…Student Volunteer Program

El Pacífico... una parte de él al menos.

El viaje a San diego CA en 2007 fue importante por diversas razones: primera vez que salía del país, primera vez que iba al SIGGRAPH y por muy marico que suene primera vez que veía el Oceano Pacífico. Para mí el mar es importante.

Sin embargo la experiencia de ver el Pacífico no fue tan grata como esperaba: estaba en una fiesta en una marina, con mas o menos 200 personas de alrededor del mundo, disfrutando no 1 si no 4 buffets con comidas de todos los lugares del planeta, escuchando música eléctronica, cervezas Corona a buen precio, hablando con unas alemanas y compartiendo con mi pana Víctor Sojo. Ok… fue bastante grato, de hecho fue muy arrecho.

Y con Uds Guillermo Fantásti... Jim Blinn

Lo malo fue cuando tuve que cuidar la puerta en la sesión de Pixar sobre Ratatouille, y luego en la de Dreamworks sobre Shrek, o cuidar la puerta en las sesiones de Transformers y Spiderman 3, donde asistieron los artistas técnicos y directores de efectos especiales… Mmmmmm, la verdad eso fue muy de pinga, sobre todo porque no hay que hacer, era estar parado y ver que gente entraba y salía los primeros 10 minutos. Dejenme recordar a ver, a ver, YA, fue un fastidio tener una sesión especial para los estudiantes voluntarios con la gente de Weta Digital, y también fue una ladilla la presentación exclusiva de la gente Sony Pictures sobre Surf Up, estabamos viendo todo antes que el resto de la conferencia y pues era muy bueno… fue extremadamente bueno. Esteeeeeeeeee, AH, la sesión exclusiva con el gerente de recursos humanos de EA, esa si fue una ladilla, o sea como se le ocurre hablarnos de los proyectos de EA, de perfiles de trabajo y las oportunidades de empleo, ¿qué diablos le pasó en su cabeza cuando nos dió su tarjeta? (que tengo entre las cajas de mi mudanza aún y después la busco), o sea que bolas tiene ese tipo.

Helmut Pottmann (http://bit.ly/jJGlc)

También era una ladilla compartir con estudiantes voluntarios de todos los lugares del mundo, quienes en el futuro (si no es que lo están ya) estarán trabajando en universidades, laboratorios de computación gráfica y compañias de animación, con quienes compartí acceso total a la conferencia: el Electronic Theater (a partir del año pasado cambiaron el formato y se conoce como Computer Animation Festival), la exhibición y la licencia original de Softimage XSI 6.5 que te regalan (por lo menos en esa oportunidad). Que cagada porque solo estoy mencionando a lo que pude asistir, no puedes imaginarte lo ladilla que fue todo el resto.

De pana, si puedes ir a SIGGRAPH como particular pues asiste, pero si estás leyendo este blog es porque entiendes la idea: el programa de estudiantes voluntarios es una experiencia distinta, MUY DISTINTA. Ya para New Orleans estea año el proceso de selección terminó, pero te tengo buenas noticias: SIGGRAPH ASIA 2009, revisa el programa de pasantías (cambiaron un poco el sistema y por ende el nombre también). No te cuesta nada, regístrate, ponte un par de horas a escribir el formulario electrónico, yo te ayudo, la gente del UCVSSC también puede, no porque sepamos más inglés que tú, o hayamos viajado más que tú, si no porque por lo menos a mí me han aceptado 3 veces y seguramente a tí ninguna, y es brutal estar en SIGGRAPH, y mejor aún es saber que mis posibles compañeros de trabajo en videojuegos pueden ganar la misma experiencia que yo gane al asistir. Consideralo, con un poco de esfuerzo podrías estar pasado diciembre en Yokohama… YOKOHAMA…

Y O K O H A M A

Queda en Japón ¿recuerdas? Japón… JAPON

J A P O N

YEAH BABY...

