我在 http://pinterest.com/ 上頭開了個 SIGGRAPH 2012 For You 的板出來，一些即將在今年熱死人不償命的夏天，位於美國 Los Angeles 的 SIGGRAPH 2012 的消息，依造 Pinterest 的“傳統“，只放上有圖有影片，而且好看的內容。

計畫去一趟 SIGGRAPH 2012? 好奇想知道今年有些什麼看頭? 喜愛今年產業又有什麼好看又有趣的? 來加入這個 pinterest 看板吧 :)

Siggraph Asia 2011 結束後，我收到了一則問卷調查，裏頭有兩則有趣的問題，特別抓了張圖下來，結果就一直擺在電腦裏頭沒有理會了。剛剛才發現它們十足礙眼地躺在桌面上，提醒我要處理（??）一下。

“哪些雜誌，是你會常常/偶爾/持續關心並且閱讀的?“

{{ flickr drakeguan 6804780652 >}}

“哪些網站或是社群網站，是你會常常/偶爾/持續關心並且閱讀的?“

{{ flickr drakeguan 6950893429 >}}

CG Taiwaner 台灣人玩動畫在 2009 有一篇 Free CG Magazine 免費CG雜誌，給關心的人重溫一下資訊 :)

Wonderfully, we got this cooperative research work published on IEEE TCSVT. That’s great!

The following is the quote from the press in Digimax, http://www.digimax.com.tw/2012_0216

在太極影音辛苦工作的 同仁們大家好！我們研發部門，在技術上的突破以登上各大報嚕！我們太極研發部針對動 畫人物口部的「嘴型同步捕捉技術」，在刻畫3D動畫 角色表情上有著重大突破。此項研究已發表於國際專業技術組織美國電機電子工程師學會( IEEE: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers)的TCSVT (Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology)單位之中。

<img src=”http://www.digimax.com.tw/files/dgmx_TCSVT.png” width=100% />

我們是兩岸極少數具有研發能力與發表研究論文的動畫製作公司，也是台灣數位內容的旗艦企業。在各位同仁的努力之下, 太極影音在製作技術與視覺的呈現上，都已具備國際頂級動畫製作公司的水準。希望同仁們能多多支持，讓大家知道台灣也有國際級的動畫製作團隊。

以下是由旺報記者蔡家蓁所做的專訪：http://bit.ly/wHADl9

{{ flickr drakeguan 6445315283 >}}

After spotting this exhibitor DM, it reminds me of one un-answered question:

Do we really realize the contribution and advantages of Pixar’s RenderMan? If we don’t, how can we evaluate other renderers (ex, Arnold Renderer) in that soon without any hesitate?

