A discussion of the year-round activities of the ACM SIGGRAPH Digital Arts Community, including online curated exhibitions, our virtual community, and discussions. Bring announcements and ideas.

Cynthia Beth Rubin
rubin (at) siggraph.org

Artists from past Blender Open Movie projects will give demos of work they did. This is an open-stage event for which everyone is invited to show work as well.

Twenty years ago, large projects in computer graphics animation, game development, and visual effects typically involved a half-dozen artists and engineers working together in a single studio space. Ten years later, the size of project teams had grown to include sometimes hundreds of collaborators, but the work remained largely housed within a single campus. In 2011, many projects, large and small, are distributed across multiple locations and time zones. Facilitating creative problem solving among team members remains the key to success, but the tools and behaviors within the creative process are changing dramatically.

This panel discusses issues surrounding globally distributed projects in animation, games, and visual effects. Success in these ventures depends on unique production structures, review processes, universal tool sets, and adaptation of artists and engineers to technology-mediated communication. Topics include speculation on possible future work environments and how the rising generation of artists and engineers will influence the collaboration process. Each panelist brings a specific area of expertise to the general topic and represents an organization recognized for successfully advancing industry capability with distributed projects.

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 dynamics pipeline integrates all forms of deformable simulation, consolidates the artist's toolset, and opens the door to high-quality and convincing dynamics.

This talk describes new techniques for coherent out-of-core point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion that are being used at DreamWorks Animation in the making of CG-animated feature films.

This complete demolition system combines an efficient pipeline with the artist-friendly simulation tools used to destroy a city in DreamWorks Animation's "Megamind".

This talk concentrates on how some of the recent advances in computer graphics and vision fit into a visual-effects pipeline and how they are used to digitize props.

This powerful feather-rendering system emphasizes artistic control and flexible workflow. It was critical to realization of feathered characters like Crane, Fifi, and Lord Shen, the anti-hero in "Kung Fu Panda 2".

Animating detailed liquid surfaces has always been a challenge for computer graphics researchers and visual effects artists. Over the past few years, researchers in this field have focused on mesh-based surface tracking to synthesize extremely detailed liquid surfaces as efficiently as possible. This course provides a solid understanding of the steps required to create a fluid simulator with a mesh-based liquid surface.

The course begins with an overview of several existing liquid-surface-tracking techniques and the pros and cons of each method. Then it explains how to embed a triangle mesh into a finite-difference-based fluid simulator and describes several methods for allowing the liquid surface to merge together or break apart. The final section showcases the benefits and further applications of a mesh-based liquid surface, highlighting state-of-the-art methods for tracking colors and textures, maintaining liquid volume, preserving small surface features, and simulating realistic surface-tension waves.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction and Welcome
Wojtan

2:05 pm
Liquid Surface Tracking Review
Müller-Fischer

2:35 pm
Embedding a Surface Mesh Into an Eulerian Fluid Simulation
Müller-Fischer

3:05 pm
Break

3:20 pm
Maintaining Surface Mesh Quality
Wojtan

3:35 pm
Topology Changes
Wojtan

4:25 pm
Advantages of a Mesh Surface
Brochu

5:10 pm
Conclusion
Wojtan

OpenGL is the most widely available library for creating interactive computer graphics applications across all of the major computer operating systems. Its uses range from creating applications for scientific visualizations to computer-aided design, interactive gaming, and entertainment, and with each new version, its capabilities reveal the most up-to-date features of modern graphics hardware.

This course is an accelerated introduction to programming OpenGL, emphasizing the most modern methods for using the library. In recent years, OpenGL has evolved and fundamentally changed how programmers interact with the application programming interface (API). The most notable change was the introduction of shader-based rendering, which has expanded to subsume almost all functionality in OpenGL. The course reviews each of the shader stages in OpenGL and how to specify data for rendering with OpenGL. And it summarizes how OpenGL's wealth of new functionality and features enables creation of ever-richer content.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Greeting and Course Overview
Shreiner

2:10 pm
OpenGL Pipeline Introduction
Shreiner

2:35 pm
A Prototype Application
Angel

3:15 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 1: Vertex Shading
Angel

3:55 pm
The Fundamental Pipeline, Part 2: Fragment Shading
Angel

4:30 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 1: Tessellation Shading
Shreiner

4:50 pm
The Advanced Pipeline, Part 2: Geometry shading
Shreiner

5:05 pm
Wrap-Up: Questions and Answers
Angel & Shreiner

This course focuses on rigid-body and particle simulation and collision techniques used in breaking objects and large-scale destruction. Following a brief introduction to the basic theory, the course continues with examples from specific films and games. Topics include production aspects such as authoring tools (including the open-source Bullet physics library used in both game and film production) and computational and algorithmic issues.

COURSE SCHEDULE

2 pm
Introduction and Overview of Destruction and Dynamics Techniques
Coumans

2:30 pm
Authoring Destruction With the Dynamica Bullet Maya Plugin
Baker

2:45 pm
Destruction and Dynamics Artist Tools at DreamWorks Animation
Zafar & Carlson

3:30 pm
Break

3:45 pm
Deformable Rigid Bodies and Fragment Clustering at Industrial Light & Magic
Criswell

4:30 pm
Procedurally Generating Fragmented Meshes at Disney Interactive Studios
Knight

4:45 pm
Accelerating Rigid-Body Simulation and Fracture Using GPU
Harada