Travels

I came home about an hour ago. My trip is over. It was a nice journey.

Today was the last day in San Francisco. Technically I will be here tomorrow as well, but I will rise early, give back the car and then go to the airport and fly home.

I was not really in the mood today for a lot of sightseeing. Was shortly to Chinatown and I finally managed to post my cards. I will be home, before them .

I walked around San Francisco today. Mostly along the Embarcadero. Shot quite some images, I selected one of Alcatraz. Would have liked to show Golden Gate Bridge, but it was in clouds and not really visible.

I had a short stroll through dark San Francisco. This city is great. It finally feels like a city to me. I think, I saw the fourth or fifth stretch limo, a sax player was laying Autumn in New York. I saw a bus driven by electricity and a man hole fuming from hot steam. What a city.

Was that a long drive. It seemed endless. I am still quite impressed, the area is very dry. You can clearly see, that the climate is semi arid, the prevailing colors are brown. Only where some framers water the fields there is green. When nearing the coast the vegetation is slowly turning mediterranean again.

I left Los Angeles and am now in San Francisco. I walked around for a last time and this time did even manage to shoot some images. The first one was my hotel, the New Otani Hotel & Garden.

The second of a small monument in front of Weller Court. It is dedicated to the crew of Challenger, that didn't return.

SIGGRAPH 2005 is more or less over. I found it very interesting, I am undecided, if I will attend next year as well. It is in Boston next year.

All in all it was a great experience and if you want to do more with computer graphics I suggest visiting SIGGRAPH. There are a lot of technical and creative people to learn from. I learnt most not directly related to the papers, but often from simple explanations, e.g. I now know fairly well, what a storyboard or animatronics is. I know, what previz is and why it is so important.

I learnt a lot of how a movie is produced. If you want to know something like that, there are quite some courses for that. Also in the Computer Animation Theater are sometimes sessions with people who actually did create a movie and describe, how they did it.

The paper sessions may be hard and tiring, but you can learn a lot there. Especially the things that don't appear in the papers are often more relevant then you would think. I for example found a lot of sites with the models that appear frequently in the papers. You may not use them commercially, but they are at least a way to test your programs. I will add them to the link section over time, some are already there. The rest is on my PDA.

There was one very interesting paper on clustering light sources. The effect is, that that system can literally handle thousands of lights. They showed scenes with 100K lights. It is an interesting approach, that can incorporate global illumination by creating point lights out of them.

I am currently in the paper session on Transparency amd Translution. The first paper was on subsurface scattering in multilayered materials. Very, very interesting. They basically can render very realistic paper (light shining through paper!), leafs and skin.

I am currently in the realtime raytracing course. Although I don't intend to do this in my system, they obviously know, how to make raytracing more efficiently. Up to now only the introduction has finished, but I already got an idea. It is advanteous to not ratrace in lines, but in small clusters. For non aliased images, I can implement that quite easily, some changes in the control function and I would have to change the image writer (it is currently also line based).

Was to some other sessions yesterday, but they were not really that intersting. Was to the animation theater again, that was much better. First show was a director of an animation showing, how he is doing it (he is not finished yet). He showed some animatronic and some of the things from production.

Today I was to the plants session and it was really great. There were two lectures basically about leafs, one about creation of plants and the last one about realistic rendering of wood, especially for furniture.

In the time between sessions I have been to some of the other attractions. The emerging technologies is more like a playing field. Lots and lots of whacky things there. Although also some very cool ones.

Last session of the day. That one was more of the practical side. Some guys from DreamWorks were showing, how they did some of the stuff from Madagascar (and Shrek 2). It was quite a contrast to the other sessions I've been to.

Just came out of the keynote. It was basically an interview of George Lukas. I have to admit, I am a bit disapointed. It could have equaly well been some TV-documentary. I am unsure, if the keynote shouldn't really be done by a researcher. It was a lot of talk about stuff probably everyone in the audience knew (after all, this is SIGGRAPH).