**Rendering Synthetic Objects into Legacy Photographs **
Kevin Karsch, Varsha Hedau, David Forsyth, Derek Hoiem (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
Modeling and Generating Moving Trees from Video
Chuan Li (University of Bath), Oliver Deussen (University of Konstanz), Yizhe Song, Phil Willis, Peter Hall (University of Bath)
Video Face Replacement
Kevin Dale, Kalyan Sunkavalli (Harvard University), Micah K. Johnson, Daniel Vlasic, Wojciech Matusik (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Hanspeter Pfister (Harvard University)
Candid Portrait Selection From Video
Juliet Bernstein (University of Washington), Aseem Agarwala (Adobe Systems, Inc.), Brian Curless (University of Washington)
C1x6: A Stereoscopic Six-User Display for Co-located Collaboration in Shared Virtual Environments
Alexander Kulik, Andre Kunert, Stephan Beck, Roman Reichel (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar), Roland Blach Fraunhofer IAO (Digital Image), Bernd Froehlich (Bauhaus-Universitat Weimar)
A Hybrid Iterative Solver for Robustly Capturing Coulomb Friction in Hair Dynamics
Gilles Daviet, Florence Bertails-Descoubes, Laurence Boissieux (INRIA, Grenoble, France)
Interference Aware Geometric Modeling
David Harmon (New York University), Daniele Panozzo (University of Genova), Olga Sorkine (ETH Zurich), Denis Zorin (New York University)
Controlling Physics-Based Characters Using Soft Contacts
Sumit Jain, C. Karen Liu (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Animated Construction of Line Drawings
Hongbo Fu (City University of Hong Kong), Shizhe Zhou, Ligang Liu (Zhejiang University), Niloy Mitra (King Abdullah University of Science and Technology)
Mixed-Order Compositing for 3D Paintings
Ilya Baran, Johannes Schmid, Thomas Siegrist, (Disney Research), Markus Gross (ETH Zurich), Robert W. Sumner (Disney Research)
Insitu: Sketching Architectural Designs in Context
Patrick Paczkowski, Min H. Kim, Julie Dorsey, Holly Rushmeier (Yale University), Yann Morvan, Carol O’Sullivan (Trinity College Dublin)
Displacement Interpolation Using Lagrangian Mass Transport (TR)
Nicolas Bonneel, Michiel van de Panne (The University of British Columbia), Sylvain Paris (Adobe Systems Inc.), Wolfgang Heidrich (The University of British Columbia)
Sketch-based Dynamic Illustration of Fluid Systems
Bo Zhu (ERATO, JST), Michiaki Iwata, Ryo Haraguchi (National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute), Takashi Ashihara (Shiga University of Medical Science), Nobuyuki Umetani (The University of Tokyo), Takeo Igarashi Kazuo Nakazawa (National Cerebral and Cardiovascular Center Research Institute)
Modular Radiance Transfer
Bradford J. Loos (Disney Interactive Studios), Lakulish Antani (University of North Carolina) , Kenny Mitchell, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Wojciech Jarosz, (Disney Research Zurich), Peter-Pike Sloan (Disney Interactive Studios)
AppGen: Interactive Material Modeling from a Single Image
Yue Dong (Tsinghua University), Xin Tong (Microsoft Research Asia), Fabio Pellacini (Dartmouth College / apienza University of Rome), Baining Guo (Microsoft Research Asia)
Genetic Programming for Shader Simplification
Pitchaya Sitthi-amorn, Nicholas Modly, Westley Weimer, Jason Lawrence (University of Virginia)
A Shading Reuse Method for Efficient Micropolygon Ray Tracing
Qiming Hou, Kun Zhou (Zhejiang University)
Progressive Photon Beams
Wojciech Jarosz, Derek Nowrouzezahrai, Robert Thomas (Disney Research Zurich), Peter-Pike Sloan (Disney Interactive Studios), Matthias Zwicker (University of Bern)

OpenHealth的工作坊特邀曾任教於 MIT Media Lab（Context Aware Computing Group），現任教於卡內基美隆大學的教授Ted Selker，以探索健康生活為主題，歡迎對互動設計與智慧運算有興趣學子們，與大師共同激盪出有趣、有創意的健康生活新方案。

本工作坊以「健康生活」為概念下，延伸出四個主題：「居家」、「飲食」、「城市」與「照護」。每個主題會由不同助教所引導，利用各種有趣的腦力激盪方法，讓不同領域的學員們共同激盪出有創意的概念與互動原形，並結合自己擅長的技術與專長，在密集的工作坊中發揮最大的潛力。

More info on the official webpage.

Siggraph 2008 的一篇論文：[Upright Orientation of Man-Made Objects](http://www.cs.ubc.ca/nest/imager/tr/2008/upright_orientation/

)。這篇論文的目的是要把 3D 模型給擺正。只要你隨意給一個 3D 模型，使用這篇論文裏的方法的話，就能把一個模型擺正到可以平放在桌面上來。（註：其實是人造的物件為主，如果你是給一隻兩隻站立的狗的話，不曉得會跑出什麼結果來~）

• PCA 很可憐，只要是涉及 domain knowledge 的東西，都會故意拿出 PCA 當作對照組，然後它就會被數落一番…


• 顯微鏡好用，一路狂用來打 PCA…


• 小朋友的那段很優，想到用小朋友來示範『把東西擺正』的這件事，實在很有意思。


• 開場的機器人站起來那段，整個就很驚人，我猜他們看到這結果時，應該非常興奮，就整個覺得 paper 會上了吧。

事後觀點：

• 放寬 upright 的定義，就可以用在很多地方?


