but quickly skimming them doesn’t take much time, and there is sometimes good stuff there. During lunchtime on Tuesday and Wednesday, the poster authors are available to discuss their work, so if you see anything interesting you might want to come back then and ask some questions.
• The Studio includes several workshops and presentations of interest, particularly for artists.
• The Research Challenge has an interesting interactive haunted house concept (Virtual Flashlight for Real-Time Scene Illumination and Discovery) presented by the Square Enix Research and Development Division.
• The Geek Bar is a good place to relax and watch streaming video of the various SIGGRAPH programs.
• The SIGGRAPH Reception, the Chapters Party, and various other social events throughout the week are great opportunities to meet, network, and talk graphics with lots of interesting and talented people from outside your regular circle of colleagues.

I will conclude with the list of game studios presenting at SIGGRAPH this year: Activision Studio Central, Avalanche Software, Bizarre Creations, Black Rock Studio, Bungie, Crytek, DICE, Disney Interactive Research, EDEN GAMES, Fantasy Lab, Gearbox, LucasArts, Naughty Dog, Quel Solaar, tri-Ace, SCE Santa Monica Studio, Square Enix R&D, Uber Entertainment, Ubisoft Montreal, United Front Games, Valve, and Volition. I hope for an even longer list in 2011!

After my last SIGGRAPH post, I spent a little more time digging around in the SIGGRAPH online scheduler, and found some more interesting details:

Global Illumination Across Industries

This is another film-game crossover course. It starts with a 15-minute introduction to global illumination by Jaroslav Křivánek, a leading researcher in efficient GI algorithms. It continues with six 25-30 minutes talks:

• Ray Tracing Solution for Film Production Rendering, by Marcos Fajardo, Solid Angle. Marcos created the Arnold raytracer which was adopted by Sony Pictures Imageworks for all of their production rendering (including CG animation features like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and VFX for films like 2012 and Alice in Wonderland). This is unusual in film production; most VFX and animation houses  use rasterization renderers like Renderman.
• Point-Based Global Illumination for Film Production, by Per Christensen, Pixar. Per won a Sci-Tech Oscar for this technique, which is widely used in film production.
• Ray Tracing vs. Point-Based GI for Animated Films, by Eric Tabellion, PDI/Dreamworks. Eric worked on the global illumination (GI) solution which Dreamworks used in Shrek 2; it will be interesting to hear what he has to say on the differences between the two leading film production GI techniques.
• Adding Real-Time Point-based GI to a Video Game, Michael Bunnell, Fantasy Lab. Mike was also awarded the Oscar for the point-based technique (Christophe Hery was the third winner). He actually originated it as a real-time technique while working at NVIDIA; while Per and Christophe developed it for film rendering, Mike founded Fantasy Lab to further develop the technique for use in games.
• Pre-computing Lighting in Games, David Larsson, Illuminate Labs. Illuminate Labs make very good prelighting tools for games; I used their Turtle plugin for Maya when working on God of War III and was impressed with its speed, quality and robustness.
• Dynamic Global Illumination for Games: From Idea to Production, Anton Kaplanyan, Crytek. Anton developed the cascaded light propagation volume technique used in CryEngine 3 for dynamic GI; the I3D 2010 paper describing the technique can be found on Crytek’s publication page.

The course concludes with a 5 minute Q&A session with all speakers.

An Introduction to 3D Spatial Interaction With Videogame Motion Controllers

This course is presented by Joseph LaViola (director of the University of Central Florida Interactive Systems and User Experience Lab) and Richard Marks from Sony Computer Entertainment (principal inventor of the Eyetoy, Playstation Eye, and Playstation Move). Richard Marks gives two 45-minute talks, one on 3D Interfaces With 2D and 3D Cameras and one on 3D Spatial Interaction with the PlayStation Move. Prof. LaViola discusses Common Tasks in 3D User Interfaces, Working With the Nintendo Wiimote, and 3D Gesture Recognition Techniques.

Recent Advances in Real-Time Collision and Proximity Computations for Games and Simulations

After an introduction to the topic of collision detection and proximity queries, this course goes over recent research in collision detection for games including articulated, deformable and fracturing models. It concludes with optimization-oriented talks such as GPU-Based Proximity Computations (presented by Dinesh Manocha, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, one of the most prominent researchers in the area of collision detection), Optimizing Proximity Queries for CPU, SPU and GPU (presented by Erwin Coumans, Sony Computer Entertainment US R&D, primary author of the Bullet physics library, which is widely used for both games and feature films), and PhysX and Proximity Queries (presented by Richard Tonge, NVIDIA, one of the architects of the AGEIA  physics processing unit – the company was bought by NVIDIA and their software library formed the basis of the GPU-accelerated PhysX library).

Advanced Techniques in Real-Time Hair Rendering and Simulation

This course is presented by Cem Yuksel (Texas A&M University) and Sarah Tariq (NVIDIA). Between them, they have done a lot of the recent research on efficient rendering and simulation of hair. The course covers all aspects of real-time hair rendering: data management, the rendering pipeline, transparency, antialiasing, shading, shadows, and multiple scattering. It concludes with a discussion of real-time dynamic simulation of hair.

Ray Tracing Solution for Film Production Rendering
Fajardo

2:40 pm
Point-Based Global Illumination for Film Production
Christensen

3:05 pm
Ray Tracing vs. Point-Based GI for Animated Films
Tabellion

3:30 pm
Break 

3:45 pm
Adding Real-Time Point-based GI to a Video Game
Bunnell

4:15 pm
Pre-computing Lighting in Games
Larsson

4:45 pm
Dynamic Global Illumination for Games: From Idea to Production Kaplanyan

5:10 pm
Conclusions, Q & A
Ray Tracing Solution for Film Production Rendering

Fajardo

2:40 pm

Point-Based Global Illumination for Film Production

Christensen

3:05 pm

Ray Tracing vs. Point-Based GI for Animated Films

Tabellion

3:30 pm

Break

3:45 pm

Adding Real-Time Point-based GI to a Video Game

Bunnell

4:15 pm

Pre-computing Lighting in Games

Larsson

4:45 pm

Dynamic Global Illumination for Games: From Idea to Production Kaplanyan

5:10 pm

Conclusions, Q & A

All

All