SIGGRAPH 2013

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More and more material and news are being released about the next edition of SIGGRAPH, so here is a short summary.

Technical papers

The video teaser of the technical papers has been published. It looks like there will be some really cool stuff to see. As every year Ke-Sen Huang maintains a page with the list of papers.

Real Time Live!

The Real Time Live! program looks very nice too, and it is good to see at least two demoscene related works will be presented there (the community GLSL tool ShaderToy by Beautypi, and some experiment by Still with a LEAP Motion controller on their production, Square).

Courses

Not much to say, it looks great and I want to see most of them… The Advances in Real-Time Rendering in Games and Physically Based Shading in Theory and Practice courses are a must see as usual. The Recent Advances in Light-Transport Simulation: Theory & Practice and Ray Tracing is the Future and Ever Will Be courses sound promising too.

Our work to be shown at SIGGRAPH

Lastly, we had some awesome news yesterday, when we were told our last released demoscene production, F – Felix’s workshop, has been selected to be shown as part of the Real-Time Live! demoscene reel event.

Released last year at Revision and ranking 2nd in its category, Felix’s workshop is a 64k intro: a real-time animation fitting entirely (music, meshes, textures…) within a 64kB binary file meant to run on a consumer level PC with a vanilla Windows and up to date drivers.

I was also told Eddie Lee‘s work, Artifacts, was selected as well. His outstanding demo won at Tokyo Demo Fest earlier this year.

Tokyo City Symphony: a video mapping on a model of Tokyo

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I was impressed by the quality of this work. The model looks very accurate, the soundtrack captures the sound environment one experiences in Tokyo, and the video mapping comes with some nice ideas.

The project seems to allow even more than is shown on the video, with some interactive mapping: see the Tokyo City Symphony website.

Two online color picking tools

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Color Scheme Designer is a tool I have been for a while now, but more recently I discovered Color Sphere. Both are very helpful when it comes to choosing an harmonious set of colors. Color Scheme Designer gives much more control over colors repartition and has more export options, while Color Sphere has more rules and a simpler interface. Both allow to test the color set against various kinds of color blindness.

How to use light to make better demos?

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This is the third day at Revision, and my contribution this year is the talk I gave yesterday. Unlike last year, this seminar is not technical at all but focused on the design aspect and, to some extent, how it relates to the technical one. The context is demomaking, but many ideas are still valid in other media.

There were some issues with the recording unfortunately, which means some elements are missing (you will notice some blanks at the beginning). In particular after 5mn, there is an important point which was completely cut out. The text was:

Throwing a new technique at whatever you’re doing is not going to make it any better. It’s only going to change what you can achieve. There are two sides of image creation: the technical one and the artistic one. Different techniques allow to do different things, and the more techniques you master, the better you understand what you can and cannot do with them, and how to do it. Technique becomes a tool that changes how you can express yourself.

Here are the slides with notes (~5MB), or a low quality version (~1MB).

For more demoscene related talks, here is the full list of seminars at Revision 2013.

FaceWorks demonstration at GTC

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Geeks3D mentioned this keynote at the GPU Technology Conference, where NVIDIA’s CEO shows their technology called FaceWorks. After talking about the uncanny valley and avatar rendering uses, came the live demonstration, which seriously raises the bar in terms of face rendering and animation.

The quality is incredible, the gap from photo realism is getting very narrow, and some expressions are really convincing. The transitions and frozen expressions feel weird though, so I am wondering how it would look running freely for a moment, with all the rapid subtle moves we show even when staying idle. The avatar as a mean of communication is certainly very appealing. It would be interesting to see if when facing this rendering, we would react to the expressions displayed.

The demo itself starts after 8 minutes.