The great Dan Garza has made his way back to Siggraph this year and we’re delighted to have him provide his thoughts on Siggraph ‘07. As you recall, Dan was one of our student bloggers back at the ‘05 show in LA and did a great job. So, we’ve invited him to give his thoughts on this years show, so, without further ado:

The last time my hawaiian patterned eggplant physique swaggered into SIGGRAPH was two years back. We had won a national competition and best in show at a film fest and were flown to LA. A lot has changed.

Quick recap LA ‘05 through my eyes:

-Sensory overload phase: Flashy lights, first rate hotel, VIP parties, gifts, industry give-a-ways, dancing, drinkin’ to the point of blurry and new friends. Woo-hoo! more

If you hurry (you have until 2 p.m. today) down to the bowels of the San Diego Convention Center (rooms 15 and 16 on the Mezzanine Level), you can still enjoy the Guerilla Studio experience, make some art, meet some collaborators, or just goof around.

With Gibson guitars wailing in the background, I discovered artists, students, and curiosity seekers “playing with lots of cool toys,” as one of them described it. Down there earlier, I watched a young man get his face scanned using a Polhemus handheld scanner so that he could “play with myself,” so to speak, using animation software. I also watched artists sketching on Wacom tablets, people animating stacks of colorful teacups, folks printing out all sorts of CG drawings, sketches, and previsualizations, and I listened in as artists hotly debated new ways to animate organic shapes to do all sorts of “reverse engineering,” whatever that is. In other words, this is the colorful, expressive, and free little corner of Siggraph where anything goes. more

One of the great joys of each Siggraph is the hodge-podge of hopeful students and professionals that gather in the juried Emerging Technologies pavilion. Described by the Siggraph organizers as chock full of “Digital innovations that change the way we work, live, and play”, the exhibits are mostly fresh out of the R&D labs and university computer science departments. (See http://www.siggraph.org/s2007/attendees/etech/ for more.)

In the darkened hall, you‘ll find pools of light shining on hardware and software galore: 3D displays, robotics, input devices, interaction techniques, computer vision, sensors, audio, speech, biometrics, wearable computing, scientific visualization, and more. more

Finally got a chance to sneak over to the Electronic Theater at the San Diego Civic Center Theater last night for the 7pm showing. As with every Electronic Theater from Siggraph’s of yesteryear, the pre-show is just as entertaining as the actual clips.

For ‘07 the committee offered a tribute to some of the ground-breaking innovations in game technology–from the ’80s. They projected three different laser-based Atari games onto the huge movie screen and invited industry pros to try their hand at the joystick classics. more

More Siggraph news from our ongoing virtual press conference

Autodesk, Inc. extends its congratulations to all recipients of this year‘s Autodesk Masters awards. Through this annual program, Autodesk recognizes exceptional Autodesk 3ds Max and Autodesk Maya software artists and technical specialists whose work and dedication have significantly contributed to the advancement of computer graphics. The 2007 Autodesk Masters were announced yesterday at Autodesk‘s SIGGRAPH User Group meeting. more

My pal, Dan Ochiva, alluded in an earlier posting to Vicon’s new F40 camera system with its proprietary sensors, and many mo-cap hardware developments generally. But, in popping in at the busy Vicon booth (#902) today, I was also impressed with the company’s software work with the debut of its new Blade processing technology. Vicon’s approach seems to be to package the whole mocap workflow process inside a single, unified, proprietary toolset under the Vicon umbrella.

Vicon’s CEO, Brian Nilles, says clients wanted to keep data from capture onward inside a single pipeline as it gets pushed into the 3D animation process, and Vicon responded with Blade. The tool, he emphasizes, is scalable to fit with boutique pipelines to those of monolithic studios. And, he adds, it was also designed with plug-in architecture to easily bring in third-party applications, as studios figure out various new ways to integrate their mocap and animation pipelines.

Vicon also launched a mo-cap oriented film festival at Siggraph this week. The company is offering a $10,000 grand prize to artists who create original short films (between two to five minutes) incorporating motion capture data provided by Vicon on its festival web site (www.vicon.com/filmfestival/) in new and unique ways. The plan is to post selected entries on YouTube for public voting, and the top 10 vote-getters will be judged by a panel of industry experts, with the winner reeling in the grand prize.

–Michael Goldman

Mo cap is entering a golden age–or maybe a green one, as both new and established companies alike are churning out product to get or gain market share. As I mentioned in two earlier postings, established companies like Vicon as well as newcomers like Reallusion are just two companies at the show with cool gear in the booth or promised ‘real soon‘.

In part, it‘s because of the growing popularity of a more sophisticated generation of mo cap-based projects like Pirates of the Caribbean (just saw behind the scenes previews of Zemeckis‘ Beowolf at the Electronic Theater–looks great!).

The elements used in mo cap technology are being spun off for other uses too. Long-time motion tracking manufacturer InterSense (www.intersense.com) collaborated with 3D virtual studio developer Cinital (www.cinital.com) to create the latest in previsualization stages for Stargate Digital, which recently opened a virtual studio in Van Nuys, California. more

This morning, Eyeon announced Fusion 64; Fusion 5.2 comes to Siggraph with a list of previously unannounced features, among them 3D LUTs, FBX, 3DS, OBJ and Collada import improvements, Python scripting, a vector motion blur tool, and lots more.

Fusion 64 brings 64 bit to desktop compositing. This is one of the bigger responses to the opportunity presented by multi-core and multi-processor workstations. Hopefully more to come. Fusion 64 shares a lot (all?) of the new feature in 5.2.

The popular software-that-could is in its second decade of being used on too many big effects films and games to name.

Cafe FX built its business on a Fusion foundation some 12 years ago and stuck with it, now using their Fusion pipeline on Frank Darabont’s take on Stephen King’s The Mist and on the HBO mini-series biography on John Adams.

One of the Cafe FX artists–Richard Reed–is demoing on the Eyeon booth and points out that Fusion suits the increasingly blurry line between 2D and 3D. A Shake/Nuke vet, Reed found the transition to Fusion pretty easy overall. “It’s an excellent resource for artists,” he says, “lighters are becoming compositors, the lines between artists are disappering. Fusion supports that well because of the 3D workspace and it’s only getting better.”

If you’re here, try to catch Rob Taylor (Pendulum Studios) demo on Stuntman 2: Ignition.

Be sure to check out the Art Gallery located on the upper floor. Here is a sampling of some of the astounding artwork up there:

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If you’re here, you won’t want to miss this. Starting at 6pm go to Room 28B and C at the convention center to see the unveiling of the 32-hour animation contest winners otherwise known as the Fjorg! Iron Animators. They’re tired, but they’re happy.

Videos are rumored to be hilarious, winners will be announced at 6:55. In the meantime if you want to see the scene (or if you’re not here) go to workstations.tv .

All contest videos will be posted to workstations.tv tonight. Stop by and see what these creative CG animators have put their hearts and souls into.