[Soc-2012-dev] Multitouch Weekly Report, SIGGRAPH Edition

[Nick Rishel]

Bullet points just don't seem appropriate in this case, so instead, I have
copied the writeup in full.

Original post at:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:PrototypeNM1/Weekly_Report#Week_12
SIGGRAPH 2012 Begin

As I had guessed last week, SIGGRAPH left me with no time to work on my
project this week. So instead I will report on what I got out of attending
this event.

First thing I learned, is that the Blender crowd is made up of some of the
most diverse, generous, and interesting people I have ever had the honor of
coming into contact with. I can not stress enough that it was a pure joy to
spend time with this community.

Throughout the week, I prioritized attending studio events, panels, and
general talks over technical papers. This is largely due to it being much
easier to find and review the papers at a later date than other
presentations, and many of these papers' content is above my ability to ask
intelligent questions for. Additionally I am more interested in finding
issues in the development process than results of others' research I have
little exposure to.

With that quick point out of the way, I'll continue the rest of this update
in a somewhat more structured manner.
Sunday

For some reason I had convinced myself that the conference began Monday,
but while on-route to my hotel I noticed the LA Convention Center, and
decided to stop by to see if I could pick up my badge early. This was a
fortuitous choice, as soon upon arrival I learned that the conference was
already in full swing. However, this left me with the unfortunate necessity
to carry my travel bag all day. In hindsight, paying the minor baggage
holding cost at the front would have been a smarter move, as my shoulders
have still not completely recovered from this poor choice.

I had arrived just in time to make it to the Blender Community Meeting,
where I quickly learned of the diversity of the Blender community that is
not always apparent online. As a side note, this was also my first exposure
to the absurd presence Texas A&M had at this conference.

The first panel I attended pertained to the future of motion control in
interactive entertainment. Unfortunately the panel itself seemed more like
a recap of where it has been going than a look forward as to what will
come; unfortunately three of five panel members were from competing
companies which were largely weary of sharing too much information. I was
able to confirm with the panel directly that their experience suggested
there is an uncanny valley for input devices.

The Technical Papers Fast Forward was an interesting and entertaining
overview of most papers which were to be featured at the conference. Many
of the exceptions to my above stated rules for prioritization were a direct
result of interest that sparked from this event.

Though I live in a city and am no stranger to walking downtown at night, I
can say that the half-ish hour walk to my hotel, baggage in tote using a
dying cellphone's GPS was not the most comfortable stroll I have taken in
my life. Combined with Google's lack of awareness of which streets might be
considered questionable for such time of day, and you have a mixture that
certainly quickened my pace.
Monday

I began my morning bumping into two fellow conference attendees over
breakfast. The repor I had with them really set the tone of conversations I
had with most individuals at this conference. Most people were
exceptionally outgoing and interested in randomly starting up conversation
in the short stints of downtime had. These small conversations in and of
themselves made of some of the most memorable, personal moments on this
trip.

The first papers roundup of the morning centered around shape analysis,
which I found to be quite similar to 2D image analysis as I already
understood it, at least with regards to the general steps necessary to
progress through the process.

Later I would attend a talk on teaching procedural workflows in animation.
I found this interesting when the instructor mentioned that students begin
projects with the idea of having to hand animate everything, in many cases
I find myself included. The talked focused on the point that there are
intuitive examples that students tend to grasp quickly, while basic
abstraction such as using a noise texture to cause noise in geometry tends
to through students for a loop.

I was confronted with my first hard decision of the conference at this
point. Either I could take an extended course in "Modern OpenGL" or attend
presentations on the work done for The Avengers and Brave. I am happy to
say I chose the latter, which certainly did more for me in terms of
motivation and fascination. Later, I confirmed with fellow attendees that
courses such as the one I was considering tend to be very dull and not as
useful as simply researching the material online.

There were several panels and presentations that centered around things
learned from Brave and The Avengers, all of which blur together as a large
collection of ideas learned around these two movies. So instead of trying
to recall what I learned from each presentation each day, I have written up
a separate section for each below.

Following the Brave presentation was the animation festival. This was
something special to have attended. These shorts hit all the extremes of
abstractedness, ranged from funny to absurd, to absurdly funny; ending with
what I consider the largest surprise of the show, Paperman. Had I been told
that a non-Pixar, Disney animated short would be the crown jewel of this
conference before seeing it, I do not believe I would have believed it. I
believe that in the future, this will be marked as the point at which
Disney Animations finally paralleled the quality of their towering
counterpart. I can not speak highly enough of the simple charm that this
short invoked.

