These have been the most AMAZING couple days ever. Being a winner of the HP/Saytek Team Animation contest has really gotten our team’s names out there. I worked on the short with my two close friends Danny Garnett and Manuel Sierra. Our school, The Art Institute of Philadelphia, has been doing a great job of introducing us to many people already in the industry.

Day 1 (Monday): Lay of the Land

After being in San Diego for a bit and checking into our amazing hotel (Hilton Gaslamp Quarters…conveniently accross the street from the convention haha), we headed out for some food. Stopped by “The Field” near fifth and market. We all decided to get boxties since we have never heard of them before. They were delicious, pretty much a potato pancake wrapped around bacon, cheese, and covered in a white wine sauce. Now onto the convention itself. more

A word from our sponsor: Dan Snyder at the Penton booth:

Wow, what a phenomenal showing for our just one-year-old baby Core 2 Duo and Core Xeons here at Siggraph. HP, Boxx, Dell, Alienware and tons of others are showing these systems really being pushed to their limits. I am still reeling from French food envy after seeing Ratatouille (every frame of that was touched by an Intel CPU, thanks to a 30% speedup of Renderman on the new architecture!)… Softimage’s gig last night with the behind the scenes of “300″ would boggle even the geekiest computer guy’s mind. Great to see the software and hardware coming together here, we’re glad to be a little bit of the glue that makes this magic happen. Kudos to the artists–where it all starts!

–Dan Snyder, Intel 3D and Audio/Video Group

A steady crowd for has hovered around the Animation Mentor (animationmentor.com) booth the last couple days, as young artists flock to find out about the school’s totally virtual approach to educating character animators in preparation for industry careers. Animation Mentor offers an 18-month program to train students across the globe in the ways of character animation, using “mentors” who are really working industry professionals, to guide their work and progress, critique them, and teach them the latest techniques, tools, and innovations. The two-year-old program was recently approved by Sony Pictures Imageworks to join its growing roster of IPAX schools, dedicated to training animation professionals.

Judging from the crowds around the booth, this virtual education concept has merit, particularly in an industry that, by its very nature, is on the cutting edge of technology.

I chatted with one of Animation Mentor’s founders this afternoon–Shawn Kelly, a feature film animator at ILM, and will be uploading a slice of that conversation to this blog site a bit later today, so check back later for that podcast.

–Michael Goldman

Yesterday the ZBrush booth was completely out of control. The ammount of polys that were flying around the mesh they were murdering was so grossly insane that I literally gagged. They looked to be adding a baboons rear end (when in heat) to a poor human models face, and they were doing it extremely fast. It reminded me of the scene in Total Recal when their oxygen masks explode and their faces get all re-mixed. Barf. So Zbrush is totally crazy. I can’t wait to start playing with it when I get back to Phoenix. In other Siggraph related news I was assaulted by a June Bug. My lawyers are already on it.

SupaCam, which is backed in part by Panasonic, is selling their popular DVi handheld, tapeless, digital movie recorder for only $328 over at their booth (booth #853)-about $500 less than you would pay at B&H or other resellers. Up for grabs are black, white, and silver models.

The camera, about the size of your hand, does 24 bit color at 30 fps at 720 x 480, both NTSC and PAL, in MPG 4 or dvx formats. It can also serve as a webcam, with a 25 ft. remote and 180 degree motion sensor triggered when activity occurs within it’s optic range–and can stream online in HD quality. For digital photographers, 12 megapixels.

Expect mobile workstations (and the IO to go with them) to become an increased area of focus in the coming year. For example, after spending much of this year deploying and supporting a range of new multi-core chips for powerful new generation workstations, Intel says they will next increase the spotlight on mobile.

You just need to look around Siggraph to see the power of fixed workstations–the Autodesk and Softimage user groups literally gasped at the level of realtime and near realtime rendering they were seeing on stage. Guerilla Studios provides a hands-on chance to see for yourself. And the 32-hour animation contest at the Fjorg! would have been pretty impractical even last year. So we’ll see how much power ends up hitting the mobile workforce in the coming year. more

Better hardware and software are making it easier to do high-end work where it hasn‘t gone before. In July ESPN debuted The Bronx is Burning, an eight-part baseball - themed miniseries for ESPN Original Entertainment that used a compact, truck-friendly HD editing setup that makes for slick location production.

The production, shot on location throughout Connecticut (ESPN‘s home turf), employed Thomson‘s VIPER FilmStream camera system and a full 4:4:4 HD post workflow designed by Creative Bridge and Technicolor. A mobile truck dubbed Technicolor Creative Bridge‘s Mobile Digital Lab and Theatre (MDLT) included Globalstor‘s ExtremeStor DI workstation, a PNY provided Nvidia Quadro FX 4500 SDI card, and Assimilate‘s SCRATCH.

The MDLT truck–first introduced at NAB 2006–enabled 4:4:4 data capture from the Viper‘s storage, full 1920 X 1080 projection, real-time color correction, real-time HD-SDI playback, HD and SD down conversion, and direct to disk file transfers. more

Massive Software’s big news at Siggraph 2007 is the release of Massive 3.0, it’s popular AI-based animation system. The company’s approach with the new release is to push beyond Massive’s well documented crowd capabilities generally and into more of the nuances and specifics. Among the additions: dynamic hair and fur, simulation passes, more Subdivision Surfaces, and especially interesting–”lanes,” which lets animators lay down directional lanes on, or in, terrain, and set up paths for characters to travel, efficiently simulating street, water, or pedestrian traffic.

Massive 3.0, of course, is also now available on the Windows platform, which is a huge leap–”a turning point for the company,” in fact, according to the company’s unusually effusive CEO, Diane Holland.

When not singing the gospel of Massive generally, Holland, in her spare time, is also acting as an unofficial filmmaking advocate for the nation of New Zealand, where Massive is based following its revolutionary birth during the making of the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy. For the record, Diane says New Zealand is “an amazing place” to live and make movies. If you want to visit, give her a ring–she says she has plenty of room and “people can even stay at my house.”

Now that’s enthusiasm. (But check with her at the Massive booth, #1428, before you just pop in unannounced…)

–Michael Goldman

Digital Anarchy’s Toon It! plug in for After Effects turns video of any resolution into Scanner Darkly-style animation or line drawings. Announced at NAB, it released about six weeks ago and you can see the demo here at booth #321.

James Tierney, chief executive anarchist says the plug-in can also be combined with other After Effects filters and/or green screen shot footage. “The best way to use Toon It! is to plan how you’re going to use it before you shoot, since there are things that can be done in shooting and lighting that will give you more options.”

Moving from an arcane, difficult black science to wide acceptance in the Hollywood community, motion capture systems are also now dropping in price and complexity.

As reported yesterday, Vicon is enjoying success with its new turnkey FK Extreme, which delivers an eight-camera system complete with its new ‘Blade‘ software for about $50,000.

One small company, Reallusion (www.reallusion.com) out of San Jose, Calif., is taking it a step further, with plans to make “mo cap in a cubicle‘ a reality, as the product manager told me. Their iClone2 Studio already garnered interest over the past year for its “3D real-time filmmaking” capabilities. With easy-to-create actors/avatars, clothing, 3D scenes, and special effects, the inexpensive Windows-based software claims some 400,000 users worldwide. more