Vaughan’s SIGGRAPH 2019 Highlights
This years SIGGRAPH has come and gone and now that the dust has settled, I thought I’d share a few highlights from the show. I’ve been attending SIGGRAPH since the mid-90’s and while this year’s event was smaller than last year, I left with the same level of excitement from the show.
Math Whitaker and i were asked to present at the Textiles: Virtual to Physical session on Sunday, and were part of an amazing group discussing challenges and solutions when working with textiles. It was a great turn out with many take-aways.
One of my favorite slides from the session shared some interesting numbers from 2017. Definitely gets you thinking.
The Foundry dinner Sunday was a great opportunity to connect with some amazing people. and was a great way to kick off the show.
I started Monday participating in a Rigging session that was definitely a highlight of the show. Lots of interesting ideas and workflows discussed. This session attracted all of the major studios and was one of many standing room only sessions I attended.
The Foundry had several sessions, and although I couldn’t attend all of them, I was glad I caught Nick Boughen’s talk about Katana.
No SIGGRAPH would be complete without some Making of Sessions. A few favorites were the Avengers: EndGame, Spiderverse and Alita: Battle Angel talks.
There were also some great presentations on the show floor this year. Rich Hurrey showed some amazing work he’s been developing on his Rigging Master Course and made an announcement about his new training resource Kitestring. Very exciting news and definitely something to keep a look out for. I’ll be at the front of the line signing up for Kitestring.
Another cool presentation on the show floor was at the Nvidia booth. Saham and Craig from Falcon’s Creative talked about their work on the Halo Ring Experience. I hope to catch the traveling show at some point. Looked amazing!
Foundry showed the new Path Tracer in action at the Nvida booth and in the Modo session. Cant wait to get this into our pipeline at New Balance. Extremely impressive.
One of the coolest things about attending a show like SIGGRAPH is all the people you get to connect with. Getting to meet Matt Cox from Foundry was a treat and I was super excited to finally get to meet Warren Marshall before his presentation. If you’re not familiar with Warren’s work, be sure to check out his YouTube Channel and join his Discord.
As you can imagine, there were so many cool sessions, people to connect with, and new tools and techniques to discover. Too many to mention here, but I hope these bits and bobs give you an idea of how great shows like SIGGRAPH are. I hope to connect with many of you next year in Washington DC for SIGGRAPH 2020.
