
SIGGRAPH 2017
Siggraph, the biggest annual conference for celebrating interactive media and computer visualisation was held in LA this year from July 30 to August 3 and lucky me, I happened to be there.
LOCATION

For this year they booked around half of the LA Convention Centre to accommodate ten thousand people, which illustrates the size of the venue. It is also rumored to be the next home of the San Diego Comic Con.
Although the location changes every year, the building blocks of the conference remain more or less identical to this setup:
- Village area
A place to try out emerging technologies and get your hands dirty in topics like digital illustration, 3D printing or robotics. - Exhibitors
Big shot companies come here including Adobe, Autodesk, Black Magic Design and Maxon to showcase what’s new, as well as smaller and up-and-coming vendors selling proprietary software and hardware. - Talks, workshops
You can find talks diving deep into a discipline and lightweight introductions to a specific field, but if you really want to see how these professionals think, get into one of the ‘birds of a feather’ discussions.
These roundtable talks give insights into pipeline management techniques, thoughts about the future and in general the everyday struggles of the creative business.
Workshops are labeled with a difficulty level but you can easily get by in one of the advanced ones, so, by all means, there’s no point in being discouraged.
TRENDS
This year was all about AR/VR and real-time rendering.
AR and VR seemed to reach a certain maturity with dozens of vendors showcasing experimental projects and hardware.
The groundwork for these technologies are solid by now, so naturally, the focus shifted towards elevating the sense of immersion with the not-so-distant goal of achieving real presence.
Several companies were experimenting with light-field technology to enable depth perception in virtual scenes. Others were focusing on tactile and force feedback solutions to bring the sense of touch into play.
Although still in its infancy these technologies play a huge role in achieving full immersion.

Another important aspect is bringing these technologies to the masses.
To do so, social capabilities have to be introduced to the platform.
For example, Google was showcasing a prototype to project your own face on a virtual reality headset to reduce isolation.

Above all else, the star of the show was real-time rendering.
With the advancements in cloud rendering and GPU/CPU solutions, real-time rendering is now achievable.
Although it still requires a highly specialized infrastructure, in a few years this will be the de facto standard for complex AR and CGI scenes.
HIGHLIGHTS
Papers Fast Forward
Probably the most educational part of Siggraph, Paper Fast Forward brings the best research projects to the stage and summarises each one in one-minute chunks. This year included a lot of fluid, hair simulation and deep learning/AI assisted projects.
Electronic Theatre
Two hours of carefully selected digital content, showcasing the bests of this year. There was a special twist in the beginning where they rendered these two CGI shorts by The Mill and Epic Games live on stage and honestly, you couldn’t even notice it.
Advances in Real-time Rendering
This is a yearly roundup of advancements in game engines and rendering in AAA games. Prominent studios are invited to give short lectures about lighting, particle simulation and other aspects of rendering. You can find this year’s agenda with slides here
MEETMIKE
This project fascinated me the most, they rendered a highly detailed virtual human in real time, with facial rigging in 90 FPS VR, to conduct virtual interviews with people from Disney, Pixar, Epic Games.
One aspect of the project was to research the uncanny valley paradigm which describes the discomfort we feel when looking at a robot or digital human that’s close to realism but not quite there yet.
In order to do this, the interviewee was rendered as cartoonish characters as opposed to Mike who represented the super-realistic side. After each session, they conducted user interviews and handed out questionnaires to figure out people’s perceptions of the problem.
You can check out a detailed description of the project here
or listen to this CG Garage podcast to learn more.
AMD Capsaicin
Although not exactly a part of the official conference schedule, company organised events are an important aspect of Siggraph.
The premise is that you get to see them release new products and enjoy free food and booze afterward.
At AMD’s event, the main goal was obviously to persuade you into buying one of the new AMD Vega cards and Threadripper CPUs but during all that, they managed to share a few interesting details about their vision.
Basically, their goal is to achieve full presence (a mirror-like virtual reality) and in order to do that our hardware needs to be a million times faster. With Moore’s law in place, this will be achieved in the next 20–25 years.

In the meantime, real-time rendering is already a possibility with super computers but their goal is to reduce these costs to a level where individuals can afford it.
By targeting creative professionals (whom they are estimating to be around a 100 million globally) they are reaching out to a segment that up until now, was kinda neglected.
MAXON and Greyscale Gorilla
As an avid fan of Cinema 4D, I had to mention them in this post.
There are a couple of handy features coming out with R19, including GPU Rendering (AMD only) and drastic performance improvements to the viewport.
It was also amazing to meet the Greyscale Gorilla team in person, I’ve been a huge fan ever since I’ve stumbled upon their site and they definitely helped a lot in figuring out Cinema 4D.

PEOPLE
It can easily seem like the main focus of the conference is knowledge sharing but there’s an underlying purpose. They want you to socialise with others a LOT. This is the place where you get to meet people working on your favourite video games or at one of the leading digital studios or VFX powerhouses.
Just walking around I happened to bump into people from the Civilization franchise, Industrial Light & Magic, and Epic Games.
It’s been one hell of a ride for sure.
Thanks for reading ✌️

