Siggraph 2010 – Day 4

Day four of Siggraph began at the exhibitor’s hall. I I got the chance to look into some motion capturing devices, there are a lot to choose from and I really need to some research as to which device does what. In efforts to get one of the Pixar’s limited edition teapots, I manged to snag a seat at the Pixar’s booth early in the day. I sat through one of their demos on Renderman, which proved to be very interesting. Renderman is Pixar’s own rendering application, which includes advanced features for creating visual effects, and the core rendering technology has been proven on some of the most demanding 3D productions ever realized. The demo talked about the REYES algorithm (which stands for Renders Everything You Ever Saw), within Renderman, which focuses slicing 3D primitives into grids, where only the geometry in the camera’s view will be rendered and all the rest discarded. After the discussion, I got my teapot.

I looked around the job fair for a while, the lines were huge and despite the fact that no company was actively hiring a slew of individuals were there showing off their demos and portfolios.

Later in the afternoon I got the opportunity to visit the Disney Studio workshop. There they were having all sorts of sessions. One that I got to be apart of was Animator who animated Dr. Facilier, the evil voodoo magician in Disney’s The Frog Prince. He talked about his process in character development. He also went on to talk about the difficulty of animating an established character, and still making it your own, such in the case of his latest project Winnie the Pooh, where is lead animator on Piglet.

After playing a few games in the Disney studio area I was ready to call it a day.