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Call for Nominations: 2018 SIGGRAPH Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art.

The deadline of 15 December 2016 is fast approaching. Time to submit your nominations for the award through the ACM SIGGRAPH website! Do not assume that someone else is nominating your choice for the award – so take some action now!

Visit the URL listed below and click on Artist Award Chair. Please include as much information about your nominee as possible, including web links. https://www.siggraph.org/participate/awards

Nominations not submitted through the SIGGRAPH website will not be considered.

Description

The Distinguished Artist Award is awarded annually to an artist who has created a substantial and important body of work that significantly advances the aesthetic content in the field of digital art.

N.B not all these qualities are required

Nominations

Nominations are due by 15 December 2017 and should include:

• Name(s) of the individual(s) being nominated (address and/or phone number and/or email address are also appreciated).
• References to websites with the artist's works and texts where applicable (multiple references are welcome).
• Nominator's name, address, telephone number, fax number, and email address.

A statement by the nominator describing the significance of the artist's contributions according to the following criteria (not all criteria are mandatory):

1. The Artist has been contributing internationally to the digital arts for more than Twenty (20) years.
2. The Artist has produced important work(s) that is (are) referenced in digital art history/theory papers/books.
3. The Artist has established an unexplored area in the field of digital art/media art.
4.  The Artist has been advancing the use of digital technologies in creative expression.
5. The Artist has contributed to the history and/or theory and/or practice of digital art through writing and presentations at conferences and symposia.

Looking forward to hearing from you.

Thank you

Sue Gollifer

Chair, Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement in Digital Art

ACM SIGGRAPH
University of Brighton, UK
School of Media
Executive Director, ISEA International HQ

By Ian Failes. Republished with permission from Spark CG Society.

Thor: Ragnarok opens with Thor (Chris Hemsworth) trapped by the fire demon Surtur. But not for long, as the God of Thunder soon battles the creature (and several others, including a dragon) before escaping back to Asgard.

The exciting sequence was crafted by Method Studios in Vancouver, and Iloura in Sydney. Overall visual effects supervisor Jake Morrison and Method visual effects supervisor Andrew Hellen outline how it was made.

The sequence begins in a comical fashion with Thor wrapped in chains while he banters with Surtur, who is sitting on a throne. While the creature would be voiced by Clancy Brown, director Taika Waititi actually performed Surtur on set in a motion capture suit. This way, the director was able to play around with the performance, and in fact went somewhere different with it rather than have Surtur be all-powerful right from the get-go.

Thor: Ragnarok — In Theatres November 3

“Taika thought it would be much more interesting if Surtur was actually like a slightly lesser version of himself, which gives us somewhere to go at the end of the film when he gets the eternal flame and actually is restored,” says Morrison. “He's like, ‘I’ve got it. He's Richard III.’”

Although Surtur is a fire demon, his desired appearance was not to be completely fire-covered from the beginning. So VFX artists built in a bones and muscles structure, albeit charred, that was made of plasma. “Then we had this idea to build up these layers of slag, like a magma style crust,” outlines Morrison. “The idea is like a volcano and you've got streams of lava that are pouring out that if you leave it for a while or it's cool outside then you will get these crusts.”

“We did go down a path without the ‘slag’ component, however, getting a readable facial animation from hot magma and gas was proving tricky in defining a character,” notes Method’s Hellen. “Slag was the answer. For the face we needed to develop a way for the slag to move without stretching and squashing. We used Houdini to create a cracked skin broken up enough to allow facial movement; it looked like a face cracked up into 1000 pieces. It allowed the face to move but the individual pieces did not bend or stretch, only the cracks in between opened and closed.”

At one point, Thor is attacked by hordes of fire demons. Hemsworth was filmed taking on various stunt doubles, some in motion capture gear. VFX artists hand-animated the demons and also pieced together footage and mocap that been shot.

“It’s an interesting process working with Marvel,” says Hellen. “The shoot component is a bit like gathering elements that may or may not end up in the final product. There were a number of key shots that stayed in the final cut so they acted like pillars to build out from. Production provided a vast amount of mocap, doing all manner of running, crawling, jumping, which we used for our background crowds.”

