France dominated.

Here’s the list, all deserving winners. Congratulations to all the nominees on a great exhibition!

Best of Show Winner
Oktapodi
Gobelins l’école de l’image, France

Best Student Piece Winner
893
Supinfocom, France

Jury Award Winner
Mauvais Rôle
École Supérieure de Réalisation Audiovisuelle, France

…and the only awards that didn’t go to the French was created especially by the Jury:

Best Well Told Fable Prize
Our Wonderful Nature
Hochschule für Film und Fernsehen “Konrad Wolf” Potsdam-Babelsberg

There are always a few variables that a film maker has to worry about when presenting work to an audience. Of the utmost importance are the picture quality and sound. In the blocked short film format with multiple screening sessions there are some other elements to consider. Quality of the surrounding work in the blocks as well as the audience’s mood and expectations can have a huge impact on the film’s success.

This Thursday was the day that “Distraxion” played for an audience and I could not have asked for better circumstances. The picture quality at the Nokia Theater was absolutely stunning and the sound mix was spot on. The space was filled close to capacity at the ground level and the work surrounding my film was nothing short of inspiring.

There was a myriad of the latest and greatest in the computer graphics field. For the animation enthusiasts there was the hilarious “My Little Angel” by Flurry Studios.
and “Do Penguins Fly?” by Planktoon. The highlight in the showcase had to be the award winning Oktapodi from Gobelins. Overall, the French schools Gobelins and Supinfocom had a dominating presence in the festival. The VFX crowd also had their share of eye candy. The highlight reel from Dai Nipponjin showcased a collection of hyper-real creatures that will forever be imprinted on the mind of the viewers. I’m sure that film is going to appear on quite a few Netflix Queues in the next few weeks. There were even a few gems in the motion graphics contributions. I was pleasantly surprised by the appeal of the abstract shape morphing and music in the “What makes you special” IBM web campaign by Little Fluffy Clouds.

I had memorized the lineup for my block and I knew that soon after the final fade of the scenes from “Appleseed:Ex-Machina ” that my film Distraxion would appear. My heart was beating out of my chest with excitement and nervousness. I was seated with Scott Trosclair, the films lighter as well as some of my fellow animators from the AnimationMentor program and DreamWorks Animation.
There it was. “Distraxion” was up on the screen. My attention was focused more on the crowd reaction than the film on the screen which I could play beat for beat in my mind. “Wow, it was working!” There was a big laugh when the boss initiated the soft jazz music and sax man made his first appearance on screen. There were more laughs each time he trapped our hero and then a huge laugh at the end followed by applause when our hero fights back with his heavy metal. Just like that it was over. Two minutes had flown by and the screening went as well as I could have hoped for.

The audience response gave me a vote of confidence as a film maker. More so, it spoke volumes about the effectiveness of the new format of the SIGGRAPH Computer Animation Festival. What started out as a showcase for advances in computer graphics technology has evolved into a forum for up and coming animators. I would encourage all animation artists to target the CAF as venue for their work. I can guarantee that seeing your final piece up on the screen with the highest quality picture, surrounded by work that represents the current state of the art in computer graphics will make it worth all of the hard work that it takes to create a piece of finished animation.

While some may claim that there is nothing new at the show, if you walk the aisles with an open mind you’re sure to find trends and new gear that fits the bill.

3D, for example, turned up in many different guises from new software apps to a growing number of 3D-capable monitors. You can even make a case that stereolithography– those 3D printers that lay down 3-D objects layer by layer, from your own 3-D design– is part of the growing 3D mania. These devices have come down in price from many tens of thousands of dollars to much more affordable units.

Why would you want to create a real-world object from a digital design? You might need a prop that would be expensive to rent, or perhaps even one that doesn’t exist anywhere, for example.

You don’t even need to own your own 3-D printing machine either these days. Netherlands-based Shapeways offers a web based service where you can send 3-D designs you create in one of the many compatible programs, uploading that design to the website, and have a model mailed back to you at a very reasonable price.

