SIGGRAPH 2010 Panels

I don’t often go to SIGGRAPH panels, but this year’s list includes three that look very tempting. Here they are, sorted by date:

Future Directions in Graphics Research

Sunday, 25 July, 3:45 PM – 5:15 PM

The SIGGRAPH website description says, “This panel presents the results of an NSF-funded workshop on defining broader, fundamental long-term research areas for potential funding opportunities in medical imaging and device design, manufacturing, computational photography, scientific visualization, and many other emerging areas in graphics research.” It’s important to know where the funding is going into computer graphics research, and what the researchers think the most promising future directions are. The panelists include some of the most prominent and influential computer graphics professors: Jessica Hodgins from Carnegie Mellon,  James Foley (first author of “Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice”) from Georgia Tech,  Pat Hanrahan (who probably has his name on more SIGGRAPH papers than anyone in the world) from Stanford University, and  Donald P. Greenberg (whose list of former students would make a great first draft for a “who’s who” of computer graphics) from Cornell.

CS 292: The Lost Lectures; Computer Graphics People and Pixels in the Past 30 Years

Monday, 26 July, 3:45 PM – 5:15 PM

This is a unique idea for a panel – in the 1980’s, Ed Catmull and Jim Blinn taught a hugely influential course on computer graphics. Among many others, it inspired Richard Chuang who went on to found PDI. While teaching the course, Ed Catmull was building Lucasfilm’s computer graphics group, which later became Pixar. The panelists are Ed Catmull and Richard Chuang, who according to the website description “use video from the course to reflect on the evolution of computer graphics – from the genesis of Pixar and PDI to where we are today.” Catmull in particular is an amazing speaker – this looks well worth attending.

Large Steps Toward Open Source

Thursday, 29 July, 9:00 AM – 10:30 AM

Several influential film industry groups have open-sourced major bits of internal technology recently. This panel discusses why they did it, what were the benefits and where were the challenges. This is definitely relevant to the game industry – would it make sense for us to do the same? (Insomniac is already leading the way – I wish they had a representative on this panel). Panelists include Rob Bredow (CTO of Sony Pictures Imageworks, which has recently launched several important open source initiatives),  Andy Hendrickson (CTO of Walt Disney Animation Studios, which has recently done the same, most notably including the Ptex texture mapping system),  Florian Kainz (Principal R&D Engineer at Industrial Light & Magic and the key individual behind OpenEXR, which ILM open-sourced in 2003),  and Bill Polson (Lead of Production Engineering at Pixar Animation Studios). Pixar doesn’t currently have any open-source initiatives that I know of – does Bill’s participation mean that they are about to announce one?

SIGGRAPH 2010 Talks

After the courses, the next best source of good SIGGRAPH material for games and real-time graphics professionals is the Talks (formerly called Sketches), and this year is no exception. The final list of Talks can be found on the SIGGRAPH Talks webpage, as well as in the Advance Program PDF. I will summarize the most relevant sessions here, sorted by date:

Avatar for Nerds

Sunday, 25 July, 2-3:30 pm

  • A Physically Based Approach to Virtual Character Deformations (Simon Clutterbuck and James Jacobs from Weta Digital Ltd.) – I saw an early version of this presentation at Digital Domain a few weeks ago – although they use an expensive physical muscle simulation, they bake the results into a pose-space deformation-like representation; this kind of approach could work for games as well (pose-space deformation approaches in general offer a useful way to “bake” expensive deformations; their use in games should be further explored).
  • Rendering “Avatar”: Spherical Harmonics in Production (Nick McKenzie, Martin Hill and Jon Allitt from Weta Digital Ltd.) – The website says “Application of spherical harmonics in a production rendering environment for accelerated final-frame rendering of complex scenes and materials.” This sounds very similar to uses of spherical harmonics in games; making this talk likely to yield applicable ideas.
  • PantaRay: Directional Occlusion for Fast Cinematic Lighting of Massive Scenes (Jacopo Pantaleoni, Timo Aila, and David Luebke from NVIDIA Research; Luca Fascione, Martin Hill and Sebastian Sylwan from Weta Digital Ltd.) – the website mentions “…a novel system for precomputation of ray-traced sparse, directional occlusion caches used as a primary lighting technology during the making of Avatar.” Like the previous talk, this sounds very game-like; these are interesting examples of the convergence between graphics techniques in film and games going in the less common direction, from games to film rather than vice-versa. Note that  several of the authors of this talk are speaking at the “Beyond Programmable Shading” course, and there is also a paper about PantaRay (called “A System for Directional Occlusion for Fast Cinematic Lighting of Massive Scenes”).

