Monday at the Siggraph Computer Graphics conference is really when things kick in to high gear. The main keynote address starts mid-morning along with the awards program. The attendence is noticeably higher today with largel amounts of people in all parts of the LA Convention Center.
I decided to pass on the Keynote
this year, given by Joichi (Joi) Ito (I’ll
catch it later this week
after the video has been posted). Instead, I spent an hour in
the Art Gallery
(fabulous, as usual), the Emerging Technologies/Studio
and the brand new VR
Village. All four areas were located (oddly) in the
South Hall which is a
little out of the way. I liked it better last year when
the exhibits were
in-between both halls. Didn’t seem to hurt attendance at
all through as the whole
area was filled with observers, participants, inventors
and artists.
I’ll be reporting more on these exhibits later in the week, however, I do want to point out two exhibits that were just so very cool that I just have to mention them.
3D
Guitar
This year's Art Gallery theme was "Hybrid Crafts". I was taken by all of the artworks, but the 3D acoustic guitar really caught my eye. The design sense coupled with the practical ability to create different combinations of resonance chambers to change the overall sound of the guitar is masterful. Check out the trailer for the Siggraph 2015 Art Gallery below:
Many
Meetings
I met with Allegorithmic,
the makers of Substance Designer, who
updated me on their
Substance Share application which should be out in the
early Fall. I was
impressed with the fact that they are offering a Pay to
Own subscription model
where you pay a monthly fee untill you eventually
own the program
outright. This is a smart company with an application
thatmay be growning faster
than they can manage. Althought his is a
pretty good problem to
have.
Chaos
Group, creators of V-Ray, a penultimate 3D renderer,
had some great news
about their product. Unfortunately, it’s under embargo
until after the deadline
for this article so you’ll have to wait. I can say they
have released V-Ray for
Maya 3.1 which looks to be a wonderful
upgrade. David Tracey,
 for Chaos Group, is an excellent spokesperson for
V-Ray and our
conversation was wide ranging and fun. He shared VR experiences
using the Samsung VR set up and they were wonderful. If only you
could see what I was seeing in the picture below!
Lenovo, in a
very informative meeting, shared the latest addition to
their sterling
workstation ThinkPad stable: The P50 and P70 workstations.
Wow factor is quite high
with both of these beautiful workstations.
Redesigned from the
ground up both internally and externally, they are as beautiful
as they are powerful. In
discussing the USB-C, which will be incorporated into these
beautiful workstations, I had the quote of the day, "You can
actually move the entire Library of Congress from point A to Point
B in about 7 minutes". Amazing.
NVIDIA
NVIDIA, a world leader in GPU
techonolgy, held a showy, but informative press conference and announced NVIDIA
DESIGNWORKS, “advanced technologies for design
applications†which covers rendering,
materials, display,
virtual reality and live video. More on this during the week.
Suffice to say
there’s a lot if interesting new technology being developed
by
NVIDIA and all of it will make
digital artists work easier and more creative.
AUTODESK
Autodesk,
another giant in the 3D graphics industry, held an off-site
press dinner/presentation that was short, but very
sweet. They announced some fine updates to Maya and 3DS Max (more details
coming) alogn with additional information on their brand-new
StingRay game-engine. Autodesk’s partner, Shotgun (an asset management
and tracking program) also made a presentation that was interesting. I like the
fellow who did the presentation who joined us at the dinner table
for a frank, after dinner chat.
Final Thoughts
On the subway ride home (yes, Los Angeles has a subway) I was goingover the days events in my head and thought that if the computer graphics community didn’t have Siggraph it would be a much less interesting field. Not to mention that simply interacting with people who share your passions and interests is simply wonderful.
At the end of the day, tired, but energized, I was thinking, “I can’t wait to get back to the conference tomorrowâ€.
Stay tuned for my Siggraph Report
for Tuesday, August 11th.
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