At the show, the company announced Shapeways Creator Engine, a simple 3D program enabling even someone without the skills to run a 3D app like 3ds max to benefit. According to the company, newbies can still shape, mash, imprint, and design their own 3D products in just a few mouse clicks at the company’s site.

Of course the company with the most 3D design apps at the show is Autodesk, which delivered a number of significant new products for its 2009 series releases, including a 10-Year Anniversary Release of Maya 2009, Toxik 2009 Visual Effects software, MotionBuilder 2009 3D Character Animation software, Stitcher Unlimited 2009, and ImageModeler 2009.

Some new Maya improvements include new selection features such as true soft selection, and pre-selection highlighting, which will mean you need fewer mouse clicks, and less trial and error for common tasks. There’s also an improved modeling workflow, such as symmetrical modeling with soft seams, a tweak mode for rapid modifications, and a new Merge Vertex feature that enables you to combine parts of a mesh. Autodesk Toxik 2009, meanwhile, gains improved 3D to 2D workflow by allowing you to previsualize your scene in the form of the final composite, while you continue to iterate and refine only the required elements. There are so many more improvements throughout all of the product line that it’s probably easiest just to go to the Autodesk site for the most comprehensive information.

NVIDIA keeps in pace with the trend towards more powerful graphics-capable laptops with new versions of its Quadro FX mobile GPUs, featured in products from vendors including Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP, and Lenovo. The new top-of-the-line Quadro FX 3700M comes with up to 1 GB GDDR3 memory–that’s an astonishing amount for a mobile rig to pack–that features 128 CUDA Parallel Computing Processor cores. It uses an up to 256-bit wide memory interface, 51.2 GBps graphic memory bandwidth, and support for OpenGL 2.1, Shader Model 4.0, and DirectX 10.

The company also announced new versions of its high end, standalone Quadro Plex graphics processing system. The NVIDIA Quadro Plex 2200 D2 VCS (with two Quadro GPUs, 4 dual-link DVI channels, and 8 GB of frame buffer memory) is designed for advanced visualization of extremely large models and datasets, while the Quadro Plex 2100 D4 VCS (with four GPUs, 8 dual-link DVI channels and a 4 GB frame buffer) is optimized for multi-display setups such as video walls. The systems are not only about twice as fast as previous versions, but now offer an entry-level price beginning at $10,750, or about half the previous tab.

Luxology, developers of the increasingly popular modo (a relatively simple to learn but highly integrated 3D modeling, painting and rendering app for the Mac and PC) demo’d a more interactive Preview Renderer, even when working with large datasets. “Replicators� was introduced; it offers a method for rendering large numbers of like objects at render time, or even to add details like grass, fur, leaves on trees or for repeating mechanical objects like welds. The company’s renderer received a big nod of approval by its licensing from two top CAD companies: Dassault Systèmes will use it to render out for its SolidWorks app, while Bentley Systems will incorporate it in its Microstation product line. Luxology’s Bob Bennett speculates that the companies were attracted by the renderer’s speed as well as by its subtle ability to bring a bit of bling to even buttoned-up CAD output.

Well, there’s much more to discuss from the show, but I’ve got to end somewhere. So, until next year in New Orleans….

Over the past eight years or so, however, two companies have come to dominate the market for discrete chips and cards: ATI (since 2006 a division of AMD) and NVIDIA. While the companies continue to slug it out, most everyone else had fallen to the wayside. Now, the two companies own 98 percent of the discrete GPU business, according to on Peddie Research.

Peddie also says that the computer graphics market has grown from $1 billion in 1980 to some $60 billion today, for a remarkable growth rate of 16.5 percent for 27 years.

Those numbers could only make it attractive for the 800-pound gorilla of silicon: Intel. While the company has made low-end integrated graphics chipsets for years, over the past few months Intel has slowly revealed plans for competing directly with ATI and NVIDIA for the high-end market.

At Siggraph, Intel researchers delivered papers detailing its proposed chip architecture–code-named “Larrabee”—which features a new approach based on lashing together multiple x86 core processors, an architecture they should feel comfortable with, since it’s been key to Intel’s CPU design since the 1970s. Their first products might hit the market as early as 2009.

