The vast, fantastical world of Ga'Hoole, which ranged from deep pine forests to rocky canyons and deserts, was populated by a multitude of creatures brought together to play out a unique adventure. This talk focuses on the pipeline concepts and production methodologies that underpin the film's visual richness.

Applying facial motion capture data on a virtual actor is always a tedious task. This talk explains a technique that helped Guerrilla Games deliver more than 30 different faces over 70 minutes of cut scenes for the AAA PlayStation 3-exclusive title Killzone 3.

This technique reduces ray-gathering noise with low overhead and no bias by incrementally modifying the directional distribution of future rays to be traced based on those already traced.

A low-cost image-based system that facilitates recovery of gross scale geometry, local surface detail, and approximated albedo to create highly detailed 3D models of building façades from photographs. The system requires simple data capture and modest user intervention.

This paper studies color compatibility using large online datasets, and develops new tools for choosing colors to test new and existing theories of human color preferences and learn quantitative models that score the aesthetic quality of a color combination, and demonstrate the models in color selection tasks.

The effect of edge smoothness on color has not been studied in color-appearance modeling. This paper examines the appearance of color under different degrees of edge smoothness, confirms that color appearance changes with increased smoothness, and demonstrates an appropriate appearance model.

An example-based method for image color and tone-style enhancement that has been successfully applied in two scenarios: cell phone photo enhancement by transferring the style of a high-end camera and photo enhancement using styles learned from photographers.

This paper presents a camera with switchable primaries (RGB, CMY and RGBCMY) using shiftable layers of color filter arrays. The system provides a new degree of photographic freedom in which multiple operational modes are available for optimizing the picture quality based on the nature of the scene, color, and illumination.

Thomas Roussel from Pixologic presents a hands-on interactive workshop showing how digital sculpting with ZBrush can change your modeling and concept pipeline.

This paper on understanding enjoyment within alternate-reality games discusses the unique demands of the genre and why pre-existing enjoyment models are not applicable.

There is a growing need for procedures that can support analysis and understanding of players’ behaviors within game environments. This paper proposes a system that allows analysts to build and compare visualizations of clusters of players to better understand the causes and effects of players’ actions.

This work reports on design and evaluation of three novel gesture-based games with healthy older adults. It describes key features in the physical and social engagement, and general usability of the games, to determine their applicability to the target audience.

This study of how game reviews and user comments influence player experience found that players who read negative reviews rated the game lower than those who read either positive reviews or no reviews at all.

What if you could explore the intricate detail of small subjects (such as a butterfly or embryo) much like an explorable map? Learn how new tools developed through the Explorable Microscopy collaborative project can help you do just that. This talk shows how these new tools can be used in your own work and examples of how the technology is enabling new science and research across a wide range of disciplines. In particular, it presents a range of low-cost motion-control devices, camera and lens options, open-source software, and online viewing applications that you can use in your work.

WebGL is a cross-platform, royalty-free web standard based on OpenGL ES 2.0. It is shader-based, using GLSL, and it brings plugin-free 3D to the web, directly into the browser.

This discussion of the OpenSceneGraph open-source system includes new developments, how to use the software, and how people are using it.

Leonardo community members and all SIGGRAPH attendees are invited to hear presentations from selected Leonardo Affiliate Member organizations on cutting-edge research and educational programs in ArtScience around the world.

The DIYLILCNC is an inexpensive, 3-axis, tabletop mill that can be built by an individual with basic shop skills and tool access. The open-source plans are free to download from diylilcnc.org, where makers can collaborate with a global community of DIY CAD/CAM enthusiasts.