Split Second Screen Space

Monday, 26 July, 2-3:30 pm

  • Screen Space Classification for Efficient Deferred Shading (Neil Hutchinson, Jeremy Moore, Balor Knight, Matthew Ritchie and George Parrish from Black Rock Studio) – website sez, “This talk introduces a general, extendible method for screen classification and demonstrates how its use accelerated shadowing, lighting, and post processing in Disney’s Split/Second video game.” This sounds like a useful extension to SPU-based screen tile classification methods; I wonder if it is cross-platform.
  • How to Get From 30 to 60 Frames Per Second in Video Games for “Free” (Dmitry Andreev from LucasArts) – well, this title is promising a lot! The website description doesn’t say much more than the title, but if LucasArts actually uses it in production this might be useful.
  • Split-Second Motion Blur (Kenny Mitchell, Matt Ritchie and Greg Modern from Black Rock Studio) – the description mentions “image and texture-space sampling techniques”, so this is probably a combination of blurring road textures in the direction of motion with screen-space techniques. Split-Second looks good; an overall description of their motion blur system should be interesting to hear.
  • A Deferred-Shading Pipeline for Real-Time Indirect Illumination (Cyril Soler and Olivier Hoel from INRIA Rhone-Alpes; Frank Rochet from EDEN GAMES) – there have been screen-space indirect illumination (approximation) techniques published before, but none used in games that I know of; there could be some useful ideas here.

APIs for Rendering

Wednesday, 28 July, 2-3:30 pm

  • Open Shading Language (Larry Gritz, Clifford Stein, Chris Kulla and Alejandro Conty from Sony Pictures Imageworks) – this Open-Source project from Sony Pictures Imageworks is interesting in that it is a shading language designed from the ground up for ray-tracing renderers. Probably not of immediate relevance to games, but some day…
  • REYES using DirectX 11 (Andrei Tatarinov from NVIDIA Corporation) – the website summary claims that this REYES implementation uses “not only the compute power of GPU, but also the fixed-function stages of the graphics pipeline.” This is something I have wanted to see someone try for a long time; the typical pure-Compute approaches to GPU-accelerated REYES seem wasteful, given the similarities between the existing fixed function units and some of the operations in the REYES algorithm. It will be interesting to see how efficient this implementation ends up being.
  • WebGLot: High-Performance Visualization in the Browser (Dan Lecocq, Markus Hadwiger, and Alyn Rockwood from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology) – although anything that makes it easier for browser-based games to use the GPU is interesting, I’m not familiar enough with the existing approaches to judge how new this stuff is.

Games & Real Time

Thursday, 29 July, 10:45 am-12:15 pm

  • User-Generated Terrain in ModNation Racers (James Grieve, Clint Hanson, John Zhang, Lucas Granito and Cody Snyder from United Front Games) – from all accounts, the system for user-generated tracks and terrain in ModNation Racers is impressive; a description of this system by its developers is well worth attending.
  • Irradiance Rigs (Hong Yuan from University of Massachusetts Amherst; Derek Nowrouzezahrai from University of Toronto; Peter-Pike Sloan from Disney Interactive Studios) – this looks like an extension of light-probe lighting techniques; it promises better results for large objects and / or near lighting. These techniques are very common in games, and this talk looks likely to be useful.
  • Practical Morphological Anti-Aliasing on the GPU (Venceslas Biri and Adrien Herubel from Université Paris-Est; Stephane Deverly from Duran Duboi Studio) – since God of War III produced great visuals from an SPU implementation of Morphological Antialiasing, there has been much interest in the games industry for  more GPU-friendly version of the algorithm, for use on XBox 360 or high-end PCs. Its hard to tell from the short description on the website whether the version in this talk is any good, but it might well be worth attending the talk to find out.
  • Curvature-Dependent Reflectance Function for Rendering Translucent Materials (Hiroyuki Kubo from Waseda University; Yoshinori Dobashi from Hokkaido University; Shigeo Morishima from Waseda University) – this sounds similar to the paper Curvature-Based Shading of Translucent Materials, such as Human Skin by Konstantin Kolchin (we discuss it in the section on “Wrap Lighting” in RTR3, since it is essentially an attempt to put wrap lighting on a physically sound footing). Since in most cases curvature can be precomputed, this could be a cheap way to get more accurate subsurface scattering effects.

