SIGGRAPH, day 3

Today began with some Nvidia Tech Sessions, the first of which was Next-Generation Hardware Rendering of Displaced Subdivision Surfaces - An overview of the next-generation tessellation pipeline and its motivation. The focus is on one of the primary applications: rendering of displaced subdivision surfaces, which dramatically increases the realism of animated characters. The talk also shows how to adapt production pipelines to create compelling content that takes advantage of this innovative rendering model.

The second was Real-Time Rendering of Realistic Hair - Until recently, simulating and rendering realistic hair with tens of thousands of strands was prohibitively expensive for real-time use. This session reviews how to render realistic hair with high geometric complexity in real time on the GPU. Topics include efficient creation and rendering of large amounts of geometry for hair (essential for creating realistic hair, especially when the hair is moving), shading, self-shadowing, level of detail, and important performance optimizations. The talk also shows how next-generation hardware tessellation can make creating and rendering hair much more intuitive and efficient.

Both of these were good and showed off a lot of work Nvidia is doing promoting their development tools and especially hardware. They have everything corralled in one place at developer.nvidia.com, and I'm going to start messing around with shaders, so I just downloaded FX Composer to start experimenting.

I got to see a little bit of the ILM Production Session for Iron Man, mostly on how they made some of metal materials.

I had a small break so I went to the Nokia Theatre for some Computer Animation Festival Invited Screenings.

The first screening was a lot of material from the Demoscene, uh, scene, and it's getting it's own post.

The second screening was the Studio Eye Candy, where they showed : Presto, from Pixar; Glago's Guest, by Disney; Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and Spiderwick Chronicles by ILM; a liquid Bacardi spot and something else by Digital Domain; Live Free or Die Hard F35 sequence, by The Orphanage; I am Legend alternate ending, by Sony Pictures Imageworks; Scrat montage, by Blue Sky; and The Fourth Magi, by Lightstream Animation.

Technorati Tags: Nvidia,shaders,FX Composer,Nokia Theatre,SIGGRAPH

SIGGRAPH, day 2

Today I started with Technical Paper: Image Collections & Video, which is definitely my favorite so far. The papers include some nice and novel techniques for image compression, image and video resizing and a technique for using large collections of photos (a la Flickr collections) to generate multiple views of content and finding paths through photos based on everyone else's photos.

Following that, I went to the technical paper on Parallelism, with a few tidbits on Larrabee, the upcoming Intel architecture.

Next I had a quick lunch and did a run-through on the exhibition Floor, where I talked to some Autodesk and Adobe guys about work-related stuff. A company called Point Grey Research had a Smart car with a camera called Ladybug 3, which was hooked up with a Dell XPS laptop for some 360 degree panoramic shots, and I got my picture on the display. I'm in the yellow shirt.

 

Later that day was a Tech Talk from Intel - Why 3D Application Development is Driving Graphics-Industry Convergence. This was okay, but I couldn't stay for long.

Technorati Tags: Noah Snavely,Phototourism,Point Grey,Smart car,Intel,SIGGRAPH,Parallelism,Larrabee

First Day of SIGGRAPH!

We finally get started! We were able to take the HOV lane in to the convention center, so we missed the traffic.

My first class is Massive Model Visualization Techniques. It has some good info, but a little dry at parts.

After a quick lunch we see Ed Catmull, president of Walt Disney Animation and Pixar, give the keynote.

His speech was entitled Managing the Creative Environment, and it had some details about the start of Pixar, ideas vs people, management style and more. It was really good!

Here is the room for the Ed Catmull speech earlier in the day:

Closer to the start of the speech we noticed a line forming down the hallway and snaking back onto itself. It turns out that the auditorium fills up quickly and everyone gets turned away. We go to the first overflow room, but it looks like the video feed won't show him. We end up at the Geek Bar watching another remote feed projected on the wall.

There was also some odd robots at the new tech demo.

After that I checked out the bookstore and caught the end of Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games: Part 2 to see some details on how Blizzard rendered Starcraft 2. Looks nice!

The exhibition floor isn't open until Tuesday, so we take off and bolt to the Autodesk User's Group and Party.

Technorati Tags: SIGGRAPH,Ed Catmull,robots,Blizzard,Starcraft 2

SIGGRAPH 2008...finally!

I'm going back to SIGGRAPH, after a loooooong absence of...six or seven years?



I have been out of the workstation and graphics markets for a while, and I'm starting to get involved once again. My main reasons for going are to take the classes and some work projects.

I've been tasked with generating usage models for various lines of businesses, basically figuring out how do users actually "use" our machines and develop some processes for either making the experience better, faster, both, etc. Almost like developing benchmarks based on actual customer usage. I'll be dabbling in everything from ultramobile to workstations.

I'm also working on a graphics benchmark that scales with graphics power, as some of our current benchmarks represent the 3D load with strictly cpu-based rendering, ie no benefit of mega-uber-graphics over integrated graphics.

This isn't just a work trip, though! I'm going early back to San Fran to meet with my friend Dave to catch some Star Wars action that I'm not sure I can mention yet (correct me if I'm wrong!), and then we'll be driving down to LA for SIGGRAPH.

This should be a great trip, great experience, and hopefully the return of my regular attendance to SIGGRAPH!

Gifted and Talented

We moved our kindergartner out of a private school and into public school with some trepidation. I'm a product of both private and public schools, and our assumption was that we (and our son) would get more out of a private school.

We quickly learned the opposite.

After enrolling in our subdivision's elementary school (Leander ISD) we found that the kindergarten teacher our son has is amazing. Any doubt as to the quality of the education from her quickly dissipated. But could kindergarten keep up with our son?

LISD and our school has a Gifted and Talented program, and something called QUEST. At this level, QUEST focuses on creativity, critical thinking, observation, etc. We went through the application process, filled out questionnaires, the school interviewed our son, and finally we heard that he had been accepted into QUEST! Shazam!

His first project is researching a particular insect (he chose honeybees) and working on making his insect out of craft materials for a QUEST fair later this year.

Post-degree studies

So I've been accepted into Texas State's Graduate School for Computer Science. My goal is a Master's of Science in Computer Science, and it's going to be a long row to hoe getting there.

Since my first degree is non-Computer Science, there are some prerequisite courses that I need to fulfill (introductory C, Assembly, Calculus I and II already taken):

• C and C++ Programming (intermediate)
• Fundamentals of Computer Technology (sounds easy, but is Junior level course)
• Computer Architecture
• Data Structures
• Program Translators OR Operating Systems
• 6 hours of advanced computer science electives
• Discrete Mathematics

Once I complete these courses, I will have what is called a Certificate for Computer Science. From what I understand, the delta between a BS and a Certificate isn't huge, and while not exactly equivalent to a BS, the Certificate allows one to either get a job in the computer industry or enter graduate school.

After these I need to take the GRE, then onwards and upwards into Graduate School.