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SIGGRAPH Academy Award

This year we were pleased to announce the SIGGRAPH Academy at SIGGRAPH 2018 in Vancouver. The initial class of inductees was drawn from previous award winners. However, moving forward, our goal is to induct a broader range of individuals who have made substantial contributions to our field. To accomplish this, we need nominations for the Academy from across all of computer graphics. 

Here is the information you need to make a nomination:

Nominations for the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy may be submitted by contacting the SIGGRAPH Academy Award Chair before 31 January each year.

Eligibility Criteria:

• The criteria for election to the ACM SIGGRAPH Academy are
• Cumulative contributions to the field of computer graphics and interactive techniques
• Impact on the field through development of new research directions and/or innovations
• Influence on the work of others
• Reasonably active participant in the ACM SIGGRAPH community
• All accomplished members of the ACM SIGGRAPH community will be eligible to be nominated including researchers, practitioners, technologists, artists, designers, and educators.

Nominations will require:

• A brief summary (in English, maximum one page) explaining how the nominee meets the criteria
• Supporting letters of exactly three endorsers. Endorsers should themselves have achieved distinction in the field. Endorsers will need to have personal knowledge of the candidate's work. Endorsers will provide a brief endorsement statement giving their personal assessment of the candidate's impact on the field.
• Nominator’s name, address, telephone number, and email address.

ACM SIGGRAPH Academy Committee

• Holly Rushmeier, Chair
• John Fujii
• Cynthia Beth Rubin
• Hugues Hoppe
• Nelson Max
• Hans-Peter Seidel

We look forward to receiving your nominations!

— Holly Rushmeier

ACM SIGGRAPH is seeking Nominations for two committee Chairs. The first position is Chair of the Awards Committee. The second position is Chair of the External Relations.  If you are interested in either position, please contact the Chair of the Nominations Committee, Rebecca Strzelec.

ACM SIGGRAPH is recruiting for a Chair for the newly formed Awards Committee.  This chair will join the ranks of the standing committee chairs who assist the Executive Committee in nurturing and supporting the community of computer graphics researchers and practitioners.   A listing of the current standing chairs and their roles can be found here: https://www.siggraph.org/about/acm-siggraph-committees

The ACM SIGGRAPH External Relations Committee and their committee will establish and oversee ACM SIGGRAPH's agreements with organizations and conferences worldwide; manage relationships with external professional societies, organizations, and companies; and work with the ACM Executive Committee to identify and pursue relationships with new organizations and companies in alignment with the current strategic plan.

The Chair positions will start as soon as the candidates are identified and each position will have a three year term.

A detailed job description for ACM SIGGRAPH External Relations Chair and ACM SIGGRAPH Award Chair can be found by clicking on the links.

Move Over T-Rex, Here Comes The Meg!

By Marina Antunes. Republished with permission from Spark CG Society.

Though much of The Meg is played for laughs, in part it’s what makes the movie such an enjoyable bit of entertainment to the tune of $200 million in worldwide box office in its first week, two things are definitely taken very seriously: the action and the titular megalodon, or “the Meg” for short.

The movie takes place at a newly minted research station off the coast of China. During their inaugural research assignment, a group of scientists find themselves trapped in deep-sea waters. Enter Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham), an experienced rescue diver brought in to save the crew who then finds himself, with the help of scientist and all around badass Suyin (Bingbing Li), saving pretty much everyone.

The movie culminates in a third act arc in which Jonas finds himself in a breathless showdown with the Meg. VFX Supervisor Sue Rowe and her team at Sony Pictures Imageworks (SPI) were tasked with creating the final action sequence which is an impressive feat of kinetic movement, but achieving it wasn’t an easy task.

“We did about 300 shots, which is actually not that big, especially for Sony.” Rowe explained. “Many of us on the team had done larger projects, but because it was a computer generated character and it’s all CG under water… the number of shots is smaller but the challenge is very high.”

Animation pass.


Final comp.

To begin with, the team was tasked with creating the underwater environment of Sanya Bay without reference photos. “Even in the clearest, most beautiful waters, which are around Sanya Bay, after 10 or 15 feet, the water density, the particulate in the water and the way the light travels, you don’t actually see that far.” This is problematic when you have a 75-foot shark to frame. “To get [the Meg] into a shot, you need to move the camera a long way back, like 300 feet but if you were to pull a camera back for real in an underwater environment, you would lose all definition. You have to cheat a little.”

The team at SPI pushed the envelope to get the shots they needed, marrying science and artistry to achieve a look that everyone was happy with, including director Jon Turteltaub. Rowe and her team were constantly rethinking the shots because even when the correct math was employed, it didn’t necessarily yield the right results. ”One of the things I love about the team here at Sony is that they know that. Just because the math is correct, doesn’t mean it’s perfect. They are real artists as well scientists.”