• 挑對 domain attributes 的話，supervised learning by Machine Learning 挺厲害。ML -> 不是發現新事物，而是定義出看待事物的規則來。


• 整篇論文的實作不易，都是描述性的文字敘述


• Google Scholar 結果。

My personal viewpoints of SIGGRAPH 2011 after lots of discussion with friends, colleagues, and someone. It is very subjective and the presentation on Prezi is just a testing. The presentation is not completed yet but I think it’s enough to leave it in this way. Check the source presentation: Summary of SIGGRAPH 2011 on Prezi

• More and more research papers focusing on controllable or guidable topics are proposed, like ShadowDraw, NPR Noise, Example-Based Elastic Materials, Photo-Inspired Modeling, Assembly-Based 3D Modeling.


• Alembic 1.0 is proposed to supersede long-running OBJ and work successfully in this industry, just like OpenEXR for images.


• Open source might not be the right way, but joint development is the way!


• Deep image compositing(1, 2, 3) is hot. Weta developed and used it for Avatar on Pixar’s Renderman and The Foundry’s Nuke is going to support that. Furthermore, deep image format is included in the standardization of OpenEXR 2.0.


• Katana is going to be release in this year, which is a 3D application specifically designed for the needs of look development and lighting in an asset based pipeline.


• The course: Stereoscopy from XY to Z is awesome and really informative. ( slides by NVIDIA, brief on real-time rendering)


• Global illumination by ray tracing is the trend but volumetric rendering is the next!


• Shrink Wrapping, low-res and distant cars in Cars 2 are modelled by a simple cube with displacement shaders. Not a new idea but it still looks cool.


• When we talk about 3-D, the stereoscopic vision, people are still mentioning the min/max disparity/parallax issues, like some safe zone, the bearable disparity angles, and the min/max stuff. Even Disney puts ‘comfortable’ as the top of stereoscopic principles. But, Disney also starts to mention emotional stereo and emotional distance.


• Current volumetric renderers still base on ray tracer or REYES.


• Blue Sky thinks crowd simulation takes time, slower loading and easy to crash your memory-limited machines, it is better to just bake variety of animations and use that to synthesize plausible crowd animation. Well, that is all because Blue Sky is using proprietary ray-tracing renderer! But in some situation, it makes sense.


• Sparse Voxel Octree (SVO)(google code: Efficient Sparse Voxel Octrees) is the key to LoD.


• CG is about cheating and we all should know that in advance.

今年的 SIGGRAPH 辦在加拿大，說什麼也要來一趟，見識一下所謂的「好山好水好無聊的溫哥華」，順道拜訪一下老朋友 仁瑋 賢伉儷。除了看看美侖美幻、有海景與海鷗相伴的 Vancouver Convention Centre 之外，也想感受一下溫哥華市區的生活步調。只能說，這個城市的人較台北人來得節奏快一些，但同時也來得懂得享受生活。一小塊草皮、藍天白雲與溫柔的陽光，就是一個可以讓人放鬆的大自然氛圍。（我與同事，趁著一個午休時間，拎著一個便當，走了幾個 block，跑去參加了一場 Musical Nooners 的戶外音樂會。聽聽音樂，看看小朋友在草地上奔跑，精神整個都來了~）

Source: So many pixels and so much Andouille.

有多少人會想來這個好山好水好無聊的溫哥華呢? 不多，大約就一萬出頭吧，這其中還包括了很多來自溫哥華當地的電影/動畫產業的工作者。

看看 Jon Peddie 先生於 2009 年做的一個統計圖表會發現，參與人數最多的時候，都是辦在洛杉磯的時候，最多有將近 5 萬人次參加，實在很誇張的一個數字。

我記得，2009 年辦在紐奧良的 SIGGRAPH，那年只有約 1 萬出頭的參與人次，跟今年辦在溫哥華的情況有得拼，有人說 SIGGRAPH 已經在走下坡了。一來門票愈來愈貴；二來有看頭的東西愈來愈少了；三來商業價值也開始降低了。（學生時代，一張 Full Conference 的票約 200 美金，今年則差不多要 400 塊!）反倒是 GDC 熱門得跟什麼似的，而且原來最早的 GDC，多的是 programmer 宅男，如今有愈來愈多的遊戲企畫與美術設計相關的活動，整個顯示出 GDC 日趨全面發展的樣貌。（不過其實 GDC 的門票更貴…!）

未來有機會，還會不會參加 SIGGRAPH 呢? 當然會! 一來，我愈來愈懂得怎麼從中聽出/看出一些有潛力的未來發展（這應該跟英聽能力有直接的關係），二來，我的 full technical paper 計畫還沒開始呢!