Left home this morning at 4:30 am so I could be in New Orleans at the Ernest N. Morial Convention Center in time for the afternoon education sessions. SIGGRAPH is the premier international event on computer graphics and interactive techniques. With over 25thousand professionals in graphics research, art and design, animation, games, education, music&audio, production and visual effects, I knew the conference  was going to be jam-packed with things I wanted to see and people I wanted to meet.

The Animation in Education panel preseted a computer science class in Second Life at RIT, a collaborative animation class at the University of Central Florida where the music professors compose original scores for the class animation, and computer science and engineering students who create animations and scene graphs with an emphasis on computational complexity at the University of Pittsburgh. The showcasing of these programs and the students’ resulting work gave me some ideas, but also made me very proud of the work of our Ramapo College animation students. Good work!

Next, I went to the Making It Move Talk where our friends at Electronic Arts Canada explained how they create their physics-driven animation for Fight Night 4. It starts with motion capture tied to a dual rig with joint limits and without, and then physics systems which are tied to the soft body simulations of the models (so the jaw flaps when punched) which sit on top of the rigid body.  Particle systems are then tied to the physics systems (so the spittle and blood fly…)  I was the most impressed by the simplicity of how EA created varieties of scale of muscle tension ont he characters. This was created with shader blending between two surface maps: one of map of bare muscle structure and the other of the basic body shader.

Terran Boylan, the FX Animator and Character Technical Director at Dreamworks also demonstrated the complicated BOB character from Monsters VS Aliens which was part particle, part softbody rig and also had to come apart into sections. He showed the components of B.O.B.’s character rig and the overall design approach. There were a lot of  technical challenges in order to animate and render a high-resolution warped polygonal mesh with a topology that changed in every frame.

I went to the Maxon booth and talked to some of the folks who create plugins, make tutorials and do demos with the software we use at Ramapo, Cinema 4D. I also met a charming robot interface designed by the students in the Entertainment Technology Center at Carnegie Mellon: Quasi. He’ll explain: