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SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 opened its doors in Sydney, Australia. A member of the 3DVF team is on-site to cover the event, and we were able to attend the first highlights of the conference.
Technical Papers Fast Forward
The first major event of this opening day was the Technical Papers Fast Forward, a 160-minute session focused on the research projects featured during the conference. Researchers came on stage to showcase each paper.
Compared to the same session during SIGGRAPH, this Fast Forward was a bit more relaxed, since the researchers had 1 minute to explain what their publication was about, compared to 30 seconds during SIGGRAPH 2023.
The video below and the official website will give you more information about the topics covered by these papers. For example, there was a French project combining 3D printing and a shape memory effect, the addition of animated elements in Street View, fluid simulation focused on turbulent flows, a project about NeRF (which we discussed this summer) optimized for large-scane scene rendering… All these innovative techniques may soon join the tools used daily by artists.
The Best Paper Award was bestowed to five remarkable works:
- Fluid Simulation on Neural Flow Maps
- Adaptive Shells for Efficient Neural Radiance Field Rendering
- Concept Decomposition for Visual Exploration and Inspiration
- Meshes with Spherical Faces
- Warped-Area Reparameterization of Differential Path Integrals
RenderMan 26: the future of rendering
In the afternoon, Dylan Sisson from Pixar unveiled features that will be introduced in the upcoming RenderMan 26 release, as well as R&D details from Elementary.
Here is what you can expect in RenderMan 26:
- Interactive denoiser (this will be available for Katana at first)
- stylized rendering also available in the non-commercial version of RenderMan
- VFX Platform support
- XPU advancements, such as:
- adaptative sampling
- light filters
- light & shadow linking
- IES profiles, temperature, etc.
- full camera settings support.
Computer Animation Festival – awards for French shorts
During the opening ceremony of the Computer Animation Festival, several awards were given to projects from all over the world. As we announced yesterday, several French animated shorts received some of these awards. The Best Student Project went to Thaba Ye from Gobelins (directed by Preetam Dhar, Daria Batueva, Hannah Judd, Mogau Kekana, Merel Hamers, and Leroy Le Roux).
Honorable Mentions were given to Quem Salva and Loup y es-tu?, two animated shorts created by students from Supinfocom Rubika.
The secrets behind Cocaine Bear
Last, but not least, the first Featured Session of SIGGRAPH Asia 2023 took place. Robin Hollander, VFX Supervisor from Wētā FX, explained to the audience how their team created the CGI bear featured in Cocaine Bear. The impressive creature had to be realistic, while also being able to perform in an action-packed movie.
