Posted on by priscellie

SIGGRAPH Post-Mortem: SO MUCH AWESOMENESS.

Highlights included:

  • The 20-minute Effects Omelette presentation on the creation of 1933 New York for King Kong. I was blown away. And the presenter had so much material, he could have had a half-day course devoted to the subject. The huge amount of research coupled with a phenomenal new automated building generation system coupled with droolworthy crowd-creation tool Massive = GUH.
  • ILM and Rhythm & Hues both taking credit for creating the creature construction kits for Narnia. I can see why they’d want to! It’s an amazing piece of technology that allows riggers to near-seamlessly apply rigging dynamics from one animal to another or even combine existing animal rigs to create hybrid rigs.
  • The admission that the basis for Aslan’s facial expressions is Gregory Peck as Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird.
  • ILM’s presentation on creature creation for PotC, described in the previous entry.
  • The Penn students and grads lunch, in which we grilled my friend Paul (now working at Pixar) on how Cars procreate.
  • The Zbrush demos. I’m emailing Amy and begging her to get some licenses for Penn, because OMG WANT!
  • Hobnobbing with the Laika folks and fishing for info on Coraline. I kept hearing conflicting info (that it would be a mix of stop-motion and CG, that it would be mostly CG with some stop-motion, etc), and now the story is finally straight! To my glee, it’s going to be entirely stop-motion with a touch of CG effects (smoke, etc). Originally, they’d planned to make the Real World CG and the Other World stop-motion, but after a few animation tests, they felt that Joe Average Viewer wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them and wouldn’t particularly care. Three cheers for stop-motion!
  • The Electronic Theatre, a showcasing of the best of the best of the best of computer animation (3d, 2d, and hybrid). Personal favourite: Guinness “noitulovE”, by Framestore CFC (who also brought us the Golden Gate Bridge scene in X3. *hearts*) I’ll have to see if I can rustle up any of the other great animations I saw.

And now, to lunch!