A lot of the film production talk sessions also look interesting, even without an explicit game or real-time connection; I have often found useful information at such talks in previous years. These sessions include “Elemental Training 101”, “All About Avatar”, “Rendering Intangibles”, “Volumes and Precipitation”, “Simulation in Production”, “Blowing $h!t Up”, “Pipelines and Asset Management” and “Fur, Feathers and Trees”.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Courses Update

Since my original post about the SIGGRAPH 2010 courses, some of the courses now have updated speaker lists (including mine – regardless of what Eric may think, I’m not about to risk Hyper-Cerebral Electrosis by speaking for three hours straight). I’ll give the notable updates here:

Stylized Rendering in Games

Covered games will include:

  • Borderlands (presented by Gearbox cofounder and chief creative officer Brian Martel as well as VP of product development Aaron Thibault)
  • Brink (presented by lead programmer Dean Calver)
  • The 2008 Prince of Persia (presented by lead 3D programmer Jean-François St-Amour)
  • Battlefield Heroes (presented by graphics engineer Henrik Halén)
  • Mirror’s Edge (also presented by Henrik Halén).
  • Monday Night Combat (presented by art director Chandana Ekanayake) – thanks to Morgan for the update!

Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production

  • I’ll be presenting the theoretical background, as well as technical, production, and creative lessons from the adoption of physically-based shaders at the Activision studios.
  • Also on the game side, Yoshiharu Gotanda (president, R&D manager, and co-founder of tri-Ace) will talk about some of the fascinating work he has been doing with physically based shaders.

On the film production side:

  • Adam Martinez is a computer graphics supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks whose film work includes the Matrix series and Superman Returns; his talk will focus on the use of physically based shaders in Alice in Wonderland.  Imageworks uses a ray-tracing renderer, unlike the micropolygon rasterization renderers used by most of the film industry; I look forward to hearing how this affects shading and lighting.
  • Ben Snow is a visual effects supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic who has done VFX work on numerous films (many of them as CG or VFX supervisor) including Star Trek: Generations, Twister, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, The Mummy, Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, King Kong, and Iron Man. Ben has pioneered the use of physically based shaders in Terminator Salvation and Iron Man 2, which I hope to learn more about from his talk.

Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production

The game side of the course has two speakers in common with the “physically-based shading” course:

  • Yoshiharu Gotanda will talk about his work on film and camera emulation at tri-Ace, which is every bit as interesting as his physical shading work.
  • I’ll discuss my experiences introducing filmic color grading techniques at the Activision studios.

And one additional speaker:

  • While working at Electronic Arts, Haarm-Pieter Duiker applied his experience from films such as the Matrix series and Fantastic Four to game development, pioneering the filmic tone-mapping technique recently made famous by John Hable. He then moved back into film production, working on Speed Racer and 2012 (for which he won a VES award). Haarm-Pieter also runs his own company which makes tools for film color management.

The theoretical background and film production side will be covered by a roster of speakers which (although I shouldn’t say this since I’m organizing the course) is nothing less than awe-inspiring:

  • Dominic Glynn is lead engineer of image mastering at Pixar Animation Studios. He has worked on films including Cars, The Wild, Ratatouille, Up and Toy Story 3. Dominic will talk about how color enhancement and rendering is done at different stages of the Pixar rendering pipeline.
  • Joseph Goldstone (Lilliputian Pictures LLC) is a prominent consulting color scientist; his film credits include Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Batman Returns, Apollo 13, The Fifth Element, Titanic, and Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones. He has contributed to industry standards committees such as the International Color Consortium (ICC) and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science’s Image Interchange Framework.
  • Joshua Pines is vice president of color imaging R&D at Technicolor; between his work at Technicolor, ILM and other production companies he has over 50 films to his credit, including Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, The Abyss, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, Schindler’s List, Forrest Gump, Twister, Mission: Impossible, Titanic, Saving Private Ryan, The Mummy, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, The Aviator, and many others. Joshua lead the development of ILM’s film scanning system and has a Technical Achievement Award from the Motion Pictures Academy of Arts & Sciences for his work on film archiving.
  • Jeremy Selan is the color pipeline lead at Sony Pictures Imageworks. He has worked on films including Spider-Man 2 and 3, Monster House, Surf’s Up, Beowulf, Hancock, and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Jeremy has contributed to industry standards committees such as the Digital Cinema Initiative (DCI), SMPTE, and the Academy of Motion Picture Art and Science’s Image Interchange Framework. At the course, Jeremy will unveil an exciting new initiative he has been working on at Imageworks.
  • The creative aspects of color grading will be covered by Stefan Sonnenfeld, senior vice president at Ascent Media Group as well as president, managing director, and co-founder of Company 3. An industry-leading DI colorist, Stefan has worked on almost one hundred films including Being John Malkovich, the Pirates of the Caribbean series, War of the Worlds, Mission: Impossible III, X-Men: The Last Stand, 300, Dreamgirls, Transformers, Sweeney Todd, Cloverfield, The Hurt Locker, Body of Lies, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Where the Wild Things Are, Alice in Wonderland, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and many others, as well as numerous high-profile television projects.

