Grimage
Put any object into the interaction space and it is intantaneously modeled in 3D and injected into a virtual world.

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First, in case you don’t know what Fjorg! is here’s the blurb: The world‘s first international FJORG! competition is an “iron animator” event at SIGGRAPH 2007 in which 16 competing teams from around the world will have 32 hours to create the world‘s best character-driven animation in front of a live, “Gladiator-style” audience and judging panel.

And the winners are: First place, Team Mocap from Bowling Green State University for their animation “Switch.” The team consists of Jim Levasseur, Tomas Jech, and W. Jacob Gardner. Congrats to the team and you can see their winning entry later today at www.workstations.tv.

So why is the title of this post about the Art Institutes?

Because second and third place both went to AI teams. Picture This, a team from Miami International University of Art and Design came in second place and Impulse, from Illinois Institute of Art-Schaumburg, won third place. Their winning entries will also be avaialable to see later on today. I’ll also get back to you with the winning students’ names (my Exchange Server is down with that info stuck inside!). 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

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

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

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.

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 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

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