So the exciting thing that went on this month was that I attended Siggraph 2008 in Los Angeles. For those who do not know, Siggraph means Special Interest Group in Graphics (specifically computer graphics). Although there is an organization called Siggraph, the term is generally used to refer to an annual conference where tons of nerds get together and show off all their cool stuff. The conference has gotten pretty big and now covers a wide variety of topics beyond just computer graphics. You can see research presentations for new technology that you might see in cutting edge games and movie graphics five years from now.

Anyway, I won’t actually dwell on Siggraph too much because I already wrote up a summary for work, and I don’t feel like doing it again.

In a nutshell, I learned about some of the graphics techniques used in Halo 3, Crysis, Starcraft 2, learned about texture tiling and tile theory, learned about natural material simulation, and global illumination using photon mapping. I watched 8 hours of computer animated short films. I created some Dueling Monkeys stickers. I learned about creating materials, foliage, and volumetric effects for movies. I met some game industry people and talked about engines and stuff.

I also got to see the StarCraft 2 trailer in a movie theater with movie resolution and theater sound.

In other news

In order to keep things visually interesting, I collected some screenshots of stuff I’ve been doing at work recently.

This is a screenshot of a demo I did a little work on for GDC 2008. I modeled, textured, and animated the power core structure in the center of the room.

This is a shader that just takes two textures (in this case, sand and gravel) then blends them in an interesting way to get more natural transitions.

A character and environment I created for the demo I’m currently working on. All this stuff is just proxy so it will get replaced in the end. he has a very humorous run animation.

There are a few more screenshots of the same stuff in the gallery, but I accidently put them in the gaming set instead of art, and I can’t find a way to correct it. Also, Flickr sucks and gives me the ‘this photo currently unavailable’ BS for everything I’ve added. Great.

Whatever, I’m done.