This article is also available in:
Français
SIGGRAPH Asia continues in Sydney, Australia. A member of the 3DVF team is on site to cover the conference. Here’s a summary of Day 2!
Opening of the Exhibition Hall
The event of the day was the opening of the Exhibition Hall, an excellent opportunity to meet software editors, studios, as well as manufacturers. About thirty companies have a booth.
The opening ceremony of the show was marked by the sound of a didgeridoo, a traditional aboriginal instrument. June Kim, the Conference Chair of SIGGRAPH Asia 2023, reflected on the challenges faced year after year to organize such an event, and he took this opportunity to thank partners and participants. Awards were presented to Paul Brown (Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art) and to Singaporean Professor Yong Tsui Lee Yong Tsui Lee, whose Outstanding Service Award recognized three decades of work for ACM SIGGRAPH. Yong Tsui Lee played a crucial role in the creation of SIGGRAPH Asia.
In addition to the Exhibition Hall, the Experience Hall, the Demoscene area, the Emerging Technologies space, and the Poster gallery allow participants to discover countless projets, artworks and new technologies.
Keynotes and roundtables
The day continued with various presentations. Joe Letteri, Senior VFX Supervisor at Wētā FX, gave a much-anticipated keynote on the technologies and workflows deployed on Avatar: The Way of Water. He explained that the team used neural networks to replicate facial muscle movements, improving the quality of character expressions while giving artists complete control over the end result.
He also emphasized the importance of understanding physics for greater realism: an obviously essential point for achieving realistic water simulations, fire sims, and increasingly advanced creature animations.
During another conference, Andrew Jackson, Production VFX Supervisor and Creative Director at DNEG Sydney, revisited the effects behind Oppenheimer. As Andrew Jackson explained recently to The Art of VFX, the practical and visual effects teams collaborated. One of the challenges was to shoot a lot of practical elements (real particles, explosions, etc.) before combining them using compositing. The atomic explosion, for example, was created by compositing various large-scale real explosions as well as miniature elements. An impressive achievement.
The team also had to work on the Los Alamos set: this mainly involved cleaning up the shots. For example, they had to remove anything that might have seemed anachronistic in the filming environment.
Finally, a round table on character animation brought together Mike Seymour from FxGuide, Rob Coleman (Creative Director, Industrial Light & Magic), Emily Dean (Director, Blur Studios & Nexus Studios), and Raqi Syed (Senior Lecturer – School of Design Innovation).
The panel discussed the challenges faced by animation teams, who often have to start working without even knowing the voices of their characters. Rob Coleman highlighted the major role of sound in animation, and not just dialogue: audio also contributes significantly to reactions, enabling artists to create believable performances.
The panel also pointed out that compromises are sometimes necessary: deviating slightly from realism for more effective emotional expression is often useful. Moving the location of an animal’s eyes on its head makes no sense, but is a goot tool to reinforce an expression.
Interviews coming soon
We also had the opportunity to interview Rob Coleman from ILM, as well as Raqi Syed from the Victoria University of Wellington (we had already presented an interview about Raqi Syed’s touching VR project Minimum Mass back in 2020). We discussed their recent projects and their vision of animation. You will find their interviews soon on 3DVF.
