SIGGRAPH

The inexorable rise of open source

Open Source was once a curiosity and the question always asked, but how do you make money? Turns out, that’s not the question. After a good decade and a half of proving the point, open source tools are enabling companies to save huge amounts of money by re-using and adapting code already written. Developers making use of open source tools are leveraging the talents of a worldwide army of programmers dedicated to making software work better.

The software industry opens up

A year ago at Siggraph, the creative community from TV, movie, marketing, game, and VFX studios came together to form the Academy Software Foundation, ASWF, as a resource for open software development in the creative fields. The Foundation was spearheaded by Executive Creative Director and Head of ILM Rob Bredow, who has shepherded several important open software and technology initiatives. … Read more

Realtime ray tracing shown by Adshir at Siggraph

  Ever since Arthur Appel proposed the core technology for ray tracing in his 1968 paper, realtime ray tracing has been the ultimate goal for computer graphics. The Ballistics Research Lab (BRL) demonstrated ray tracing for ballistics research using technology developed by the Mathematical Applications Group, Inc. (MAGI) in 1979. Turner Whitted showed how to speed up the calculations in … Read more

Siggraph attendance beats forecast

We’ve been tracking Siggraph’s attendance since the conference started and attending almost that long as well. Siggraph went through an explosive period, climaxing 22 years ago in 1997 ago just before the internet bubble popped. Since then, the attendance has dropped hitting an all-time low in 2009 during the great recession. History of attendance of Siggraph since its inception   … Read more

Ton Roosendaal wins the JPR Technology Advancement Award

Ton Roosendaal wins JPR's Technology Advancement Award for 2019 It’s been a big year for the Blender organization for several reasons. First, 2019 is the 25th anniversary of the Blender 3D software application, which Ton Roosendaal began developing in 1993. He had the first version of Blender running on January 2, 1994. Also this year, Ton and Blender were recognized … Read more

A few things we’re looking forward to at Siggraph

Siggraph combines an Academic Conference, with Science Fair experiments, trade show, art fair, and animation festival. It’s a select bunch, people who love computer graphics and in the past decade, the show has been dominated by the film industry. Lately, we’ve been seeing a lot of buzz at Siggraph for virtual production. However, where the interest has primarily been rendering, … Read more

The message from Siggraph

The subtext of Siggraph in Vancouver has generally been about the evils and advantages of outsourcing. The whole reason the North American version of Siggraph ever left the U.S. is because so many content creation jobs had moved to Canada – many of them, just up the road from Los Angeles to Vancouver. Just how short that road can become … Read more

Cubic Motion makes more than faces

Although Cubic Motion has stayed primarily in the background, leaving the spotlight to its partners, the company has defined performance capture for the gaming and movie industry since its founding in 2009. Recently, the company has demonstrated its prowess with character performances driven by a virtual Andy Serkis and Siren, a digital reinterpretation of a female character. The technology developed … Read more