Krause Springs

We've been trying to go camping now that the weather has gotten colder, and our first choice was Inks Lake State Park, as we've gone there for day trips and my parents have taken me there as a child.

As luck had it, Inks Lake was booked through the rest of the year! At least, campsites with a fire ring on the lake side were booked. If we wanted to hike in ~1.5 miles schlepping our gear to a primitive site, there were a few openings.

No thanks.

We had heard about Krause Springs and had wanted to check out the place just as a swimming hole, and found out they had campsites. I called them up and spoke with Elton Krause himself, and when I asked him about reservations, he said just come up, drive around until you find a spot you like and pitch your tent!

Sold!

We left later than we planned, and had to make a few stops on the way, and got to the campsite a few minutes before dark. We used our headlights to help us set the tent (thanks Erika and Ty!) up and managed to drain our battery. Some nice neighbors help us jump it the next day.

Our first night went without a hitch and we woke up to masses of Monarch butterflies gathered in the trees right over our heads.

One of the other campers mentioned that they were migrating, and I wasn't sure about this (but I had no reasonable explanation otherwise - I guess it is the skeptic in me), so when we returned, I  consulted my pal Google. Armed with the knowledge that Spicewood, TX, is roughly at Latitude 30, I consulted this migration schedule. Zut alors! The time matched!

My wife found a Coleman cooking stove thing at a garage sale for $5 (normally ~$50) and it worked like a charm! It uses a small thermos-sized canister of propane, and we had a blast cooking outside. I had to go the instant coffee route, as I didn't have a chance to look around for a suitable camp coffeepot or get my French Press action going, but roughing it is roughing it!

Krause Springs has some amazing natural rock formations, with grottos, waterfalls, rockwalls teeming with squirrels, HUGE cypress trees, a natural spring that feeds into a lagoon/swimming hole, etc. We went exploring and ran out of space on our 1GB photo card.

I also took a panoramic shot of where we camped. We were in the middle spot - under the RV hookups and above the primitive area.

The right-most spot in the panorama was filled with Cub Scouts from Saturday to Sunday. We were there the weekend of the Red River Shootout (Texas vs OU) and one guy was camping in our area I noticed what I thought was football sounds coming from his area. I investigated and he had stretched over 200 feet of extension cord from a table outside his tent to a power outlet in the RV hookup area to watch the game. Roughing it indeed!

They also have a butterfly garden with some wind chimes bigger than I am, plus a swimming pool that is fed directly from the spring. Let me tell you - it was cold! I eased in to my waist before I took the plunge, but my wife was brave enough to dive in. It's brisk!

We had a fantastic time, and will definitely go back. In fact, we are trying to work out a November camp date. The kids loved it, we loved it, and it's cheaper and closer than Inks Lake. Win-win!

Technorati Tags: Spicewood,Austin,camping,Krause Springs,Monarch butterflies,panoramic

Hurricane Ike

Recently Hurricane Ike hit Texas and we, outside of Austin, were in line to be part of the blast according to the news and the hurricane trackers. Then, Ike turned a little more and we thought we would get some good rain. Then a little rain. Then we were totally missed.

My friend Kelvin, on the other hand, had a somewhat closer encounter. Here is a great image from him:

Check the link for his account. Glad y'all are in one piece! Wait - two pieces. You know what I mean.

Technorati Tags: Hurricane Ike,Houston,Galveston,flag

Speedshape visit

On Friday we made our way out to the Venice Beach area and checked out Speedshape, a studio where my friend Robert works.

We got to see some sweet demo reel action (the Norwegians were right - I really believed a plane could fly!) and a nice studio in what turned out to be the former Wachowski brothers studio.

If you want to see a car, real or virtual, these are the guys to call. Check out their reel!

Afterward we drove up the coast for a bit and then through Topanga Canyon to hang out at Rob's pad. Nice! And thanks to the fumes from the floor work I'm hearing colors I've never smelled before!

Thanks Rob!

Technorati Tags: SIGGRAPH,Speedshape,Topanga Canyon,Venice Beach,Wachowski brothers

SIGGRAPH, day 5

This was the last day of SIGGRAPH.

To complete what I started the previous day I attended a screening at Nokia Theatre of some of the best (?) Flash work out there. I question best, though some really was top-tier work, such as the Heavenly Sword backstory - my favorite hands-down. There was some other stuff that I might call interesting, but I don't think best of the best.

I also saw one of the competitive animation screenings, which showcased some work ranging from students to research to special effects houses. Not exactly a level playing field, but some very interesting stuff nonetheless.

The theater was powered by dual 4k projectors, with 5.1 surround sound, and this is what it looks like:

Convention Center food is always too expensive. $3 for a 20-ounce Pepsi? No thanks! I took a load of snack bars and assorted goods with me so I wouldn't have to go through highway robbery for food, but that got old by the end of the week. Today we had lunch just down the street a few minutes away in a little shop that was more than a convenience store. It was like some sort of bodega/coffee shop/snack bar kind of thing, and it was very reasonable, especially compared to what we had in the convention center.

We happened to both be interested in going to the last Technical Paper - Procedural Modeling and Design, with the following papers:

Automatic Generation of Tourist Maps - using rules about how buildings should be shaped, how streets should be widened and how users designate points of interest in maps.

Automated Generation of Interactive 3D Exploded-View Diagrams - more rules about how parts of models interact and envelop other parts and how these relationships govern what parts need to move away from others.

Interactive Visual Editing of Grammars for Procedural Architecture - describing a "grammar" for architecture allowing buildings to be scaled, for instance, and appropriately placed and scaled architectural features appear without modeling them by hand.

