Siggraph Monday

After visiting Psyop on Monday we went to Siggraph. It was crowded. This is my first Siggraph and I didn't know what to expect. If your in the film industry or in school for it, and technology this is "the" nerd convention for that. lol This is smart/rich nerdy that were talking about. The things that seem to be big is mocap systems and these machines that take your 3d model from the computer and make a real representation of it. It creates it by layering. Creates a layer then glue, then another layer. It uses different materials too. Its pretty cool. I'm not sure how more effective it is then creating a mold then casting it from that. I know the lessor is cheaper.
They had a "Making of Avatar" panel there too. Some of the creators spoke about some of the techniques they used. I did a paper on mocap and read a lot about the making of Avatar through Cinfex. But some of the things they talked about I didn't even know. Even though they had facial capture on the helmets the actors wore they still did blend shapes on the model. I'm talking over 100 blend shapes for expressions. I did read that the camera for the facial capture created some weird perspective being that it was so close to the face. But using the two in conjunction from what we've seen from the film worked out those issues. Some other things they said like everything they did had to make since. They showed us breakdowns of shots for the film. It was really cool to hear this from the people who worked on this in person rather then from a youtube vid. which I did for my paper.
After that we walked around a bit. Found a area where they where taking pics for these circles that had pics of people around the convention. Of course we had to get in on that. And of course I had to do a split for them. lol And of course the nerds went wild over that one. :p After that we walked around looking at some other things. Apparently an animator from Pixar had been drawing on neon post-it notes a character and a web-site on the back and randomly sticking them on the Siggraph signs. It was a scavenger hunt to make sure everyone in our group ended up with one. After that we ate at a yard house then went back to the hotel to do it all over again the next day......THE END. ;p