Martin Gardner, a great person

Some have heard, some haven’t, so I’ll mention it here: Martin Gardner passed away a few days ago, age 95. If you’re saying “who?”, then you’re in for a treat, as there’s a great set of books and articles you haven’t yet discovered. He wrote about mathematical ideas and puzzles (he popularized Conway’s Game of Life, among many other things), debunked pseudoscience such as homeopathy and dianetics, explained magic tricks, annotated Lewis Carroll’s works and others, wrote about science and a little philosophy – what a great guy, and my #1 childhood hero. Need to know more? Check say this NYT article (which includes some puzzles) and Wikipedia.

I just noticed on Amazon you can get all of his Scientific American “Mathematical Games” articles on CD-ROM – cool. Me, my favorite books are “Aha! Insight” and “Aha! Gotcha” because I could give them to my children and pass on the word.

I’ll get back to graphics soon, but for now: a toast to a life well lived, and may we all do at least half as well!

Oh, come to think of it, I do have something that’s somewhat graphical, or at least geometric. This is from the book “The Mathemagician and Pied Puzzler: a Collection in Tribute to Martin Gardner”: You have a cube and you select at random three (different) corners. What is the chance that the triangle formed by these corners is acute (all angles < 90 degrees)? is a right triangle (has one angle == 90 degrees)?

Answers are here, along with another puzzle.

Bonus followup: I just noticed that the book I mentioned, “The Mathemagician…”, is available as a free PDF download.

Graphics Conference Calendars

SIGGRAPH’s early registration deadline is June 4th, after that the price goes up $175 or so, depending. News of which made me look around for graphics conference calendars. I didn’t find much – if anyone knows of others, please do let me know.

The Upcoming Graphics Conferences page on wikidot lists most of the graphics conferences I know about, and tons I don’t. It doesn’t list HPG 2010, however. I wrote the website maintainer about this omission but it’s a week later and no response or update.

A handy schedule of computer graphics conferences is available from a student at the Max Planck Institute. This one’s handy for researchers, as it gives submission dates. Oddly, HPG 2010 is again missing.

3rd Edition now on Google Books

Naty just noticed that our latest edition is up on Google Books. It’s the usual deal, about 20% of the book is excerpted. Between this and Amazon’s Look Inside, a fair bit of the book is at your fingertips.

By the way, if you are the author of an out-of-print book, please do get it 100% up on Google Books, if you can. Even if it’s dated, it captures where the field was at a particular time – at the least you’re helping future archaeologists. First step is to get the rights back. Contact your publisher and ask. It’s not a high priority for any of them, but they usually have no reason to hold onto the rights and will freely return these, or so I’m told. After that, well, I’ve personally never done step two, but I’d hope it’s not an arduous process to get Google Books to list it. If anyone has experience in this area, please do speak up.

In other news, the Amazon Stock Market for our book had a sudden uptick. Interestingly, Barnes and Noble kicked its price up the same week. Just a coincidence, I’m sure. The May 10th uptick was no doubt due to Mother’s Day and the busy summer reading season; our book is a chick magnet when casually left out on your beach blanket.

SIGGRAPH 2010 Course Scheduling

One of the challenges of SIGGRAPH is doing it all. My own method is to take a sheet of lined paper (remember that stuff?) and make columns for the days, each line being a half hour. One whole sheet holds it all, vs. me dorking around with my Palm/phone/Touch/whatever, scrolling around to see what’s what. Old school, but it works great.

Anyway, Naty’s recent summary of courses didn’t have course times. Here goes, mostly for my own benefit, in time order. Bolded are the ones I personally plan to attend and why, FWIW:

Perceptually Motivated Graphics, Visualization, and 3D Displays – Sunday afternoon

Physically Based Shading Models in Film and Game Production – Sunday afternoon. Toss up for me between this and the previous course. Naty’s the only speaker for this one, so it’s tempting to go, just to see his head explode after lecturing for 3+ hours.