And some of that artistry is clearly on display in The Meg. The team built an underwater city of corals for their action sequence. “I say ‘city’,” Rowe explains, “However it was all rocks and corals, but there were specific points in our 3D environment where certain key events took place: this is where the bite happens, this is where they go into the corals. It’s a map of the area.”

To build that environment, the team used an in-house tool called Sprout. “It’s a paint tool that allowed me as a VFX supervisor to select where rocks, coral, sand etc. are placed and they would be painted into place in three dimensions.” The tool isn’t completely unheard of in the realm of science technology but as Rowe explains “It’s so efficient and clever and it automatically updates which made my life hugely simple and I was easily able to art direct.”

Lighting pass.


Final comp.

One of the other challenges Rowe and her team had to overcome was making the scenes look like they were taking place underwater. Even with the addition of chromatic aberration, bubbles, particulates, and silt on the ground, that wasn’t always obvious and this took some creative thinking. “We added these things that I call ‘streamers’.” Essentially, they are streamers of bubbles coming out of the shark’s nose and gills. “It kind of looked like it was fizzing, but it really told us that that Meg was travelling through water and you suddenly felt the power of how fast it was moving.”

Another example of out-of-the-box thinking was in achieving the Meg’s menacing look. “The animation team did a really amazing job to give the Meg a real sense of evil. It had to look scary, formidable, powerful and if you actually look at sharks they’re scary because they have these calm, cold, dead eyes and because they’re sharks. If you want to make one feel like it was pursuing you, then you would need to employ some extras to make it feel like she was really determined and to give it some personality.”

One of the ways Rowe accomplished that was by asking animation supervisor Craig McPherson to give her a control so she could have a little bit of a brow on the shark. “What we realized is that if we dip the shark’s head by 15 degrees and gave it just the tiniest of brow, it looked mean.”

In addition to Sprout, Rowe and her team used a combination of tools to achieve the challenge put forth by the project. Houdini was the weapon of choice for the water simulations but getting Meg’s size and proportion was a challenge all its own. The team used Ziva, a tool created by a team of Vancouver natives, to help bring the Meg to life. “The tool is very anatomically based and is based on the concept that if you build your shark, or any animal, with the right skeletal structure, you will then be able to derive how the muscles should contract and how they will move.”

Rowe had used the tool on a previous project and brought in James Jacobs, founder of Ziva Dynamics, to help her team muscle the Meg. “The animators loved it because it didn’t take away from their artistry of making Meg move in a clever, smart, intuitive way; they had all the freedom to do the creative stuff but they didn’t then have to do the secondary animation on how the belly would wobble or how the gills would open and close or how the water resistance would impact the flesh when the head moves.”

Muscle simulation.

The team also employed Massive for what Rowe admits is one of her favourite shots of the film. For reference, Rowe and production side VFX supervisor, Adrian de Wet, used a photo of hammerhead sharks near Cocos Island. “They swim together in these beautiful blue waters. Adrian and I thought it was really beautiful and we wanted to include it in the movie somewhere.” The shot, which comes late in the film, is very striking and features a shiver of sharks as it closes in for a meal. “The team animated a little cycle. When two sharks get too close to each other, one nips the other which gives them a little bit of interaction, as if they all know they are next to each other. This makes it a little more visually interesting.”

Though The Meg makes excellent use of the visual effects, the film’s climax is a mix of digital wizardry and practical artistry. Jason Statham, a former Olympic diver, was quite comfortable working underwater and as Rowe explains, shooting part of the scene in a tank, for real, was hugely advantageous. “You get the buoyancy and the way that humans look underwater. The downside was this also created a lot of roto work for her team who extracted Statham from the tank background. Lastly, we added lots of CG bubbles because how we used the images were not necessarily how they were shot — meaning Jason needed to look like he was being pulled by the Meg through the water, so we added CG bubbles flowing behind him.”

Final comp.

For the one-on-one showdown between Statham and the Meg, the scene was shot on an outdoor set in New Zealand using a buck which allowed the team to get the physicality of Statham’s stabbing motion. “Everyone assumes it’s all done in CG but you speak to any VFX supervisor and they’ll tell you to try to shoot something for real.” Even so, Statham was replaced on both the rising and falling with a digital double but the moment when he stabs the shark in the eye “that’s 100% Jason.”

All images © 2018 Warner Bros. All Rights Reserved.

