And now, some entertainment

In the evening, the conference schedules some more entertaining event.

Yesterday evening I attended "Siggraph dailies", a novelty this year. The goal is to "celebrates excellence in computer graphics by showcasing images and short animations of extraordinary power and beauty". Presenters have 1-2 minutes to talk about their work while a short sequence of animation they produced runs in loop. This could be the perfect venue to attract some attention on brain images visualization. Most productions this year came from the film and game industries, but a couple also came from the world of scientific visualization.

The second show I attended is the real-time simulations session. The presenters there are, again, mostly from game studios but also from the world of visualization. The participants show their work on a huge screen. They have to be able to interact with the material and the thing needs to run at interactive rates. Many of the presentation where really impressive. A man from NVidia was showing a film quality water simulation that uses a pretty cleaver screen-space technique to compute the water surface from the position of a few hundred thousand small sphere who's position is computed in real-time on the GPU. Another impressive presentation was given by a team from INRIA and CNRS in France. They built a "realistic virtual Earth model and browser with physically based rendering and animation of terrain, ocean, atmosphere, and clouds, and seamless transitions from ground to space views". It is difficult to believe that the rendering is done in real-time.

Tonight I was at the screening of the films that are competing in the computer animation festival. One of my favorites (which happen to win the jury prize) is "Loom" a short by director James Cunningham from New Zealand. The film takes place in the trenches during the first world war. It is one of the most interesting looking 3D CGI film I've seen in a long time.

Pixar's "Day and Night" is by far the best short I've seen from this studio in a long time.

"Visualizing empire decline" (see embeded video) by Pedro Cruz and Penousal Machado from University of Coimbra in Portugal managed to keep me interested during all its 3:30 min of watching nothing more than 2D color bubbles representing the rise and fall of 4 of the great maritime empires of europe. Its yet another proof that the meaning behind an animated film is more important than the fancy graphics.



I finally got a chance to see "Logorama", which I liked a lot.

The interesting films I just listed accounted for about 20 minutes out of the 2 hours screening. The rest of the projection was filled with technically advanced, but extremely boring sequences of explosions, monsters, pseudo medieval crap a lot of CGI animators dream of. I overdosed...