This overview of the state of CG in Latino countries includes a special presentation by various studios in Latin America, including 3D Animation Rocks, the largest animation school in Argentina, and a university in Chile. The session ends with a celebratory piñata.

Sandro Alberti
salberti (at) siggraph.org

An overview of the state of CG in Asia, including the evolution of SIGGRAPH Asia. The Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2011 summarizes the upcoming conference in December in Hong Kong.

Lee Yong Tsui
MYTLEE (at) ntu.edu.sg

Animation festivals remain a hugely popular activity with all segments of the digital-media community. This is your chance to find out about how two chapters run their festivals. If you're interested in finding out more about how to run such a festival, or just want to take a peek behind the curtain, don't miss this talk.

Scott Lang
New York City ACM SIGGRAPH Chapter
scott (at) siggraph.org

This study explores whether non-player characters within World of Warcraft reinforce stereotypical assumptions surrounding gender and work. Even though all professions are represented (albeit not equally) by male and female NPCs, there seem to be subtle hierarchies within the distribution of "work" in this gameworld.

Drawing on theories from game, film, and theater studies, this paper explores two primary ways in which 3D computer games deal with stories.

Educational psychology studies use motivational constructs called achievement goals to predict learning success. This paper examines whether gaming achievement goals influence game play in similar ways. Gaming achievement goals could help determine whether people will play and which players are more likely to learn from educational games.

Studies of expertise in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) involve either small-scale ethnographic accounts of elite players or large-scale accounts relying on one-dimensional measures of expert play. This paper presents a quantifiable model of expertise in MMOGs that is generated through qualitative analyses of both novices and experts.

How Much Animation Can You Do in a Day?
This talk shows how to speed up your pipeline with the Xsens MVN animation tool. It also explains how to record a motion, edit the motion, and insert it into a scene in no time, or even real time, using the Xsens MVN system.

Bakery Relight: Interactive Lighting, Shading, and Rendering for Pros
Designed for the high-end feature film, television, industrial, automotive, and architectural design industries, Bakery Relight is the first interactive, all-in-one lighting, shading, and rendering solution. Born out of years of hands-on experience on top-grossing feature films, Relight supports the lighters’ and shaders’ iterative process with full-resolution feedback in seconds.

Physics-Based Virtual Reality
Thanks to their unique physics-based approach, OPTIS light-simulation specialists provide real-time, predictive visualization solutions based on measured physical properties of surfaces and materials. OPTIS solutions are used by engineers, ergonomists, and designers to optimize perceived quality and the visual ergonomics of HMIs.

Multi-Threaded 2D Renderer Design
Rendering real-time high-quality 2D vector graphics through a 3D pipeline is a challenging task that requires custom algorithms for shape tessellation, edge anti-aliasing, and text rendering. For best performance, Scaleform 2D renderer includes optimizations such as multi-threaded rendering, mesh caching, and draw-primitive batching. Following a high-level design description, this talk dives into multi-threaded rendering, introducing a novel render-tree design that allows the both threads to access scene graph nodes simultaneously, greatly reducing copy overhead. This strategy is particularly effective when only a subset of nodes is modified every frame and can be applied to any real-time rendering engine.

Video Processing With AMD FirePro Solutions
PC architecture and graphics-processing units have become ubiquitous in broadcast and post-production workflows. This talk reviews the types of processing and rendering that the GPU excels at and illuminates some of the emerging trends for tightening GPU integration into these workflows.