Picto Synthesis

To wrap up with this year's coverage of SIGGRAPH 2007, here are links to articles I wrote for the occasion.

For Renderosity:

Summary of the week

Emerging Technologies - Experience the future
Part I - Part II

Front Page articles on related technologies.
Back to the drawing board
Image Explorations

For VFX world - (free registration required)
Electronic Theater review

On Flickr:
SIGGRAPH 07 Photo stream

The upgrade to Movable Type 4.0 didn't go as smoothly as some people have reported soon after the release of the final version, but it wasn't all that bad either compared to past versions.

Upgrading, in itself, was an easy task. I just followed the Recommended upgrade instructions, starting with a migration of the database from DB::Berkeley to MySQL.

I only ran into some minor issues:

The database migration script was taking too long when it came to handling a large amount of junk trackback pings I never had the patience to delete. I had to edit the script to skip that kind of class when migrating database objects.

The CGI scripts in the main installation folder of MT 4.0 returned a message about invalid headers. I had to edit the scripts with the proper includes for the perl installation on my server :

use strict;
use File::Basename;
use File::Spec;
use lib File::Spec->catdir(dirname($0), "lib");

Once the scripts were running correctly, I was missing all CSS formatting on the admin interface of MT 4.0. It turned out that was because I used to have my 'mt-static' folder outside of the 'cgi-bin' folder. Moving the folder where it belongs solved that problem.

The last problem was trickier. Although I could see recent entries on the dashboard page and the Entries RSS feed, the 'Manage -> Entries' page returned no entries whatsoever. A message on the forum and an official support ticket later, I came across a solution by accident - setting the number of rows to display from 5 to another value brought the entries back. 

Very strange.

I was not able to reproduce the problem, except by opening the admin interface for the first time, on a different browser and different machine. I don't know if this is an issue with CSS, cookies or browsers. At least, there's a workaround.

Now the only issue remaining is the update of templates and plugins, but that is not really related to the installation process. So far, it seems to be working pretty well except for the missing QuickPost wizard. It looks like the convenient wizard from MT 3.3 was replaced by a single link for Quickpost on the Entry form.

I wouldn't be surprised if someone came with a plugin to restore that missing wizard.

Thursday - Last chance for discoveries in San Diego.



The day started strong with an shared interview of Master "painter" Don Seegmiller with Lillian. Don graciously shared his experience as a proeminent Painter users, his philosophy teaching classes at the university as well as examples of his non-digital paintings - portraits full of grace and life.

After the interview, he went on showing his technique with Painter at Corel's booth (the picture above is the result of about an hour of work).



Before closing the day with a section of this year's Animation Theatre I missed on Sunday (Games and FX), I barely had time for one last walk through the Art Gallery and the Emerging Technologies displays.

Enough time to look at a few pieces I missed the first time around, such as the interactive, autonomous Glow Bots or the Digital Confessional. Just about time - coffee shops were being disassembled when I left the exhibit. Sure sign the end of the Conference had arrived.



Fortunately, this year, SIGGRAPH had happy ending - the Renderosity gathering ! We had a great time meeting several fellow members, vendors and guests. One of the best Renderosity parties I have been to so far.

This year's SIGGRAPH was packed with new experiences. As usual, it went by so quickly that it will take a few days to absorb the overload of images and start getting ready for ... next year's Siggraph Evolution in Los Angeles.

Wednesday - Three major talks on the menu, with another quick run  through the exhibition floor around lunchtime to get an autograph of Syd Mead himself at the Softimage booth !



First thing in the morning - "Digital Art Techniques" - where artists such as Kenneth Huff talked about their artistic approach and their experience bridging Science, Computer Graphics and Art. Their testimony provided invaluable insight into the elaborate thought process behind electronic art pieces too often dificult to make sense of.



In the afternoon - "Interactions Tomorrow" was a great occasion to review the latest advances in user interfaces, from multi-touch devices to tablets and even walls. Diamond Touch from Mitsubishi's MERL laboratory was particularly interesting to try on the Exhibition floor later on.

The last talk of the day, titled "Vogue!", featured papers around the capture and representation of cloth, with applications to virtual fashion. One of the talks 'High Fashion in Equations' showed an attempt at recreating ancient haute couture garments and show them in motion as a way to preserve them digitally (the originals being too fragile to be used on models anymore). That paper was also part of the selected papers at the Electronic Theatre.



The official reception was an occasion for everybody to meet and share experiences from the past few days around foods from around the world.

Tuesday night's event on my schedule is the Softimage User group meeting.

Set in an old theatre, the event is an occasion for Softimage to show off the achievements of their product line - XSI, Face robot  - and to invite cool speakers such as world famous Futurist - Syd Mead.
The designer behind vehicles of TRON, Blade Runner or Alien, talked about his long carrier and offered glimpses into his creative process along with a flurry of pictures from his personal collection.



Featured next was a fascinating tour behind the scenes of the move 300 with some members of the VFX team. It was amazing to see how much they achieved with a tiny set, a handful of people and a lot of computational power.



The show was concluded by a preview of XSI's next technological advances - a system of visual scripting called Moondust.
The power of this new programming tool was clear when the developer showed applications such as : lighting a log on fire interactively, dynamic simulation of waterfalls, cigarette smoke, crowd simulations and physics collisions between hundreds of cubes. Look out for future announcements about this technology.

Tuesday - Up bright and early for a press conference before the opening of the Exhibition. This is where serious stuff begin.

