Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Petree Hall D

Half-Day
Level: Intermediate

A continuous challenge for special effects in movies is the production of realistic virtual crowds. There is also a need for real-time crowds in games and VR. This course presents state-of-the-art techniques and examples from recent movies ("Lord of the Rings," "Shrek2," "Madagascar") and VR applications.

Prerequisites

Experience with computer animation is recommended but not mandatory.

Intended Audience

Animators and designers.

Organizer

Daniel Thalmann

EPFL VRla

Lecturers

Laurent Kermel
William Opdyke

PDI/DreamWorks

Stephen Regelous

Massive Software

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Room 515A

Half Day

Level: Intermediate

A thorough introduction to how to acquire and process multiple video streams for omni-perspective, interactive rendering of real-world, dynamic scenes. Attendees learn how to reconstruct and represent dynamic scene geometry from multi-video footage, as well as how to render time-varying scenes video-realistically from arbitrary viewpoints in real time.

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the concept of image-based rendering. Some basic knowledge of computer vision fundamentals is helpful but not mandatory.

Intended Audience

Graduate students interested in interdisciplinary graphics and vision research, and professionals from the movie, special effects, and interactive entertainment industries.

Co-Organizers

Marcus Magnor

MPI Informatik

Marc Pollefeys

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Lecturers

German Cheung

Neven Vision Inc. (formerly Carnegie Mellon University)

Wojciech Matusik

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL)

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Half-Day
Room 502A
Level: Beginning

Animators perceive and apply acting theory in a different way than do stage actors. Ed Hooks, author of Acting for Animators (revised 2nd edition, 2003), pioneered acting workshops that are specifically designed for the needs of the animator. Each consists of a lecture, simple improvisations, and acting analysis and deconstruction of clips from films. Hooks does not try to make stage actors out of animators. He teaches them acting theory in a fun, painless, and empowering way.

The primary focus of Acting for Animators is to explore the connections among thinking, emotion, and physical action as they relate to performance animation.

Attendance at this course is highly encouraged. Its exclusive content will not be recorded in any post-conference video documentation.

Prerequisites

No prerequisites except an open mind and a willingness to explore new ideas.

Intended Audience

Professional animators, students, and teachers of animation.

Organizer

John C. Finnegan
Purdue University

Lecturer

Ed Hooks

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Petree Hall C

Half Day

Level: Intermediate

Realistic shading and how it can be achieved using precomputed radiance transfer. The course covers: the theory underlying a general model of shading and shadowing for real-time rendering, basic radiance transfer techniques, more advanced techniques that incorporate higher-frequency lighting and arbitrary BRDFs, the differences among these algorithms, and insights the presenters have gained working in this area. And it includes implementation details and a complete theoretical derivation.

Prerequisites

Some knowledge of a low-level graphics API such as DirectX or OpenGL. Knowledge of shading algorithms, linear algebra, and basic global illumination is useful.

Intended Audience

Everybody who is interested in realistic real-time shading. The course is designed for people who already have some knowledge of real-time rendering and want to learn a more sophisticated shading technique.

Co-Organizers

Jan Kautz

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jaakko Lehtinen

Helsinki University of Technology and Remedy Entertainment Ltd.

Peter-Pike Sloan

Microsoft Corporation

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Room 502B

Level: Intermediate

OpenGL performance analysis, tips, and techniques to help programmers write better OpenGL programs regardless of their development platform. Topics include: the causes of and solutions to performance problems in OpenGL programs, techniques for organizing data, and how advanced OpenGL features can make OpenGL programs run faster.

Prerequisites

The course assumes that attendees are comfortable programming with the OpenGL programming interface, understand the methods for rendering geometry and images with OpenGL, and know how to control rendering by manipulating OpenGL's state.

Intended Audience

This course is designed for novice to intermediate OpenGL programmers or those seeking insights into how to make interactive graphics applications perform better. You are beyond the level of the course if you have evaluated and tuned graphics programs and systems and are aware of the options and tradeoffs available in OpenGL.

Co-Organizers

Bob Kuehne

Blue Newt Software

Dave Shreine

SGI

Lecturers

Alan Commike

SGI

Tom True

NVIDIA Corporation

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Room 511AB

Level: Intermediate

The Multi-User Programming Pedagogy for Enhancing Traditional Study (M.U.P.P.E.T.S.) system (a fully featured collaborative virtual environment) has been in development at Rochester Institute of Technology for several years. This course describes how the system was built and how it is used in the classroom for programming and graphics education, as well as how Open Source has affected the system, its development, and its deployment.

Prerequisites

Familiarity with OpenGL and/or another graphics APIs. Familiarity with graphics and programming education.

Intended Audience

Educators who are teaching computer programming and/or computer graphics, and anyone interested in seeing a multi-user system that doubles as a CVE and a fully capable development environment.

Organizer

Andrew Phelps

Rochester Institute of Technology

Lecturers

Kevin Bierre
Christopher Egert
David Parks

Rochester Institute of Technology

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Monday, 1 August

8:30 - 12:15 pm

Room 501AB

Level: Advanced

What do the configuration space of an animation skeleton, a subdivision surface, and a lightfield have in common? All of these are examples of manifolds. This course presents an overview of manifold constructions useful for graphics applications, with a focus on two-dimensional manifolds.

Prerequisites

The course is mostly self-contained. Mathematical prerequisites are basic calculus, complex numbers, and vector and matrix algebra. General familiarity with graphics research is helpful, but not required.

Intended Audience

Researchers from academia and industry who are interested in learning techniques for constructing manifolds and applying these techniques to different research areas in graphics.

Co-Organizers

Cindy Grimm

Washington University in St. Louis

Denis Zorin

New York University

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