Debería bastar eso para motivarte. Pero si no te basta, podrías leer la entrada anterior. Repito, si puedes ir como particular pues asiste, total yo despues de vivir la experiencia de ser estudiante voluntario no me da la gana de ir como particular, cuando no asista como estudiante voluntario lo haré como ponente. Definitivo.

Weta session

Alex Alvarez (http://bit.ly/Io8ec)

Meats Meier (http://bit.ly/ZRxh7

Nota 1: no me pregunten por la diagramación de la entrada, WordPress se puso imbécil. No me permite dejar más de una línea entre parrafos, por eso están viendo estas palabras entre las dos fotografías, por mencionar eso nada más

Nota 2: no van a ver el estado en el que estaba en esos días. No lo van a hacer. Me niego categóricamente.

Nota 3: lo prometido es deuda, el año pasado no pude asistir a SIGGRAPH porque me dió una convulsión, aquí que acá va mi descarga: CDLM,CDLM,CDLM,CDLM,CDLM, CDLM,CDLM, CDLM,CDLM,CDLM, CDLM, CDLM, CDLM,CDLM,CDLM,CDLM. Gracias.

What Art Can Tell Us About the Brain

Margaret S. Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School

I knew the keynote talk at the IEEE Visualization conference was going to be interesting when the student volunteer at the door handed me stereo glasses before the talk. The talk was focused on introducing concepts about color and luminance that artists have been using effectively for hundreds of years.

In the first part of the talk, she focused on introducing concepts such as centre-surround. 

Some of the highlights from her talk are as follows: 

- In some cases, color contrast is not equal to luminance contrast. 

- People are good at recognizing objects from different points of view. This might be interesting since there seems to be considerable amount of work in graphics and visualization on finding the ‘best’ view for a particular dataset. 

- Equiluminance – In the paper “Vernier and Displacement Thresholds in Equiluminance” by Masami Funakawa, equiluminance is introduced as follows 

The notion of equiluminance is based upon the assumption that in the human visual system there are two kinds of visual pathway, i.e., luminance and chromatic pathway. An equiluminous stimulus varies in color, but not in luminance, so that it is assumed to be signaled by the chromatic system, but not by the luminance system. In psychophysical studies these stimuli are used to isolate and probe the chromatic system. 

 This webpage describes the use of equiluminance in art and how luminance affects our perception http://www.webexhibits.org/colorart/anuszkiewicz.html

 - Depth can be conveyed using motion, shading, perspective projection, occlusion and stereopsis. 

- Luminance contrast: As long as the luminance is appropriate, shape can be conveyed. She showed some interesting examples of paintings [Matisse's The Woman in a Hat] and visual representations, where the colors were unnatural but it did not affect the perceived shape of face/object. 

- Yellow, Blue and White, when used appropriately can convey motion in static images. This was demonstrated by showing some work  by Akiyoshi Kitaoka’s Rotating Snakes (left image below) and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie. It reminded me of the SIGGRAPH 2008 paper on 
Self-Animating Images: Illusory Motion Using Repeated Asymmetric Patterns by Ming-Te Chi et al.

The images in this paper seem to use a similar principle and are very effective and conveying motion. 

- Our central vision has high acuity whereas our peripheral vision was lower acuity. We dont seem to notice the fact that our peripheral vision has lower resolution since we move our eyes rapidly over scenes. This reminded me of the keynote from IEEE Vis 2004, where the speaker, Wilson Geisler, gave an amazing demonstration of this phenomena. 

She said that Mona Lisa’s smile was particularly enigmatic since one feels her expression changing depending on whether one focuses on the eyes or the mouth. Her lab has conducted research on the same and by filtering if they have been able to create representations of how our peripheral and central vision interpret the painting, as shown here   

The last part of the talk focused on the use of stereopsis by artists in making more realistic paintings. She found that many artists lack the ability to see stereopsis and that makes them see a flat world which they capture on canvas. This can be identified by looking at the glint in the eye of the photo/painting and if both the glints are not synchronized, chances are that the person lacks the ability to see stereopsis. Through her research, she found many famous artists to have misaligned eyes including the painter Rembrandt. Photographs of Babe Ruth too seemed to imply that he had misaligned eyes. 

