The Crew arrived this weekend in LA for Siggraph 2010. We are all fairly exhausted from shooting last week in Yellowstone, which was insanely great, but the fxphd meet up tonight with so many great people turning up certainly helped!
We will be blogging each day from the show, with news, info and reviews of the show. Tomorrow the show starts properly – but today were some initial sessions including a great Avatar first talk. Avatar was first released in cinemas in December last year, but its impact certainly hadn’t been lost on the hundreds who turned up for the first of a several SIGGRAPH 2010 sessions on the film. In fact, it was standing room only.
In ‘A Physically Based Approach to Virtual Character Deformations’, Weta Digital explored the character-simulation toolset used to create the photorealistic characters. The presenters showed how Weta’s existing muscle primitive system was upgraded to one using polygonal meshes. ‘Rendering “Avatar”: Spherical Harmonics in Production’ focused on how the complex forest environments in the film were lit and rendered. The studio looked to a spherical harmonics approach rather than image-based lighting while also moving to a 64 bit workflow and making the scenes work for stereo.
Finally, ‘PantaRay: Directional Occlusion for Fast Cinematic Lighting of Massive Scenes’ dealt with NVIDIA and Weta’s collaboration on a new architecture for the precomputation of ray-traced directional occlusion caches for lighting, particularly on the forest scenes.
Tomorrow will be really busy with Computational Photography, Camera Sensor Calibration, more Avatar, and the best of all – Ed Catmull and the lost lectures in the afternoon – followed by the killer Foundry User group. Big thanks to Zap from Mental Image who sat down with us today – we hope to post that video interview on Tuesday morning.