On the way, quick stop to hail the imposing guard of FJORG!... this year's Iron Animators event pitting teams of animators working non stop to produce an original movie during the time of the conference. Their followers are everywhere, easily recognizable by their viking helmet.



The Exhibition is as much of a visual overload as usual. Colorful booths, goodies, loud demos and people running everywhere. And sometimes, around the corner of a booth, an unexpected cool piece of hardware like this car simulator.

One of the highlights of the day was the brilliant talk from featured speaker Scott McLoud. With an acute sense of humor, he took the audience through a tour of his world, starting with his roadtrip with his family, why we are privileged to be able to create our own imaginary world, how he got involved with comics at a young age to a deconstruction of what makes comics a unique medium and how they may evolve in the future.

This was one of the most engaging talk of my experience of the conference... interestingly enough, it wasn't about computer graphics :)

The events of the night were not as wild as some other attendees will tell you (I heard rumors of interesting things going on at a party on the airplane carrier Midway). Mine started with the Electronic Theatre, which featured the best if this year's animation movies, including a sneak peek at Beowulf, a photo realistic motion capture movie that will certainly set a new standard for the idea of actor's performance for 3D characters.

During the pre-show, special guests tried their hand at a giant video game, projected by lasers on the screen of the theatre. Here, Computer Graphics pioneer Jim Blinn showed a remarkable mastery of Astroids !. After the show, I turned out to be too late to attend the 2007 Unravel Cyber Fashion show, hosted by the Siggraph Chapters party. Fortunately, both models and designers stayed for a while to discuss their work and answer questions.

Here is an example of an LED bracelet, shining with a built in game of life.

Continue reading "SIGGRAPH 07 - Day 3 (evening)" »

In the afternoon, a visit to the Art Gallery gave an interesting look of various interpretations of this year's theme - Global Eyes.



One of the most striking installations was World Processor, a series of globes representing facts about our planet in explicit and surprising ways (such as a map of only borders on a black globe). After spending the whole day walking from one installation to the next, the Guerilla Studio was a welcome break.



In a dark and peaceful atmosphere, dozens of machines are available to anyone willing to sit down, relax and try creating art. Graphic tablets, modeling and painting software, high definition printers and 3D sculpting machines ... even motion capture equipment are at your disposable if you are willing to give them a try.

Monday is the last day before the chaos of the main Exhibition begins.

It is a perfect occasion to walk through the other exhibitions. First, Emerging Technologies. This year featured both technology submitted to Siggraph and curated content, selected by the Program Chairs for that exhibition. Among notable technologies presented are the XO (One laptop per child), a 'transparent' car viewed from the driver's seat, electronic hair for machines with a sense of touch, Microsoft's Surface table and fantastic screens with e-Ink.

The Surface table had, among other applications, a cute Puzzle game where each piece is made of a fragment of a video, displayed under transparent square tokens laid out on the table.

The screens showcased by eInk have a built in smoothing property, allowing them to display extremely fine prints. They come in color and in flexible sheets and best of all, they keep displaying their content after being powered off.

Sunday night was marked by Flash Forward, the review of all the papers presented at the conference, by their authors, in 50 seconds each. The pace is quick, and creativity and fun run high. We saw new techniques to make fire and water, a way to build your own plush animal, amazing image manipulations and most of all, everything you want to know about how to torture a Bunny.... a 3d model of a Bunny that is.

 
This model of Bunny is rapidly replacing the venerable Teapot as one of the most widely used standard model for research in computer graphics, with a mutant armadillo coming close second.

Sunday - Relatively quiet.

I only have a couple of courses to attend in the morning, including Introduction to Siggraph. It may sound strange to attend this session after years of practicing computer graphics (and a few siggraphs already under my belt) but it turned out to be packed of tips and reminders about what it is we are areally doing here. Celebration of Computer Graphics in all its manifestations.

Throughout the conference, volunteer students are easily recognizable by their red or blue shirt. outside of some paid contractors, the entiere event is made exclusively of volunteers, including the Program Chairs. The afternoon is spent watching 5 hours straight of movies at the Animation Theatre. I will have to catch up the remaining hour or so later in the week. Watching these movies in block is a great way to get into the mood of the Siggraph and get a feel for this year's crop.

- Madness session: Swimming sheep, talking balls, dead head and bone heads
- Science: Particles, liquids, cloth, GPU physics simulations, and great baby
- Music : NPR, abstract and more physics and fluids, grandpa of soul
- Creativity : striking image of a man chasing his reflection (ego), abstract, animated Escher, poetic robots and a kid, Dreammaker, la marche des sans nom (poetic – visually close to Pink Floyd - The Wall)
Missing first two
- Storytelling: Cartoon characters, simulation of paper, cardboard, stop motion animation, great stories

Unfortunately, I don't have pictures (not allowed in screening areas, even for media), but here is a link to the summary of movies presented : Animation Theatre Program

Tips

- If you have a laptop, always spot the nearest power outlet. All power outlets are not active all the time.
- Leave a little early around lunch breaks to beat the crowd
- Walk a little more for less crowded coffee stands
- Go to Intro to Siggraph course. Nice reminders even if you are experienced

Saturday - Welcome to SIGGRAPH 2007. Only saturday and registration lines are already growing strong.



Not much to do other than pick up badges and merchandise, and get the lay of the land. This year I can finally take pictures officially without fear of reprisals. Why the world's leader in Computer GRAPHICS conference prohibits photographs is still a mystery to me.... after all it is not like attendees are interested in images, they only make them for a living (!)