The end of the talk kept us wanting for more and I guess that implies that it was a great keynote talk.

Well hello again people. I just wanted to drop a quick note here.

I uploaded 75 SIGGRAPH 2008 pictures to Flickr today, and that pretty much used the whole 100mb that I had (I was too lazy to resize the images so I uploaded the high-rez ones that I took).

Well it seems that I can’t post the stupid flash slideshow on this blog, so here’s the direct link to my stream thing or whatever is this -_-

First of all, let me show you this video that I just uploaded. I shoot this one during the special Star Wars Clone Wars presentation at SIGGRAPH. It was really amazing to see all the clone troopers there.

And I actually have a couple of pictures with the troopers

Anyway, now the real post. As you may or may not know, I’m working on the get-sponsors part of the shortfilm. So, to make things more “professional” we’ve opened a production blog and we will be posting the milestones and news about the project there.

The link is on the sidebar, but I’m also including it on this post: Tormented production blog

I’ve just finished uploading the Animation Mentor interviews to Renderosity, and I hope they will be live this week…. So I’ll post a link when they are up

Well, I had an amazing time at SIGGRAPH last week. This was my third one, so I pretty much knew my way around.

I will be posting photos and stuff on this blog, but right now you can read my coverage on Renderosity here.

Anyway, my highlights go something like this:

• Rome Reborn
• 3DConexion space navigator (and I actually have one of those sitting on my desk right now )
• The LucasFilms booth, of course.
• The classes on Kung Fu Panda, Cloverfield and Ironman
• Some camera tracking system, don’t remember the name.
• The Maxon Cinema4D R11 launch
• Maya 2009 and Mudbox 2009 (also known as Mudbox 2, lol), how can I miss those.
• I went to pay a visit to my TSpline friends, and I finally got to meet Diana Lee from Maxon.
• I spent nearly half an hour with Carlos Baena from AM and another 20-something minutes with Taylor Mahony also from AM. I actually have these on video so I’ll be posting them on Rendo in the following days.
• And since I am a press member I pretty much had to do a lot of running around.

Anyway, so sad the event is over, but I wouldn’t be able to survive another week… If you want to see how a SIGGRAPH attendee looks on the last day, watch the video below…

So good.

It was my very first Siggraph and it was a ton of fun! I got to meet my mentor Joe Mandia. Solid guy. Funny, informative and charitable. He bought me a wet burrito at a taco joint seeing as how I gave all of my money to a cab driver (that’s whole different story… and not a fun one). He took us around to some the major studio’s booths and we got to talk to people face to face at Sony/Imageworks, Dreamworks, Blue Sky and Disney. Tons of fun and GREAT information. I got to hand out a ton of resumes and a few reels. Not expecting much, but who knows, right?

Aside from that some of my memorable moments were:

-Reviewing my reel with an ambushed John Kahrs (ambushed by his Disney folk, not be me) at the Disney booth’s portfolio review.

-Finally getting to meet Bobby, Shawn and Carlos. Super sweet guys.

-Getting to meet a bunch of awesome AMers!

-Watching the half-naked, fit-bodied samba dancers at the Fjorg competition.

-Talking to the guys at the Laika, Pixar and Disney booths. Really nice guys and very willing to take time and talk with me.

-MY POOR FEET WALKING AROUND FOR HOURS ON END!!!

The last one inspired me to draw this picture:

I probably won’t make the next one seeing as how it’s in New Orleans… unless of course I’m working for a company that sends me there to work a booth.

Fingers crossed.