Marina Antunes is a Vancouver-based writer who has been dishing on film for various websites since 2005. She is the Editor-in-Chief of Quietearth.us and co-hosts a film podcast called After the Credits. Marina is a member of the Online Film Critics Society and the Alliance of Women Film Journalists. She joined the Spark CG Society as Festival Director in 2013.

 

 

VRCAI 2018: ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on VIRTUAL REALITY CONTINUUM AND ITS APPLICATIONS IN INDUSTRY Event Dates: 2-3 December 2018 Event Details: The 16th ACM SIGGRAPH International Conference on Virtual-Reality Continuum and its Applications in Industry (VRCAI2018), on 2-3 December 2018 will take place just before SIGGRAPH Asia 2018(4-7,Dec) in Tokyo, Japan. An exciting VRCAI 2018 awaits participants from both academia and industry all over the world, where fundamental methods, state-of-the-art technologies and innovative applications in the Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC) will be presented and discussed. Virtual Reality Continuum (VRC) emphasizes the coexistence and consistence of the virtual world and the real world. Spanning across next-generation info-communication environments like Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Virtuality (AV), Augmented Reality (AR) and Mixed Reality (MR), VRC is key in the way we define and interact, with and within, our virtual worlds and physical worlds. To advance research in the VRC fields, VRCAI 2018 seeks to provide a forum for scientists, researchers, developers, users and industry leaders in the international VRC community to come together to share experiences, exchange ideas and spur one another in the knowledge of this fast-growing field. VRCAI 2018 will focus on the following main themes: VRC Fundamental and Related Technology in Computer Graphics, VRC Systems, Interactions, and Industry Applications in the VRC. Topics of interests include (but not limited to): FUNDAMENTALS • Ubiquitous VR/AR/MR • Wearable and Mobile VR/AR/MR • Intelligent VR/AR/MR • Distributed and Collaborative VR/AR/MR • Robotics and Tele-Presence • Aural, Haptic and Olfactory Augmentation • Geometrically, Physically and Image Based Modeling • Real-time Visual Tracking and Registration • 3D Modeling, Interpretation and Reconstruction • Multi-resolution and Multi-scale Methods • Level of Detail, Model Compression and Simplification • Real-time Rendering, Image-based Rendering, and 3D Auditory • Rendering and Visualization of Large-scale Models • Procedural, Physically-based or Data-driven Animation • Avatars and Virtual Community • Metaverse • Immersive Virtual Environments INTERACTIONS AND INTERFACES • Collaborative and Interactive Virtual Environment/VR • Multimodal Interface • Visual Interface • Speech Interface • Haptic/Tactile Interface • Natural Interface • 3D Enabled Devices • Interaction Design • Sketch-based interfaces • Social and Interactive Computing and Media • Interactive Graphic Design • Interactive Sound Design • Human Factors and Ergonomics SYSTEMS • Clustered VR • High Performance VRC Computing • Large-scale Simulation • Immersive and Semi-immersive Systems • Projection and Display Systems • Active and Passive Stereo Systems • 3D Scanner, Digital Mock-up and Reverse Engineering APPLICATIONS • Aerospace • Architecture, Construction and Building • Arts • Education, Virtual Classroom and Learning, and Training • Engineering and Design • E-Commerce • Game/Entertainment • Geology, Geography and GIS • Life Science, Medicine and Healthcare • Manufacturing • Transportation and Logistics • Fashion, etc. SUBMISSIONS We invite submissions of Full Papers (8 pages) or Short Papers (4 pages). All accepted papers will be published in the VRCAI Conference Proceedings and will be included in ACM digital library (EI-indexed). Selected papers of high-quality will be recommended to  (John Wiley) (SCI-indexed) with its revised version for publication on Observer. All papers should be submitted via the EasyChair conference system: https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=vrcai2018 Paper Template: all papers should use the ACM SIG Proceedings template (word or latex template) downloaded from here: https://www.acm.org/publications/proceedings-template (use the “sigconf” proceedings template) Reviewing is double-blind, so please remove author and institution information from the submission files. IMPORTANT DATES Abstracts of Papers Due: 26 Aug. 2018 17:00 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) Papers Submissions Due:  31 Aug. 2018 17:00 PDT (Pacific Daylight Time) Acceptance notification: 29 Sep. 2018 Camera-ready papers:  10 Oct. 2018 Conference:   2-3 Dec. 2018 ORGANIZING COMMITTEE Conference Co-Chairs Koji Mikami Zhigeng Pan Matt Adcock Daniel Thalmann Program Chairs Xubo Yang Tomoki Itamiya Enhua Wu Publicity Chair Tsukasa Kikuchi Treasurer Yuriko Takeshima An adviser for local organizing committee Issei Fujishiro Event Website: https://www2.teu.ac.jp/media/VRCAI2018/