Eventually, Thor tackles a dragon which even manages to (partly) make its way to Asgard. The VFX team started with a model provided by Marvel that had basic proportions and some details such as the whiskers. “Unlike most dragons,” says Hellen, “she doesn’t have wings, and is propelled by rocket-type thrusters emitting from gills down her rib cage.”

“Other details changed quite a bit along the way,” adds Hellen. “She started out coming from the same type of finish as the fire demons and Surtur. In her case she had a rough burnt charcoal type outer surface, a hot molten surface underneath, with lots of fire down the spine and along parts of her body. These ideas worked well with the rough burnt charcoal look. However, she was looking a little too complicated, we weren’t getting a good read of her form, so we tried a more leathery finish, which helped get a better read of details like muscles under the surface.”

Only the dragon’s severed head comes through the bi-frost into Asgard with Thor — from a VFX point of view, it was simply cut off from the body. “Rigging was relatively straightforward given the head was only in a few shots and only had to slide along the floor the eyes roll forward and the tongue flopped out,” notes Hellen. “Most of the deforming was done post animation as a shot sculpt. The main difference was the eyes. Pre-beheading the eyes are on fire, post-beheading they look like fairly normal eyes. We did go through a pretty comprehensive trial of all manner of eyes, skin and horn looks before settling on what was in the final film. Most of the decisions were based on what allowed the gag to work best. Then add goo. Lots of goo.”

All images and clips copyright © 2017 Disney.  All Rights Reserved.

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum

The Heidelberg Laureate Forum was created by the Klaus Tschira Foundation, the Heidelberg Institute of Theoretical Studies, ACM, the International Mathematical Union, and the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters to provide an opportunity for young researchers to spend a week with winners of the ACM Turing Award, ACM Prize in Computing, Abel Prize, Nevanlinna Prize, and Fields Medal.  To date five have been held and all have been viewed as a major success by the laureates and the 200 young researchers in computer science and mathematics who attended each forum.  Details can be found at http://www.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/.   The inclusion of the ACM Prize in Computing began in 2017 and will continue to further enrich the computing content of the Forum.

To be considered for the Heidelberg Forum, young researchers can either apply directly www.application.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org  or be nominated by a colleague (or professor, mentor or manager) who can attest to the quality of their work.  Nominations will likely carry a bit more weight within the selection process and can be made at  https://application.heidelberg-laureate-forum.org/intern/reg_nom_registration_for.php  but require ACM-specific credentials.  If you or a colleague would like to make a nomination, the ACM “Organization Number” is ACM58372.  Applications and nominations must be completed by February 9, 2018.

The selection of young researchers will be a two-step process.  In the first step the pool of applications and nominations in computer science will be screened and ranked by the ACM Heidelberg Forum Committee.  In the second stage, the top applications/nominations will be reviewed by the Scientific Committee of the Heidelberg Forum to pick the ~200 participants.

ACM has engaged in helping create the Heidelberg Forum to raise the visibility of both the Turing Award (computing’s most prestigious award now with an annual prize of $1Million), the ACM Prize in Computing, and the computing discipline worldwide.  I hope you will share this information on the Heidelberg Forum with colleges and students … and I hope your department (or school or laboratory or center) will be the source of several applications or nominations.

SIGGRAPH Asia- November 27-30, BITEC, Bangkok, Thailand

The region’s best minds in computer graphics and interactive techniques are set to convene in Bangkok, Thailand for the annual SIGGRAPH Asia. Held from 27th to 30th November 2017 at the Bangkok International Trade and Exhibition Centre (BITEC), the 10th edition of SIGGRAPH Asia is expected to attract close to 7,000 attendees from over 60 countries.

SIGGRAPH Asia will be welcoming Albert Yu-Min Lin (Award Winning National Geographic Explorer / Co-Founder & Chief Science Officer at Planet3) and Michael Cohen (Director of the Computational Photography Group at Facebook) as its Keynote Speakers. You can expect to be dazzled by the in-depth knowledge presented and cutting-edge technologies featured at the conference sessions.