The group I work in at AMD is involved in a few presentations at SIGGRAPH this year. First, Chris Oat and Natalya Tatarchuk will be presenting a talk in the Advances in Real-Time Rendering in 3D Graphics and Games course on Monday on our latest demo “Froblins”. This talk will cover using the GPU and DirectX 10.1 for scene management, occlusion culling, terrain tessellation, approximations to global illumination, character tessellation, and crowd simulation.

I will be presenting a shorter talk on Thursday from 4:15-4:45 in the Beyond Programmable Shading: In Action course, focusing on how we used the GPU to do some general computing in the Froblins demo to allow our Froblin characters to navigate around the world and avoid each other. My addition to this course was a bit on short notice so I am fairly nervous, but how could I pass up an opportunity to speak at SIGGRAPH? I must say I am very jealous of my co-workers who will be done with all presenting duties on the first day of the conference!

I am always eager to meet new people so please feel free to introduce yourself if you will be in attendance!

Update: Here’s the link to the chapter from the course notes on our Froblins demo: March of the Froblins: Simulation and Rendering Massive Crowds of Intelligent and Detailed Creatures on GPU

LOS ANGELES, Aug 07, 2008 (BUSINESS WIRE) — SIGGRAPH 2008 takes place August 11, 2008 – August 15, 2008 at the Los Angeles Convention Center in Los Angeles. Listed below are the SIGGRAPH 2008 exhibitor profiles.

For in-depth information about SIGGRAPH 2008, visit http://www.siggraph.org/s2008/
Business Wire is the official news wire for SIGGRAPH 2008. Breaking news releases and photos are available at http://www.tradeshownews.com, Business Wire’s trade show, conference, and event news resource.

Read more: SIGGRAPH 2008 Exhibitor Profiles

So if you’re going to be at Siggraph let’s me know. I’ll be there with bells on. Not really. Jeans and a t-shirt probably. Look under “My Shizzle” and shoot me an email.

Can’t wait!

Revolution Through Evolution logo. Look for these tee shirts at Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles next week. The theme for SIGGRAPH this year is “Evolution” and we wanted to focus on having some kind of “OpenGL” undertones fried into the engineers’ brains as well as “OpenGL – version 3″. Does that blue look familiar in the “3″?

Here’s a Hint:

If you see people wearing that shirt from Siggraph 2008, tell them you know who I am.

As a newcomer to the SIGGRAPH 2008 Evolve Convention I think it had an adequate amount of alluring fluff. Though my day was beautiful as far as experiences, great company, and enticing swag, I think I could have dealt with a bit more. It left me craving more, and perhaps that was one of the best free bits I could have picked up off the convention floor.

Some highlights of the day were the thermal imaging Predator-esque camera booth (a truly fun eyecatcher to any group of n00bs at the convention who couldnt’ help but wonder which body parts and functions would display the red hot hottest areas–it quickly went South…literally), the free green-screen booth which turned out to be a blue screen (but who am I to point the finger), the DEATH SPHERE OF DOOM in one of the back booths across from LUCASFILM (another highlight!) which none of us really got see demonstrated, mo-cap booths a’ plenty, robotic arms, 3D experiences with “shutter glasses”, guitar hero tournaments, wacom cintiq tournaments, racing simulators, and a slue of other interactive goodies.

Neither the presence of traditional 2D demonstrations at the Disney booth, nor the studio art gallery went unappreciated; however, I must admit the interactive portions of the studio art seemed a bit stretched. I could not help but compare the exhibit to the 2006 Ecstasy exhibit at Moca–now THERE was some interactive and thrilling interaction. Perhaps it was a slight let-down… Despite my personal opinion onlookers seemed to sufficiently enjoy the section…

Unfortunately my camera batteries died. Fortunately I had the camera on my phone. Unfortunately my phone died. Granted I should have brought my home charger with me on my mini vacation this week. Regardless here are a few pics I snapped before it all hit the fan (more pictures later)