Another great SIGGRAPH conference this year. As always, my schedule was packed and I wasn’t able to catch every session I would have liked. While I was able to sit in on some great talks (including the Weta Digital talk on Virtual Production and the Game Worlds talk), I missed out on a couple presentations I would have liked to see (Character Rigging and Creature Wrangling in Game, Feature Animation, and Visual Effects Production; Advances in Real-Time Rendering). I’m hoping to glean a little from recordings of the presentations, though.
My Dailies presentation on satellite reentry animations went well. It seems that the Dailies program gets more popular each year – this year, the line to get in stretched all the way down the hallway. The list of presenters seemed shorter than in previous years, but it was still a great mix of topics. (See the video below for more details on the Dailies program.) You’ll notice that yours truly makes a few appearances. I’ve also posted the video I presented below.
Paperman was the gem of the conference this year. The Disney short is a beautiful piece that expertly combines traditional line drawn animation with computer graphics. The making-of session was particularly interesting – the creators described the tools they developed that allowed the artists to keyframe and animate individual line strokes. I’m hoping the conference materials include some more information about those tools.
Paperman is a great piece, and I would highly recommend seeing it if you get the opportunity (it is playing in front of Wreck it Ralph in theaters).
Looking forward to next year’s conference!
The Sky is Falling!
A technical animation depicting satellite reentry