That evening I attended the Networking Dessert Reception and ACM SIGGRAPH
Chapters Party. For anyone considering attending SIGGRAPH in the future, I
have two quick thoughts of advice. First, just go. Second, attend these
kind of social events.
Tuesday

The exhibition and emerging technologies are must-stops for anyone at this
event. One prominent thing I observed is how large 3D printing has become.
I was somewhat surprised at that fact that 3DConnexion's nDoF mice are no
particularly intuitive over a short term. It is my understanding that they
are quite versatile with time, and I was able to get in mention to them of
a crowd interested in a Bluetooth extension of their device. More
surprising was how exceptionally intuitive the Leonar3Do was, though even
with short usage I was already experiencing mild cramps in my arm.

Presentations later focused on crowd simulation. It was interesting to see
the little tricks employed by larger studios to fake large volumes of
characters while maintaining a high fidelity of control for artists, a
theme which was particularly among Pixar discussions.

SIGGRAPH Dailies! was the next notable event of the day, where presenters
gave a quick dialogue to go with their snippet of animation as presented
onscreen. Often this was either giving an explanation to the context for
which it was created, or the process and hardships which were went through
to get the final result.

I believe it was this evening that I dined with the Blender crew. Many of
my above statements about the Blender community were a direct result of
this event.
Wednesday

Most events that I found to be notable this day were centered around Brave
and The Avengers, save a pleasant discussion had long into the night with a
fellow Blenderhead.
Thursday

Hackerspaces being a personal area of interest to me, I decided to check
out a series of presentation on such. Of particular interest was a project
to retrofit old microscopes with modern imaging equipment (see: camera),
which allowed varying levels of focus to be taken and composited together
for a clear, high detail image. The applications mentioned during this talk
were numerous and highly probable.

In addition to more Brave centered discussions, there was a large
presentation held this day to talk about Paperman. There was quite a bit of
interesting software and novel techniques of animating used to create this
film, much food for thought. I am, however, opting not to discuss this
further due to honoring their implicit request to not spread too much about
it.
The Avengers Presentations

Many of the interesting points taken from these presentations had to do
with keeping character in-character during animations and constructing
large scale scenes given live-action footage. At length they discussed
their process for recording their animation needs on-set without being
over-bearing to the film crew.

As both Digital Domain and Weta Studio had hands in this film, and panels
featuring both studios, I was treated to discussions on how assets used for
this movie were traded between the companies.

Interestingly, metal bending simulation was a point of contention in at
least one scene, I had not known that this was an issue.

Another large discussion point was the fidelity of digital doubles, in that
in more than a few cases they made the conscious decision to scrap the
original material and recreate it, and that this was often easier than
fixing the recorded material.
Brave Presentations

Muscle and fat simulations seemed to be integral parts of this movie, so
much that some furry animals in the movie had no fur simulation applied
afterward. Ideas presented like this one emphasized to me just how serious
Pixar is about their pre-production, as a fact like this would not have
been applicable in later stages of development.

I gained a much more intuitive understanding of shaders as a result of
their discussion on generating much of the foliage of the movie in shaders
alone. Suddenly this topic has become very interesting to me.

As I mentioned above, it seems that much of Pixar's focus in simulation is
presenting a framework that mostly provides good results before tweaking,
while allowing artists to tweak details as necessary. They also stressed
the ability to simplify the simulation in order to allow quick feedback on
how a simulation will look that is accurate to the larger detail simulation
that follows on the final pass, which was the main take-away I got from the
hair and cloth simulation talks.

One interesting thing I took note of is the fact that while working on
Brave, it seemed that Pixar artists were individually placing guide hairs
which were used to control the flow of hair across characters and
creatures. This seemed to be a painful and slow process that lacks an
intuitive quality. To me, it would seem more intuitive to sketch a hair
line, recording the pen's rotation as it is drawn across a surface, and
using this as a base to tweak guide hairs. I will need to further research
this is indeed an issue, as well as find if a solution similar to this
already exists in Blender.
SIGGRAPH 2012 End

I go forward into the end of this summer with a new fervor and a new level
of pride in being able to say that I am part the Blender community.
Next Week

Now that I have a plan for how context should be handled, implementing it
should be rather trivial. I need to verify that the way I intended to
communicated between my library and Blender actually functions as expected.
This week I need to lay out what work will continue after the summer's end,
with the goal of having something presentable for the Blender Conference
come September.
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