Stylized Rendering in Games – Monday morning. I’m particularly pumped for this one, having done NPR work this last year.

Recent Advances in Real-Time Collision and Proximity Computations for Games and Simulations – Monday afternoon

Color Enhancement and Rendering in Film and Game Production – Tuesday morning. Naty’s a speaker.

Filtered Importance Sampling for Production Rendering – Tuesday morning

An Introduction to 3D Spatial Interaction With Videogame Motion Controllers – Tuesday afternoon

Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games – all Wednesday. Traditional course, usually quite good.

Volumetric Methods in Visual Effects – Wednesday morning

Gazing at Games: Using Eye Tracking to Control Virtual Characters – Wednesday afternoon

Beyond Programmable Shading – all Thursday. The DICE talk last year was amazing, the others were also worthwhile.

Advanced Techniques in Real-Time Hair Rendering and Simulation – Thursday morning

Global Illumination Across Industries – Thursday afternoon

The “Advances” course used to always be Monday. Which was terrible last year, as it was scheduled against the last day of the colocated HPG conference (not a problem this year, since HPG is in Europe alternate years). I suspect someone realized that putting Advances and Beyond next to each other, and alongside the exhibition floor days, was good for pulling in game devs. Anyway, looks to be a great set of courses, other than the risk of head explosion.

If you want something lighter to start with on Sunday, try Glassner’s “Processing for Visual Artists and Designers” course. The Processing language is easy to learn and fun for quick bit-twiddling or other 2D effects, with all the usual 2D primitives and mouse support (and much else) built in.

Voting Time!

If you’re an ACM member, this is a reminder that the ACM 2010 Council Election voting deadline is noon (EDT) on May 24th. So vote now. You’ll need the piece of paper mailed to you, along with your ACM membership number (find that here or look at the label of a CACM sent to you, if you don’t recall it). Voting itself takes a minute, tops. While you’re at it, vote in the ACM SIGGRAPH elections – deadline is June 4th. Who to vote for? Here’s Naty’s take. Disappointingly, very few candidates have responded so far to his questionnaire (a few candidates’ email addresses could not even be found, which is pretty sad).

I find voting theory fascinating, since there’s no perfect way to set up voting when there are more than two candidates, to name just one dilemma. I just noticed this book on Amazon, which I’ve put on reserve at the library – Poundstone’s books are usually entertaining.

ACM and SIGGRAPH Members – Vote for Open Access!

Long-time readers of this blog will be well aware of my position on ACM and Open Access. Although ACM is a non-profit organization which ostensibly has as its only mandate “the advancement of computing as a science and a profession”, the ACM Publications Board has been behaving like a rent-seeking publisher; bullying students working to provide valuable resources to the community, and lobbying the US Government against Open Access initiatives, all in the name of protecting their revenue streams.

I have witnessed an outpouring of anger from the computing community at these events, convincing me that I am not alone in believing that the ACM Publications Board (and by extension the ACM itself) has tragically lost its way, prioritizing its income over the good of computing as a science and a profession. In fighting Open Access they are on the wrong side of history; witness all the leading academic institutions who have come out in favor of the very government Open Access initiative which the ACM has opposed.

If you believe as I do, then now is the chance to make a difference! SIGGRAPH is holding elections now for three Director-at-Large positions, to be selected from five candidates; the deadline for the elections is June 4th. If you are an active SIGGRAPH member, you should have received instructions for voting by now; you can vote at this link. ACM is also holding general elections for various Council positions, including the President of the ACM; you can vote at this link. The deadline for the ACM General Council elections is May 24th.

For me, Open Access is the most important issue in these elections. But which candidates will fight for Open Access, and which for the status quo? Of all the SIGGRAPH candidates, only one has explicitly mentioned Open Access in their position statement (James O’Brien, as Eric pointed out in a recent post), and so far one of the ACM Council candidates have: Salil Vadhan’s statment is here: http://www.acm.org/acmelections/candidate10.

To arm voting ACM and SIGGRAPH members with information on the candidates positions, I have composed some questions regarding ACM’s copyright policy and Open Access, and put them up on a web page. I have sent these questions to all the candidates for these elections (except for the few which I have so far been unable to contact), and am posting the answers on the web page as they come in.

So far only two candidates for the SIGGRAPH election have answered; Mashhuda Glencross and James O’Brien. Both answers are Open-Access friendly. No candidates for the ACM Council have come forward yet. Keep following the questions web page, and make sure to use the information there to select candidates, and vote in both elections. Nothing will ever change unless we make our voices heard!