The climax of the CG-animated movie “Kung Fu Panda 2” is an epic battle featuring a flotilla of boats, an ancient Chinese-styled city, thousands of wolves armed for battle, action featuring hundreds of characters in a single shot, stylized graphic lighting, fantastical cannon fire and explosions, and a set of effects-supported Kung Fu moves. This talk provides a unique insight into the making of a CG-animated movie that goes beyond the traditional idealized concept of the pipeline.

Want to contribute an article to this department? Want to give valuable input on what YOU think should be printed there? Meet with the co-editors in this Birds of a Feather session.

Advances in digital audio technologies have led to computers playing a role in most music production and performance. Digital technologies offer unprecedented opportunities for creation and manipulation of sound, but the flexibilty of these new technologies provides an often confusing array of choices for composers and performers. A decade ago, the presenters of this course organized the first workshop on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME), to clarify this situation by exploring connections with the better-established field of human-computer interaction.

The course summarizes what has been learned at NIME. Topics include the theory and practice of new musical-interface design, mapping from human action to musical output, control intimacy, tools for creating musical interfaces, sensors and microcontrollers, audio synthesis techniques, and communication protocols such as Open Sound Control (and MIDI). The course presents several case studies focused on the major broad themes of the NIME conference, including augmented and sensor-based instruments, mobile and networked music, and NIME pedagogy.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction to NIME Tools, Design, and Aesthetics
Fels & Lyons

2:10 pm
Module 1: Building a NIME
Fels

2:40 pm
Module 2: Camera-Based Interfaces
Lyons

3 pm
Module 3: Design & Aesthetics of NIME
Lyons

3:20 pm
Break

3:50 pm
Module 4: NIME After NIME: Case Studies
Fels

4:20 pm
Module 5: NIME Theory
Lyons

4:40 pm
Module 6: NIME Education
Lyons

4:50 pm
Concluding Remarks
Fels & Lyons

5 pm
Discussion

An in-depth look at the techniques used to light and render Tokyo in "Cars 2".

Lighting Metro City at night required solving the lighting challenge known as the "many lights" problem. This sketch describes how the lighting department solved this challenge.

A technical and production-oriented talk describing the tile-based lighting architecture and deferred rendering optimizations developed to achieve a visual target with hundreds of real-time lights per scene for Need for Speed: The Run at 30 frames per second on PlayStation3.

This session encourages sharing of all non-proprietary information to maintain open discussions among studios, vendors and VARs to determine standards that will improve studio infrastructures.

Learn more about X3D Medical for 3D medical imaging in DIACOM and implementation of X3D Volume rendering.

This ACM SIGGRAPH Cartographic Visualization (Carto) sessioin explores how viewpoints and techniques from the computer graphics community can be effectively applied to cartographic and spatial datasets.

Did you ever dream of having your fashion design on a body of your own creation walking the fashion runway? In this class, which uses the Digital Clothing Suite software, human character and pattern data are given to the attendees so that they can learn how to seam patterns, simulate draping of the garment on a walking model, apply and manipulate different images to generate their own textile design, and save the final result into an animation clip. Your clips will be shown in The Studio during the conference. Conference attendees will vote on their favorite designs and the best designer will be awarded a six month free trial of the Digital Clothing Suite at the end of the conference. Participants are welcome to bring images/graphics to use for their custom textile design and to save their work on a flash drive to take home with them.

Founded in the Netherlands in 1990, ISEA International Foundation (formerly Inter-Society for the Electronic Arts) is an international nonprofit organization fostering interdisciplinary academic discourse and exchange among culturally diverse organizations and individuals working with art, science, and technology. The main activity of ISEA International is the annual International Symposium on Electronic Art. Selection of ISEA symposia is made by the ISEA International Foundation Board.

This discussion includes information about the organization, the upcoming ISEA2012 Albuquerque: Machine Wilderness, a symposium and series of events exploring the discourse of global proportions on the subject of art, technology, and nature. It also previews ISEA2013, in Sydney, Australia. All interested members of the electronic arts community are invited to learn about the future symposia and share ideas for potential organizational collaborations.

Sue Gollifer
Director, ISEA International Headquarters
info (at) isea-web.org

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.

This paper presents:

• A novel spatio-temporal anti-aliasing algorithm with essentially noise-free results. Visibility is solved for along line samples in screen space and in time.
• A new method for ambient occlusion based on line samples/ The method can also handle motion-blurred ambient occlusion.

A new frequency analysis and sheared filter for computing shadows cast by complex occluders. The approach uses ray tracing to sparsely sample the scene and a sheared 4D filter to share shadow samples between neighboring pixels.

In this paper, a method for reconstructing high-quality images from sparse stochastic samples is applied to simultaneous motion blur, depth of field, and soft shadows.

This paper introduces a homogeneous transform that reduces the computation required to determine the set of points or primitives inside a tetrahedral volume. It describes how application of this transform can improve the efficiency of soft shadows and defocus blur computations.