Interactive Procedural Street Mapping - using tensor fields to generate street maps, which also allowed modifying fields manually.

Wow. I can't believe SIGGRAPH is over. It was great to be back from a six year absence, I believe. I definitely learned a lot, and it was really good to recharge my batteries. I'm looking forward to working on a few creative personal projects as well as being energized for my regular work.

Technorati Tags: SIGGRAPH,procedural modeling,Flash,Heavenly Sword,Nokia Theatre

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

Softimage Party

Since we went to the Autodesk Users Group Monday night, we thought we could see what Softimage, the biggest competitor to Maya and 3D Studio MAX, had to say. Softimage has something new called ICE - Interactive Creative Environment.

We were expecting to get some info about the software, production houses talking about using it, demo reels, etc. Nope! Just a party at Club 740 in downtown LA. We met a Softimage reseller on the way to the party, and we thought we were close to getting VIP passes, but no such luck. They gave out one free drink coupon to everyone, but I didn't know what it was (I thought it was a raffle ticket), so I didn't use it for the first two drinks. Uh oh!

We weren't sure what to expect at a party with a company delivering a new product called ICE, but we soon found out.

Vanilla Ice! I'm not kidding. He came out along with Clint Eastwood on drums and DJ Dirty Chopstick on, uh, DJ. I'm still not kidding. It was actually a pretty good show! He started with some new music, downloadable for fee at his website, and then hit some of the classics.

 

The DJ brought out two cases of bottled water and put them at the front of the stage. I thought that someone is going to be performing for a loooooong time, but it seems like Vanilla's gimmick is to spray the crowd periodically with water, drink water and spit it out on the crowd, drop kick water bottles and douse the girls that jump up on the stage.

Oh yeah. I'm not sure how they got the signal, but all of a sudden Vanilla held his hand out and started pulling girls up on stage. Of course, they start dancing, and then start dancing with each other. Finally one of the girls decided that she really wasn't in to the other girl and was trying to keep it like regular dancing, but the other girl wouldn't hear of it. Hilarity ensues, and the girl jumps back down into the crowd just to be replaced by someone else.

Here is Softimage's coverage of the event. We're famous! Look for us in the pictures - David's wearing a green shirt and I'm wearing a yellow shirt, and we're in the first three rows. I got dissed, hard, for a fist bump. Twice.

Oh yeah. Ron Jeremy was there. The connection with Softimage? Unknown.

He's up there on the walkway. They never put a spotlight on him, but sharp-eyed viewers should be able to pick him out.

I thought that the Autodesk party had a lot more information about the applications, the business, etc. This was fun, but I was hoping to hear how Softimage is positioning itself in the industry and against its competitors.

Technorati Tags: Club 740,Softimage,Vanilla Ice,Ron Jeremy,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

Autodesk Users Group and Party

Monday night we went to the Autodesk Users Group and Party. It was at the Shrine Auditorium.

We sat through almost five hours of bladder controversy and demos of Maya, Mudbox, 3D Studio MAX, a lot of stereoscopic demos and industry tidbits. The stereoscopic demos were very nice and done using Dolby 3D Digital Cinema.

We looked totally hot. The glasses were really good. I had absolutely no problems wearing them over my glasses, and they worked flawlessly. They showed stereoscopic scenes from Star Wars, Coraline, Kung Fu Panda and many others. The announced versions of Maya, Motion Builder and Toxik supported stereoscopic in the viewport. Of course, you need a way to display stereoscopic images! A minor technicality, but they also supported the red-green anaglyph mode in the viewport just in case you weren't made out of money.

The meeting had some really great content, but waaaaaaay too long.

After the meeting everyone rushed out of the auditorium to another part of the building to a...party. Make that a semi-rave-like-performance-art-party-thing. Drinks were free, but crushing lines turned us away.

The party was put on by Massive Black, a studio full of really talented people and the force behind www.conceptart.org. Andrew (Android) Jones was there doing what he does best - a combination of live art performance mindbomb. I really like what he does, and his personally-industrialized wearable Wacom tablet is pretty nice too!

The food was a good mix of Asian flavor, but the teriyaki chicken kabob things went too quickly, especially when some dude walks by me and knocks my plate over. Dessert was endless chocolate-covered strawberries, pears with pomegranate (I think) and these fruit pastry things...I'm drawing a blank as to what they are named.

Technorati Tags: Autodesk,Maya,Mudbox,3D Studio MAX,Motion Builder,Toxik,stereoscopic,Massive Black,concept art,Android Jones,Andrew Jones,Wacom

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

Picking up our SIGGRAPH material

The convention opened this afternoon to register, pick up the materials and check out the lay of the land. We headed over, but first had to pick up lunch...at In-N-Out burger!

So I think I had my first In-N-Out burger, and while it was pretty good, I'm not sure what the big deal is. Later tonight we find out that you need to order it "animal style" to get some extra stuff piled on the burger and fries. We'll check it out again now that we know the whole story.

This particular In-N-Out is next to LAX, and planes were constantly landing over our heads. We could see two on the horizon lining up and it was crazy hearing the planes so close to us.

We get to the convention center and browse a few conference rooms, and see The Geek Bar, which is a place to charge your batteries, check your email and watch a few live feeds from eight different presentations.

Technorati Tags: SIGGRAPH,In-N-Out Burger,LAX

First day in Hermosa Beach

After crashing for a few hours we get up with David's grandmother and head to Scotty's, a Hermosa Beach staple, for breakfast. I had the Acapulco Omelette, which is an omelette with chorizo and guacamole, sourdough toast and coffee.

I passed on the White Croaker Special.

After breakfast we walked around the beach and the closest pier.

Technorati Tags: Hermosa Beach,Scotty's,White Croaker