Monthly Archives: July 2019

SIGGRAPH 2019 so far

There’s lots to see and lots to like. Here are a few things you can enjoy in the comfort of your own home, if you’re not here baking in the sun or shivering in the AC (well, it’s not so bad, but I someday imagine a SIGGRAPH where I don’t feel the need to carry a sweater, just in case).

First, the “Are We Done with Ray Tracing?” course – spoiler: no. The talks were great, and I particularly enjoyed Morgan McGuire’s, since I love to see people predict the future. Little did he realize back then that we’d all have embedded holographic displays in the backs of our necks by 2035… Anyway, the course notes are all here: https://sites.google.com/view/arewedonewithraytracing – something of a record for getting them online, surpassed only by the Path Tracing in Production folks, who have their course notes for this year available before their courses on Wednesday: https://jo.dreggn.org/path-tracing-in-production/2019/index.html – and note that Stephen Hill has already begun gathering SIGGRAPH 2019 links.

Next, I happened upon this lovely, not at all disturbing work by Weta Workshop, Poster #72, just outside the exhibition floor past the ping-pong table. They’ll be back with these 3D printed eyes on Wednesday, from 12:15 to 1:15 pm, unless some unspeakable horror consumes them first. Honestly, these look amazing. I hadn’t realized such a thing was possible, modeling volume-like structures and printing them.

One more: Eric Lengyel and the second volume of his series on game engine development, on Rendering (Amazon link). From my quick skim, it looks good, a textbook covering a lot of the basics of color science, the camera, culling, shading, lighting, and more, with code snippets throughout, and API agnostic. See his website, and if you’re at SIGGRAPH, visit him at booth 620. Cool part: he turned in the final manuscript to Amazon’s print on demand last Thursday, had printed books in hand by Monday!

SIGGRAPH 2019 – my plan

This is my guaranteed-biased view of what I think is likely to be exciting at SIGGRAPH 2019, i.e., what I’ll be attending.

First, there are way too many ray tracing events, around 50 I’ve found so far (and that’s counting each of the eight SIGGRAPH courses having to do with ray tracing each as a single event). List at http://bit.ly/rtrt2019, which took me way longer to collate than I expected. Additions appreciated.

Of these, here are ones I won’t miss:

There are a bunch of other courses and talks at other times I’ll be at, but these are the ones I’m particularly interested in and can attend.

Here is the “hmmm, many things are going on at once, which do I choose?” part of the conference:

or

or

or

Here are the ones I can’t miss, since I’m involved:

  • Emerging Technologies, Matching Visual Acuity and Prescription: Towards AR for Humans – Some next steps in lightweight AR. I didn’t work on this, but I’m helping out in the booth Sunday 1-5:30, so stop on by.
  • Tuesday 10am – 10:25am, NVIDIA booth #1313, Booth Talk: A Fast Forward through Ray Tracing Gems – 32 papers in 25 minutes, so if I speak at 400 WPM I’ll be fine.
  • Tuesday 11am – 12 noon, Room 507, Los Angeles Convention Center, Birds of a Feather: Ray Tracing Roundtable – I’m the “organizer.” This will be in a 60-person room with whoever shows up first and wants to talk informally about ray tracing R&D. No presentations or other planned activities – I give an intro, we quickly introduce ourselves, then real-time parallel processing happens. That is, it’s a cocktail party without the cocktails, or the party – just the talk, with whoever shows up.
  • Wednesday 2pm – 5:15pm, Room 501AB, NVIDIA Presents: Ray Tracing Gems 1.1 – I’m chairing, and am looking forward to hearing these talks, which will include progress since the book was published (e.g., the new work presented at HPG).
  • Wednesday 5:30pm – 6pm, SIGGRAPH bookseller, outside Room 403, Book Signing: Ray Tracing Gems – meet some of the contributors; you will be a sad panda if you miss it.

As far as evening activities go, as usual SIGGRAPH needs to have twice as many nights as it provides. For everyone, Sunday’s Fast Forward; Monday’s the sake party, Electronic Theater, SIGGRAPH Reception, and Chapters Party; Tuesday’s Real-Time Live; Wednesday’s the Khronos reception (and I don’t want to think of all the good Khronos presentations I’m missing that day). Plus all the parties I’m not invited to.

So, what cool things do I not know about and shouldn’t miss?