SIGGRAPH: First day on the floor

Posted By John LePore on August 05, 2009 12:00 am | Permalink
Although the show officially began on Tuesday, I had an opportunity to get a sneak peak at a few things Monday afternoon while preparing my presentation at the Maxon booth.

I had a chance to see Frank Vitz and Georges Taorres from EA talk about how the put together the uuber-realistic boxers in the new game "Fight Night 4." Although I'm not working in a realtime environment like a game developer, there is a lot I can take from their shortcuts and workarounds for making wild effects like muscle flexing and impact deformations.

Listening to Pixar's Eric Froemling talk about putting together the complicated balloon canopy in "Up" was what one would expect from this generation's master storytellers. Although they are blowing minds with rigid body collision simulations, and hundreds of thousands of elements choreographed together, they still employ traditional tricks like forced perspective to help sell their scene.

After a few talks, I hit the Acme Oyster house and lost track of both beers and oysters down the hatch, and played out the evening with great conversation, meeting some new faces, and some local jazz.

Feel free to stop by, say hello, and see my presentation at the Maxon booth. I'll be presenting Wednesday at 11am, and Thursday at 12pm, talking about how Cinema 4D works in our workflow at Perception NYC