"Rango" presented many challenges: the number of characters and their realism, complexity, and unique stylized look had probably never been achieved before in an animated feature. This talk provides a broad overview of the workflow and tools that were used for rigging and animating the characters.

TurboSquid and Falling Pixel use a case study from the stock 3D industry as a lens to discuss the challenges presented by a lack of standards in 3D modeling as a whole.

By optimizing games to exploit the capabilities of the latest platform technology and tools, game developers can create games featuring innovations that give players greater immersion. Spend your engineering time making the content more realistic and immersive instead of working around storage delays. With this idea in mind, Intel partnered with Iron Galaxy and Digital Extremes to deliver a proof of concept showing the content quality that can be achieved by exploiting the performance of Intel SSDs and second-generation Intel Core Family processors.

Inspired by the history, popularity, and aesthetics of sand animation(also known as sand art), this new multitouch digital artistic medium simplifies creation of sand animations and enables entirely new expressions.

See how Rhino 5 will improve your modeling techniques and process.

This talk aims to emphasize the collaborative opportunities available to educators as a result of communication technology. A successful collaboration between Texas A&M and DreamWorks Animation serves as a case study.

Learn how custom effects and props are built, how they can assist VFX, the processes that go into modern prop building (from laser cutting to CNC and 3D printing), how to use props to provide supplemental lighting and reference, and how to combine these disciplines to create new effects.

This technique renders texture-seam-free meshes without unwrapping the model into UV space at interactive frame rates.

This talk presents three shading innovations developed for the film "Cars 2": a layering method that is efficient and flexible, a procedural metal-flake illumination model that approximates the complex properties of modern car paint, and a new model for rendering reflection-aligned concentric micro-scratches.

There is no machine more steam-punk than the MakerBot Industries Thing-O-Matic 3D printer. Between five and 10 machines are available for autonomous printing on demand in The Studio.

The trademark look of Rapunzel in Disney's "Tangled" presented unique challenges in grooming, rendering, and pipeline management. This talk discusses the original hair road map, changes required during production, and how the XGen system was used for grooming, rendering, and managing the hair data.

Ping Fu, founder and CEO of Geomagic Inc., describes her journey from a computer science student to a computer graphics pioneer and ultimately an entrepreneur dedicated to advancing and applying 3D technology for the benefit of humanity. Her talk weaves technology, applications, and social impact to illustrate the importance of visual computing and its contribution to everyday life today and in the future.