A multi-core approach is also used by NVIDIA and ATI, which currently employ hundreds of cores in their massive chips to create a reprogrammable on-the-fly parallel graphics rendering architecture.

Nvidia researchers released a statement at the show challenging Intel’s approach; they claim that a larger challenge for parallel computing is helping developers decide how to divide a problem into parallel tracks and then design software to leverage a parallel processor, something they’re doing at a furious pace, buying companies that make software to enable more flexible programming of their GPUs.

Nvidia also questioned whether or not current applications will really run on Larrabee without the need for modification, not an insignificant challenge with the thousands upon thousands of apps out there that are tightly integrated to current GPU hardware.

“We’ll just have to wait to see what (Intel) actually deliver(s),� says Shawn Worsell, NVIDIA product manager.

Their philosophy seems to be that video gamers interested in animation, and folks in the Machinima community will dig it as a way to learn animation and make their own videos and movies, for consumer use or as a way to break into the professional industry. They also think Hollywood will have an interest in iClone3 as a pre-visualization/storyboard tool. And, they also see it as having educational applications. In fact, the London Film Academy is already using iClone for a visual effects course.

“We have learned from people who use games to make films, but we are now trying to combine the roots of basic computer animation techniques with the game piloting ability,” is the way that marketing VP John Martin explained the nature of the technology to me. You can find out more at www.reallusion.com.

–MG

Bunkspeed marketing chief Thomas Teger told me the company’s HyperShot technology, introduced last year as a simplified and way to render and move photographic images in real-time was used a while back for pre-viz and storyboarding work by a freelance artist who worked on Transformers, for example. He adds that the focus of the company remains on design applications, but increasingly, that world requires movement, and so, this year, Bunkspeed announced the addition of enhanced animation capabilities with its new HyperMove tool (slated for an October debut). HyperMove is basically a tool for moving photo-real imagery rendered in the Bunkspeed world for display purposes (driving a car, posing a cell phone on a turntable, etc), without requiring the artist to have any significant computer animation skills particularly.

Although companies like Ford (Bunkspeed’s largest customer), other auto manufacturers, and cell phone, computer, and all sorts of other tech product manufacturers will likely always remain the core of the company’s business, Teger fully expects the company’s products to become more involved for storyboarding and pre-vizzing work in Hollywood. Certainly, even on the last day of the show, the booth was plenty busy this afternoon, and I’m pretty sure I recognized some Hollywood types in the crowd.

–MG

I’ll take this chance to spotlight some of the nominees I haven’t covered. Carbon Footprint is a time-lapse movie depicting 50 years in the life of a discarded aluminum can and is enough to make you vocal the next time you see some jackass throw something away on the street. It comes from the U.K.-based Jellyfish Pictures, and despite its very short running time, is a strong contender for Best of Show.

Dreamworks brought a clip from its upcoming feature Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa and its up for Best of Show. The animation is very fluid and detailed, but there are more things to celebrate at Siggraph than more talking-animal movies aimed at mainstream audiences, so I’m not sure why its even in this category.

Chump and Clump, up for the Jury Award, is a funny German short that looks like it could have been created by Cheech and Chong. The similarities in the two main characters’ names is probably not coincidental, as the substance-abusing pair are stuck waiting for a bus for an entire week and are forced to amuse themselves. It even has a Superbad-like hetero-lifemate component to boot.

I almost don’t want to ruin the fun of Our Wonderful Nature, another German import up for the Jury Award. HFF Potsdam has designed the short to look like a photorealistic nature documentary, but that’s not entirely the truth, as the nature of courtship in nature is given a wicked spin.

Barenbraut is a confounding 2D black-and-white short that follows a girl, a friendly beast, and a lumberjack as they struggle to coexist peacefully in a wilderness environment. Devoid of dialogue, this German film is a slower and longer piece that confronts the nature of loneliness and free will.

I’ll be blogging the winners later, so stay tuned!